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Friday, October 19, 2001, at 6:39 PM ET
architecture
Buckminster Fuller
Inventor, tireless proselytizer, inspirational cult figure, something of a
flimflammer.
By Witold Rybczynski
Wednesday, July 2, 2008, at 6:30 AM ET
The Buckminster Fuller exhibition that has just opened at the
Whitney Museum of American Art in New York has already
received a lot of press coverage, with long stories in The New
Yorker and the New York Times. The latter ran a sensational
report suggesting that Fuller's depression and near suicide at age
32—which he famously described as spurring him to embark on
his lifelong creative quest—were more or less invented, and that
if he had a midlife crisis, it occurred later, as a result of a failed
extramarital affair. The Times story is titillating, but it pales
beside the revelation made 35 years ago by Lloyd Kahn, an early
geodesic dome devotee. The geodesic dome, a spherical
structure constructed out of small elements that make it
lightweight and extremely strong, was long associated with
Fuller. Kahn revealed that the world's first geodesic dome was a
planetarium designed for the Carl Zeiss optical works in Jena,
Germany, by Dr. Walter Bauersfeld in 1922—30 years before
Fuller filed his patent for the device.
Neither the Jena dome nor the extramarital affair figure in the
Whitney show, which is content merely to celebrate its subject
(and repeats the old chestnut that Fuller "developed" the
geodesic dome). That's a shame since Fuller was a complex
individual, and one not to be taken at face value. He is
sometimes described as a global man, yet he was a
quintessentially early-20th-century American type: the inventor
who bootstraps himself out of obscurity, the self-promoter who
turns into an inspirational cult figure, the tireless proselytizer
who is also something of a flimflam man.
Fuller did not invent the geodesic dome, but he certainly
popularized it, and in the 1950s domes were used by various
American government departments as temporary shelters for
traveling exhibitions and by the military, notably for building socalled radomes, housing radar installations in the Canadian
Arctic. The geodesic dome became such a widely recognized
icon of American know-how that it was used with great success
as the U.S. pavilion at Expo 67, the Montreal world's fair.
Most of Fuller's inventions found less success. His most durable
creation may have been his brand name, "Dymaxion," a
combination of dynamic, maximum, and ion, which conveyed his
intention to radically rethink the design of everyday objects. The
first Dymaxion House, octagonal in plan and suspended from a
central mast, existed only in model form. The Dymaxion
Bathroom, a prefabricated two-piece module that used a finely
atomized spray instead of a conventional shower, made it to the
prototype stage. Only three Dymaxion Cars were built, and the
sole surviving prototype is on display in the Whitney. It's worth
the price of admission. The car looks like an airplane without
wings, a three-wheeled lozenge that can turn in its own length.
The elegant form owes a lot to W. Starling Burgess, a pioneering
aeronautical engineer and renowned naval architect who
designed several America's Cup defenders. To obtain Burgess'
services, Fuller commissioned him to build a Bermuda-class
sailing yacht, which he christened Little Dipper.
Burgess, who invented and flew the first Delta-wing airplane, is
a reminder that Fuller's period was replete with self-taught
inventors. Many turned their attention to the problem of shelter.
Wallace Merle Byam, an attorney, advertising executive, and
publisher, invented and manufactured the Airstream trailer using
airplane-building technology similar to the Dymaxion Car. The
now-forgotten Corwin Willson built a two-story trailer house
prototype using thin-shell-veneered plywood. Konrad
Waschmann, a German immigrant, teamed up with Walter
Gropius to design an ingenious prefabricated housing system
using interlocking wood panels.
Waschmann and Gropius' General Panel Corp. ultimately failed,
and the closest that anyone ever came to realizing the age-old
dream of a factory-produced home was probably Fuller's
Dymaxion Dwelling Machine. The all-aluminum house, which
resembled an 18-foot-diameter flying saucer, incorporated
dozens of innovations such as Plexiglas windows, a huge
rotating ventilator that exhausted air from the interior, and
revolving storage shelves. The whole thing weighed 6,000
pounds, could be transported in a compact cylinder, and sold for
today's equivalent of $50,000. The Dwelling Machine garnered
immense publicity—including more than 37,000 unsolicited
orders. Fortune magazine predicted that the dwelling machine
would have a greater social impact than the automobile.
Curiously, part of the reason for the project's ultimate failure was
Fuller himself: He cautiously delayed putting the house on the
market for so long that in 1946 his company—the publicly
traded Fuller Houses—finally collapsed.
Many of the rooms in the Whitney exhibition contain flat-screen
televisions playing films of Fuller. Martin Pawley, who wrote a
biography of Fuller, described him as "perhaps one of the most
prolific public speakers ever to remain outside politics," and
Fuller's wide influence, especially later in his life (he died in
1983 at the age of 87), derived in no small part from his oratory.
I heard him lecture several times in the 1970s, both in large and
small groups. He had a flat, humorless, somewhat monotonous
voice and spoke in a kind of verbal shorthand that was
sometimes difficult to follow. Occasionally he appeared
breathless, not out of any infirmity, but because—one had the
impression—his brain was transmitting ideas faster than he was
able to speak. The unlikely effect was captivating nonetheless.
Although the Whitney show describes Fuller as "one of the great
American visionaries of the 20th century," his influence today is
hard to gauge. He had a short-lived influence on the
counterculture of the 1960s, inspiring the Whole Earth Catalog
and countless do-it-yourself domes. He also had an important
influence on architects such as Richard Rogers, Renzo Piano,
and Norman Foster (it's hard to see the Hearst Tower, across
town from the Whitney, as anything except Foster's hommage to
Fuller). It is tempting to see Fuller, with his emphasis on
maximizing resources and reducing waste, as a harbinger of
green architecture, but he was less interested in
environmentalism than in efficiency. I once heard him answer a
question about recycling a waste material: "No, no, you should
never use something just because it's available; you should
always find the best solution to a problem." The Whitney
exhibition catalog makes an unconvincing case that Fuller was a
kind of artist and tries to find links to his work in the art world.
Anyone interested in Fuller would do better to find a copy of
The Dymaxion World of Buckminster Fuller, by Fuller and
Robert Marks, now out of print. This book contains a pithy
description of Fuller's philosophy, which, in our present
condition of diminishing resources and environmental
challenges, remains as pertinent as ever: "rational action in a
rational world demands the most efficient overall performance
per unit of input." Vintage Bucky.
books
What's in a Name?
Everything, according to an amazing book about America.
By Matt Weiland
Monday, June 30, 2008, at 7:17 AM ET
On frozen winter nights in Minneapolis, I used to lie in the dark
and listen to the high-school hockey scores. They were read out
on the radio—hockey is always news in Minnesota—but I didn't
much care who won. I was 10 or 11 years old, a little bit lonely
and a little bit bored, and for some reason I found comfort and
distraction listening to the names of towns and cities around the
state. Hibbing, Cloquet, Eveleth: the pinch and chap of the Iron
Range, with traces of the Finns and French who settled there.
Crookston, Warroad, Thief River Falls: the dark romance of the
forested northwest. Moorhead, Brainerd, Saint Cloud: the dull
thud of the flat and unlovely middle and its Norwegian bachelor
farmers. Pipestone, Owatonna, Blue Earth: the dreamy vowels
of the riverine south. Did I want to go to these places? No more
than I wanted to go to Narnia or Middle-Earth. But I found in
their names a kind of secular liturgy, beautiful and full of
promise. Only later, reading George Rippey Stewart's Names on
the Land, did I discover that I wasn't alone. "Some are born great
and some with a gift for laughter," Stewart wrote, trying to
account for the origins of his own passion. "Others are born with
a love of names."
Even those lucky in laughter or destined for greatness will
recognize Names on the Land as a masterpiece of American
writing and American history. First published in 1945 and about
to be reissued in the NYRB Classics series, it is an epic account
of how just about everything in America—creeks and valleys,
rivers and mountains, streets and schools, towns and cities,
counties and states, the country and continent itself—came to be
named. Like other broad-minded and big-hearted works of
American culture from the first half of the 20th century—H.L.
Mencken's American Language, John Dos Passos' U.S.A. trilogy
of novels, the Federal Writers' Project American Guide series,
Harry Smith's Anthology of American Folk Music—Names on
the Land reflects a glorious union of two primal forces in the
American mind. On one hand, Americanism: the inclination
toward the large-scale and industrial, toward manifest destiny
and the farthest shore, toward what a French critic a century ago
called the American "worship of size, mass, quantity and
numbers." On the other, Americana: the craving for the local and
the lo-fi, for the inward heart of things, for the handcrafted and
the homemade.
Stewart was born the same year as Lewis Mumford, 1895, and
he shared Mumford's restless curiosity and the ease with which
he wrote across different disciplines and genres. A scholar,
novelist, travel writer, journalist, biographer, popular sociologist
and ecologist, he may be best known for three other books:
Ordeal by Hunger (1936), an account of the doomed Donner
Party; Storm (1941), a novel about a horrific Pacific Ocean
storm and its effects on man and environment, which is also the
source of the lasting tradition of giving female names to major
storms; and Earth Abides (1949), a post-apocalyptic sciencefiction novel in which nearly the entire human race is destroyed
by a virus. It is said to be the inspiration for Stephen King's The
Stand.
But Stewart's grandest achievement is Names on the Land, a
disguised wartime plea for the triumph of cardinal American
virtues: buoyancy and tolerance, curiosity and confidence, love
of the land and faith in the future. It is organized
chronologically, from the land's earliest settlement by what we
clumsily call Native Americans to the coming of European
explorers, the creation of the United States, the closing of the
frontier and finally World War II, the time of the book's
composition.
This is no dry encyclopedia: Stewart writes with great narrative
force. Take his account of the beginning of the Revolutionary
War, when British soldiers fired on British colonialist
militiamen—Americans!—at Lexington:
Then the firing came, and men lay dead upon
the grass. The line wavered and broke, and
perhaps some British officer thought: "Well,
that's over!" Yet all day that news and that
name spread outward from the village where
women sat with their dead. Reuben Brown
took the alarm west to Concord. It went east to
meet the men of Salem and Marblehead,
marching already. "They fired—our men are
dead—Lexington! A new name in the land!"
… Still farther it went, the name of that little
village. What riders carried it, no one knows.
By the waters of Clinch and Holston men
listened. It took the Wilderness Road through
Cumberland Gap. There at last in that western
land, a thousand miles from the village green,
it came in June to a camp of hunters. They
heard the name and said, "Let us call this place
Lexington." And so they did. … That was only
the first of many. For now there was a new
name in the land, and children learned it with
their first words. At last the people had a
symbol—not a stupid king across the ocean,
but a name red with their own blood.
Throughout, Stewart is a great evangelist for the poetry that
comes from keeping close to the land, that inscribes into it some
of the experience of those who passed by: Cape Fear, Golden
Gate, Deadman Creek. "The deepest poetry of a name and its
first glory lie, not in liquid sounds, but in all that shines through
that name—the hope or terror, or passion or wit, of those who
named it. The second glory of a name, as with Marathon or
Valley Forge, springs later from the deeds done there."
The image of the melting pot has come to seem hackneyed as it's
become clear how stubborn segregation remains and how
complicated patterns of assimilation can be. But Names on the
Land is a convincing reminder that the metaphor holds much
truth, revealing how early the process of Americanization began,
how swiftly it advanced, and how resilient it proved to be. Time
and again newcomers adopted and adapted local names, and
names survived the end of empires. The French ebbed away, but
Detroit remained; the Spaniards sailed from the Western shores,
but San Diego endured; the Dutch sold up, and though New
Amsterdam naturally became New York, the Dutch name for the
village of Breukelyn lived on.
Like all great epics, Names on the Land has moments of comedy
and of pathos. Chicago may first have meant "onion-place" or
"skunk-town." The word podunk, now routinely used to indicate
any place comically unworthy of note, originates with poodic, an
Indian word for a point of land; settlers along the Maine coast
used to say "Go to Poodic!" the way we might say "Get out of
here!" Texas originates with the word that a Spanish expedition
in 1689 heard from the Indians they encountered there: "Techas!
Techas!" or "Friends! Friends!" The original name proposed for
the state that became New Jersey was Albania.
Always a great and plain democrat, Stewart evinces a strong
sympathy for the persecution of Native Americans, and he
decries the presence on the land of so many names belonging to
"periwigged lords of London. … What most of them ever did for
the colonies to deserve so much as the naming of an out-house
would be difficult to discover." But he is no cheap patriot: He
derides our national name itself, the United States of America, as
too long, too vague, too ugly on the page, too clumsy to say. It
is, he says, "the worst misfortune in our whole naming-history,"
explaining that the abbreviation USA only became popular once
it was branded into the stocks of American muskets during the
Revolutionary War.
Stewart cites some enticing alternatives: In 1775, newspaperman
Philip Freneau banged the drum for Columbia; a generation
later, some freedom-loving citizen proposed Fredonia; novelist
Washington Irving suggested Alleghania. But as pretty as it may
be to imagine a bright and shiny new name, there is something
fitting about leaving our cacophonous, patchwork nation saddled
with one so graceless and unmusical. And there is something
perfectly American about sticking with it despite its
imperfections. Stewart, after all, notes that of the four American
places named Tokio at the time of the Pearl Harbor bombing,
none changed its name. "The state of mind seems to be more
strongly than ever that the names now belong to us—to alter
them would be repudiation of our own history, weakness rather
than strength."
bushisms
Bushism of the Day
By Jacob Weisberg
Monday, June 30, 2008, at 7:21 PM ET
"We've got a lot of relations with countries in our
neighborhood." —Kranj, Slovenia, June 10, 2008
Click here to see video of Bush's comments. The Bushism is at
12:56.
Got a Bushism? Send it to bushisms@slate.com. For more, see
"The Complete Bushisms.".
.
.
bushisms
Bushism of the Day
By Jacob Weisberg
Friday, June 27, 2008, at 10:56 AM ET
"One of the things important about history is to remember the
true history."—Washington, D.C., June 6, 2008
Got a Bushism? Send it to bushisms@slate.com. For more, see
"The Complete Bushisms.".
.
.
chatterbox
John McCain, Prisoner of Cash
How GOP fat cats will bring a Republican maverick to heel.
By Timothy Noah
Tuesday, July 1, 2008, at 6:25 PM ET
Everybody knows that John McCain has been trailing Barack
Obama in fundraising. McCain raised a mere $120 million to
Obama's $287 million through May of this year (the most recent
data that are available). Even Hillary Clinton, who lost, raised
nearly twice as much as McCain during this period. I'd been
assuming that the Obama-McCain fundraising gap was
attributable to Obama's phenomenal success at harvesting small
contributions online; fully 45 percent of Obama's contributions
came in increments of $200 or less, compared to only 24 percent
of McCain's. But on closer inspection, Obama proves no slouch
when it comes to raising bigger contributions, either; through
May, he received about twice as many contributions as McCain
at the maximum allowable level of $4,600. This included a
period of four months when it was pretty clear that McCain was
going to be the Republican nominee and three months when
there was no possibility of doubt on this question. McCain's
money problem, then, would appear to extend well beyond his
inability to match Obama's appeal to the little guy. He can't
match Obama's appeal to the fat cats, either.
The fattest of Republican cats are the "bundlers" (i.e., high-end
fundraisers) that the Bush presidential campaigns of 2000 and
2004 dubbed Pioneers and Rangers. To be a Pioneer, you had to
raise $100,000; to be a Ranger, $200,000. Most Pioneers and
Rangers were either top corporate officials or corporate
lobbyists, which meant that however fond they might have been
of Dubya as an individual, their real interest was in promoting
corporate interests by installing a tame Republican in the White
House. The Washington Post identified 246 such fundraisers in
the 2000 election cycle; four years later, the group had more
than doubled in size to 548, according to the Boston Globe. In
corralling these people, Bush fils had the advantage in 2000 of a
core group of wealthy Bush family loyalists, to which was
added, in 2004, the even greater advantage of incumbency. But
Dubya's fundraising success wasn't just a matter of dumb luck.
His campaign cultivated and supervised these Pioneers and
Rangers with fanatical attention to detail, assigning, for instance,
a four-digit tracking number to each bundler. In 2004 Dirk Van
Dongen, president of the National Association of WholesalerDistributors, called it "the most impressive, organized, focused
and disciplined fundraising operation I have ever been involved
in." Future historians may well judge the establishment and
maintenance of this money machine the only meaningful
accomplishment of Dubya's two-term presidency.
In the July 1 Boston Globe, Brian C. Mooney reports that this
group of rich Republicans, whose dedication Bush fanned to a
white heat, feels decidedly lukewarm toward McCain. Granted,
the turnover rate among top-tier bundlers can be high. Even rich
people must struggle to scare up this much money; only about
half the original team from 2000 re-upped in 2004. Jack
Abramoff is no longer available because he's in prison, serving a
five-year term for committing fraud. Ken Lay is no longer
available because he dropped dead while awaiting sentencing for
committing fraud. But forget bundling. According to Mooney,
fewer than half of the 2004 Pioneers and Rangers have bothered
even to contribute their own money to McCain. Nearly one-third
have yet to contribute to any candidate. Of the 43 percent who
did contribute to McCain, 58 percent covered their bets by
contributing also to other candidates, and 38 percent held off
until after McCain was the putative nominee. This constitutes
concrete evidence that the Republican base still hasn't warmed to
McCain.
For McCain, this isn't all bad news. After all, it suggests that at
least one well-informed constituency takes seriously McCain's
claim to be a maverick. As Brian Rogers, a McCain spokesman,
told the Globe, "It appears you've proved that John McCain isn't
Bush's third term after all." The problem is that it's the wrong
constituency. To independents and conservative Democrats,
McCain needs to come across as a maverick. To the base, he
needs to come across as a conformist. In the end, the great
majority of Bush's Pioneers and Rangers will probably donate
money to McCain because they have nowhere else to go. But the
longer they make McCain wait, the more McCain will have to
ingratiate them by dancing further and further to the right, which
is exactly what he's been doing. In that sense, McCain isn't a
maverick at all. By playing hard-to-get, the corporate ruling
class has taken McCain hostage. The ransom won't be small.
chatterbox
Planet Survival, Pro and Con
Will the earth be obliterated by Labor Day? What the Times didn't tell you.
By Timothy Noah
Friday, June 27, 2008, at 7:15 PM ET
The New York Times keeps reporting that there may be an ittybitty chance that when the Large Hadron Collider at the
European Center for Nuclear Research (CERN), located just
outside Geneva, Switzerland, gets switched on late in August,
the world will come to an end. But probably there is no such
chance, even an itty-bitty one.
A story like this poses difficult questions about news placement.
If there's even a microscopic chance that human agency will
destroy the planet—the CERN accelerator is the world's
largest—then surely this news belongs on Page One. That's how
the Times played it on March 29 with Dennis Overbye's story,
"Asking A Judge To Save the World, and Maybe A Whole Lot
More."
On the other hand, news stories announcing even a microscopic
chance that human agency will destroy the planet risk creating
worldwide panic. After all, as my friend Gregg Easterbrook
pointed out in a fine cover piece in the June Atlantic ("The Sky
Is Falling"), it's much likelier that humankind will be wiped out
by an asteroid. In the piece, Easterbrook reported that an asteroid
specialist for the Air Force put the likelihood of a "dangerous
space-object" collision in any given century at one in 10.
(Caveat: Not all such collision scenarios, which include comets
and meteors in addition to asteroids, posit the destruction of all
human life on the planet.)
The Times has kept follow-ups to the end-of-the-world story off
Page One. Overbye published an explanatory essay in the paper's
science section on April 15, and on June 21 he published deep
inside the Times A section a news story bearing the whimsical
headline, "Earth Will Survive After All, Physicists Say." On
June 27, Overbye reported, again inside the Times A section, that
the United States was seeking to dismiss a lawsuit by two
worried citizens aimed at preventing anyone from throwing the
big switch at the Large Hadron Collider. The government's
principal response, I'm sorry to report, wasn't that there's no
chance that switching on the Large Hadron Collider will bring
about the end of the world, but rather that a six-year statute of
limitations has already passed.
I can well understand why the Times doesn't want to give
sustained big play to the possibility that the world will end on or
around Labor Day. In addition to the civic-minded concern that
this might create worldwide panic, there are practical matters of
self-interest. If the possibility weren't realized, as most scientists
seem to expect, then the Times would look foolish. If the
possibility were realized, it would have no opportunity to collect
a Pulitzer, because the Times, the Pulitzer board, the Columbia
University Graduate School of Journalism, which gives out the
award, and every last Times reader would all be obliterated,
along with the rest of the planet.
On the other hand, when readers are invited to ponder the
possibility, or lack thereof, that the Large Hadron Collider will
obliterate their planet—even when that invitation is extended in
an edgy Timesian spirit of good fun—they deserve a decent
summary of the arguments pro and con. Overbye has done a
very poor job in this regard. I don't know one-tenth about this
subject as Overbye, but since he let you down, your faithful
Chatterbox is duty bound to step into the breach. (A previous
Slate "Explainer" column on this topic focused, like the feds, on
legal issues at the expense of scientific ones.)
To keep things simple, I will limit discussion to the possibility
that the Large Hadron Collider will swallow up the planet in a
black hole. This is the most-discussed doomsday scenario. (I
should note in passing, however, the existence also of scenarios
involving "strangelets," a hypothetical category of matter that
might set off an uncontrollable fusion chain reaction that would
transform the planet into what the BBC calls a "hot, dead lump";
"magnetic monopoles," a hypothetical thingamabob that might
conceivably destroy protons, hence atoms, hence matter, hence
Planet Earth; and vacuum bubbles, which might alter the entire
universe in some way that would render humankind extinct.)
Both sides in the black-hole version of the doomsday argument
recognize that the Large Hadron Collider may create black holes.
These would be little ("microscopic") black holes. The majority
view, as articulated by CERN scientists, is that microscopic
black holes are harmless, that cosmic rays create them all the
time, and that they traverse our planet at very near the speed of
light on a regular basis without causing so much as a nosebleed.
The minority view, as articulated in an affidavit filed in federal
court by Walter L. Wagner, a retired federal nuclear safety
officer, might be summarized by quoting Bruce Springsteen:
"From small things, mama/ Big things one day come."
According to this view, CERN-created microscopic black holes
would be different because they would travel more slowly,
increasing the possibility that they would be captured by the
earth's gravity, enabling them to gobble up matter and grow
bigger, like the monster plant Audrey II ("Feed me") in Little
Shop of Horrors, until eventually they gobbled up Planet Earth
itself.
Brian Cox, a University of Manchester physicist who works on
the Large Hadron Collider, responded to the doomsday argument
in an interview posted June 26 by O'Reilly Media. I will give
him the last word:
You read on the web, well, what happens if
these black holes fly straight through the
planet before they have a chance to eat it?
Whereas the one that the LHC could [create
would] just sit there and perhaps sink to the
center of the earth? It turns out that when you
do the calculation the black holes are so small
that even if they didn't decay and they just sat
there they wouldn't come close enough to any
matter—because matter is basically empty
space—to dissolve and to [inaudible] the
matter and to grow so they wouldn't do any
damage. Okay; why don't you ignore that?
Well the final piece of wonderful evidence
which confines these idiots to the bin is that
you look up into the sky and you see white
walls—some neutron stars—very, very dense
stars. Cosmic rays are hitting those with
energy greater than those seen at the LHC so if
you can make black holes, black holes will be
created on that surface. It turns out that they're
nuclear dense, these stars, so the black holes
are not going to fly through there; they're
going to sit there and they're going to eat away
and they're going to eat away much quicker
than they could eat away the earth because the
matter is much denser. So people have
calculated how many neutron stars or white
walls you would see in the sky if this were
happening. If they were getting eaten by little
mini-black holes and it turns out that there'd be
very few indeed—in fact probably pretty much
none, and you can do the calculation. So
there's a whole layer [laughs] that—I don't
need to reassure you anymore, I'm sure, but
there are layer after layer after layer of—of
tests and some of them are observational and
some of them are theoretical and it turns out
that it's utter nonsense.
I won't pretend to understand very much of this. But it does seem
reassuring.
Convictions
M Boxes and C Boxes
Peering inside the decisions of military and civilian tribunals deciding the fate
of Guantanamo detainees.
Wednesday, July 2, 2008, at 8:41 AM ET
corrections
Corrections
Friday, June 27, 2008, at 7:08 AM ET
In the June 26 "Chatterbox," Timothy Noah referred to the
Supreme Court justice as Anthony Scalia. Scalia's first name is
Antonin.
In a June 25 "Convictions" blog post, Eric Posner misspelled
Boumediene.
In a June 25 "Moneybox," Yves Smith misspelled the name of
peak-oil theorist Matthew Simmons.
In the June 24 "Foreigners," Peter Maass originally claimed that
an SEC investigation led to money-laundering fines against
Riggs Bank. The Office of the Comptroller of the Currency
pursued the investigation.
In the June 24 "Gearbox," Jason Stein wrote that California
residents who bought a Lexus GS 450h qualified for a Clean Air
Vehicle decal that allowed for free metered parking. The car
does qualify as a super-low-emission vehicle, but the state has
given away its full allotment of the decals.
In the June 23 "Family," Emily Bazelon left the word from out
of the book title From the Mixed-Up Files of Mrs. Basil E.
Frankweiler.
In a June 23 "Science," Carl Zimmer incorrectly stated that early
cephalopods used bursts of air to propel themselves and that
octopuses have been observed to push toys around a tank with
jets of air. In both cases, the animals used water, not air. The
piece also described the octopus as having about 500,000
neurons in total. The octopus has 500 million neurons, not
500,000.
In the June 20 "Culturebox," Jonah Weiner stated that Lil Wayne
was the first hip-hop artist to fantasize about eating his
competition. Other rappers have contemplated consuming their
rivals.
A June 17 "Hollywoodland" raised questions about a photograph
of Claus von Stauffenberg that appeared in a United Artists
promotional campaign for the movie Valkyrie. The piece pointed
out that the photo UA used looked more like Tom Cruise, the
star of the film, than a similar-looking AP photo of von
Stauffenberg. Because of insufficient photo research by Slate's
editors, we failed to discover another archival image of von
Stauffenberg, which appears to be the one UA used in its
publicity campaign. As a result of this mistake, the question the
piece raised—whether the photo had been doctored in an effort
to make Claus von Stauffenberg look more like Tom Cruise—
was unwarranted.
In the June 5 "DVD Extras," Troy Patterson misspelled TaNehisi Coates' first name.
If you believe you have found an inaccuracy in a Slate story,
please send an e-mail to corrections@slate.com, and we will
investigate. General comments should be posted in "The Fray,"
our reader discussion forum.
The Culture Gabfest weekly endorsements:
Julia's pick: Listener Robin Winning's song of the summer,
"That's Not My Name" by the Ting Tings.
Dana's pick: Stephen Colbert's green screen challenge: Make
John McCain interesting.
Stephen's pick: The greatest song of any summer ever, the
Rolling Stones' "Miss You".
Posted by Matt Lieber on July 2 at 6:02 p.m.
June 18, 2008
culture gabfest
The Culture Gabfest, Community
Standards Edition
Listen to Slate's show about the week in culture.
By Stephen Metcalf, Dana Stevens, John Swansburg, and Julia
Turner
Wednesday, July 2, 2008, at 6:02 PM ET
Listen to Culture Gabfest No. 11 with Stephen Metcalf, Dana
Stevens, and Julia Turner by clicking the arrow on the audio
player below:
You can also download the program here, or
you can subscribe to the biweekly Culture
Gabfest podcast feed in iTunes by clicking here.
In this week's Culture Gabfest, our critics discuss the re-release
of Liz Phair's feminist indie-rock masterpiece Exile in Guyville,
the media's semihysterical reaction to news of a "pregnancy
pact" among teenage girls at a high school in Gloucester, Mass.,
and the death of comedian George Carlin.
Here are links to some of the articles and other items mentioned
in the show:
Liz Phair's Exile in Guyville.
New York magazine's culture blog Vulture interviews Liz Phair.
Meghan O'Rourke's 2003 critical re-evaluation of Liz Phair.
Liz Phair's response.
Time magazine's original report on the "pregnancy pact" at a
Gloucester, Mass., public high school.
Time follows up.
Christopher Caldwell considers the political dogmas at play in
the Gloucester story.
George Carlin, RIP.
Jerry Seinfeld remembers George Carlin.
Cullen Murphy explains why flight attendants really talk like
that.
Listen to Culture Gabfest No. 10 with Dana Stevens, John
Swansburg, and Julia Turner by clicking the arrow on the audio
player below:
You can also download the program here, or you can subscribe
to the weekly Culture Gabfest podcast feed in iTunes by clicking
here.
In this week's Culture Gabfest, our critics discuss the unexpected
outcome of the R. Kelly trial, the song of the summer (or which
hit you'll unexpectedly know all the words to by Labor Day),
and the Atlantic's recent story: "Is Google Making Us Stupid?"
Here are links to some of the articles and other items mentioned
in the show:
Josh Levin's Slate article "Long Live the Little Man Defense!"
explains why R. Kelly was acquitted.
R. Kelly and Usher fall for the "Same Girl."
New York magazine predicts the song of the summer. (Leona
Lewis' "Bleeding Love," Usher's "Love in This Club," and the
New Kids on the Block's "Summertime" are contenders.)
The Atlantic's Nicholas Carr wonders: "Is Google Making Us
Stupid?"
The Culture Gabfest weekly endorsements:
Dana's pick: MSNBC's surprisingly touching yet seemingly
endless tribute to Tim Russert
John's pick: The Mary Tyler Moore Show, now available on
iTunes
Julia's pick: Autobiography of a Wardrobe by Elizabeth Kendall
Posted by Amanda Aronczyk on June 18 at 11:54 a.m.
June 4, 2008
Listen to Culture Gabfest No. 9 with Stephen Metcalf, Dana
Stevens, and Julia Turner by clicking the arrow on the audio
player below:
Here are links to some of the articles and other items mentioned
in the show:
You can also download the program here, or you can subscribe
to the weekly Culture Gabfest podcast feed in iTunes by clicking
here.
New York magazine's skeptical inquiry into the sanctity of
monogamy in American culture
Jim Lewis' fond remembrance of Robert Rauschenberg in Slate
In this week's Culture Gabfest, our critics discuss Vanity Fair's
sprawling, dishy takedown of President Clinton, Sex and the
City's boffo success in movie theaters, and the earsplitting arrival
of mixed martial artist Kimbo Slice on CBS.
Here are links to some of the articles and other items mentioned
in the show:
Vanity Fair profiles Bill Clinton, paying particular attention to
his post-presidential rat pack and his id.
Clinton responds, officially, in a press release.
Clinton responds, harshly, off the cuff.
Slate's Jack Shafer offers Clinton a lesson in press criticism.
Dana Stevens reviews Sex and the City.
Julia Turner considers the sartorial deficit between the Sex and
the City movie and the television show.
CBS' Elite XC mixed martial arts page.
ESPN introduces Kimbo Slice.
David Plotz defends Ultimate Fighting.
Also in Slate, Jack Shafer's takedown of the overly generous
eulogizing of Rauschenberg in the press
The New Republic's Jed Perl's dislike of Rauschenberg's work
Barack Obama's revelation of his affinity for Philip Roth to the
Atlantic's Jeffrey Goldberg
The Culture Gabfest weekly endorsements:
Dana's pick: Eric Asimov's eulogy in the New York Times of the
Mei Lai Wah Coffee House in New York's Chinatown
Stephen's Pick: John Seymour's great achievement in garden
writing, The Guide to Self -Sufficiency
Julia's picks: This American Life's explanation of the housing
crisis; the season finale of NBC's The Office.
The Culture Gabfest weekly endorsements:
Posted by Matt Leiber on May 21 at 6:31 p.m.
Julia's pick: Josh Levin's coverage of the bizarre, sad, and
hilarious R. Kelly trial.
Dana's pick: The new D.I.Y. suburban taekwondo comedy, The
Foot Fist Way
Stephen's pick: Bo Diddley, The Chess Box.
May 7, 2008
Listen to Culture Gabfest No. 7 by clicking the arrow on the
audio player below:
Posted by Matt Leiber on June 4 at 11:14 a.m.
May 21, 2008
Listen to Culture Gabfest No. 8 with Stephen Metcalf, Dana
Stevens, and Julia Turner by clicking the arrow on the audio
player below:
You can also download the program here, or you can subscribe
to the weekly Culture Gabfest podcast feed in iTunes by clicking
here.
In this week's Culture Gabfest, our critics discuss a New York
magazine critique of monogamy, the aesthetically
promiscuous—and recently departed—artist Robert
Rauschenberg, and Barack Obama's affinity for the work of
novelist Philip Roth, the great bard of infidelity.
You can also download the program here, or you can subscribe
to the weekly Gabfest podcast feed in iTunes by clicking here.
In this week's Culture Gabfest, our critics Stephen Metcalf, Dana
Stevens, and Julia Turner discuss the rollout of the summer
movie season, including the superhero movie Iron Man, Robert
Downey Jr.'s nimble performance in it, and which of this
summer's blockbusters look most promising.
Here are links to some of the articles and other items mentioned
in the show:
Entertainment Weekly's summer movie release calendar
Iron Man, reviewed by Dana Stevens
The New York Times profiles Robert Downey Jr.
You Don't Mess With the Zohan official site
Indiana Jones official site
A 2006 New York Times profile of Mike Myers and his hiatus
from films
Mike Myers and Deepak Chopra, together at last
Listen to Culture Gabfest No. 5, with critics Stephen Metcalf,
Dana Stevens, and Julia Turner by clicking the arrow on the
audio player below:
The Culture Gabfest weekly endorsements:
Dana's pick: Carrier on PBS
Julia's pick: Project Runway
Stephen's pick: Jimi Hendrix's live performance of Bob Dylan's
"Like a Rolling Stone"
Posted by Matthew Lieber on May 7 at 11:00 a.m.
April 23, 2008
Listen to Culture Gabfest No. 6 with critics Stephen Metcalf,
Dana Stevens, and Julia Turner by clicking the arrow on the
audio player below:
You can also download the program here, or you can subscribe
to the new, dedicated Culture Gabfest podcast feed in iTunes by
clicking here.
In this week's Culture Gabfest, critics Stephen Metcalf, Dana
Stevens, and Julia Turner discuss whether personal virtue can
solve global warming, the possible failure of personal virtue in
the travel writing business, and the utter failure of personal
virtue inside Abu Ghraib.
Here are links to some of the articles and other items mentioned
in the show:
Michael Pollan's New York Times Magazine article "Why
Bother?"
Lynn Margulis and Dorion Sagan's Slanted Truths: Essays on
Gaia
Thomas Kohnstamm's book Do Travel Writers Go to Hell?
Lonely Planet responds to the Kohnstamm scandal
Errol Morris' Standard Operating Procedure
Film: Iraq in Fragments
"Photo Finish: How the Abu Ghraib photos morphed from
scandal to law," by Dahlia Lithwick
Julia's pick: Hot Chip
100 best novels from Random House
Dana's pick: Elizabeth Bowen's The Death of the Heart
Stephen's pick: The Bachelor
Posted by Andy Bowers on April 23 at 11:37 a.m.
April 9, 2008
You can also download the program here, or you can subscribe
to the weekly Gabfest podcast feed in iTunes by clicking here.
In this week's Culture Gabfest, our critics discuss whether the
latest Vogue cover is racist (or just the subject of misplaced
outrage in the blogosphere), whether Hillary's tax return
explodes the Clintons' middle-class image, and whether the new
online sitcom The Guild is for nerds only.
Here are links to some of the articles and other items mentioned
in the show:
Vogue's "King Kong" cover
Slate's take on the Vogue cover
John Lennon and Yoko Ono on the cover of Rolling Stone,
photographed by Annie Leibovitz
Hillary Clinton's 2007 tax return (as disclosed by Hillary)
The Guild: official show site, YouTube channel
World of Warcraft
Quarterlife (no longer) on NBC
M. Ward and Zooey Deschanel
AC/DC
Am I That Name? by Denise Riley
BBC Radio 4's Start the Week
Posted by Amanda Aronczyk on April 9 at 11:12 a.m.
March 26, 2008
Listen to Culture Gabfest No. 4 with critics Stephen Metcalf,
Meghan O'Rourke, and John Swansburg by clicking the arrow
on the audio player below:
You can also download the program here, or you can subscribe
to the weekly Gabfest podcast feed in iTunes by clicking here.
In this week's Culture Gabfest, our critics discuss whether
Barack Obama was channeling Walt Whitman, whether the head
of JPMorgan was channeling Gordon Gekko, and whether
English professors should be channeling Wal-Mart associates.
Here are links to some of the articles and other items mentioned
in the show:
Barack Obama's "A More Perfect Union" speech
Walt Whitman's Song of Myself
New York magazine's profile of Jamie Dimon
Michael Douglas as Gordon Gekko in Wall Street
Joseph Schumpeter's "Creative Destruction"
The New York Times' "You Say Recession, I Say 'Reservations!'
"
NOBU restaurant in New York City
Gerald Graff's Professing Literature: An Institutional History
Meghan's pick: The Hakawati by Rabih Alameddine
John's pick: Dispatches by Michael Herr
Stephen's pick: Boys and Girls in America from the Hold Steady
In this edition, the panelists discuss the aftermath of the Oscars,
the challenge Barack Obama poses for comedians, and Lindsay
Lohan's Marilyn Monroe impression. Here are some of the links
for items mentioned in the show:
Posted by Andy Bowers on March 26 at 8:16 p.m.
Posted by Andy Bowers on Feb. 28 at 3:07 p.m.
March 12, 2008
Feb. 14, 2008
Listen to Culture Gabfest No. 3 with critics Stephen Metcalf,
Dana Stevens, and John Swansburg by clicking the arrow on the
audio player below:
To play the first Culture Gabfest, click the arrow on the player
below.
Daniel Day-Lewis' Oscar acceptance speech
Saturday Night Live's Obama/Clinton debate sketch
Lindsay Lohan's New York magazine photo shoot
Julia Turner's Oscar fashion dialogue with Amanda Fortini
The Encyclopedia Baracktannica
You can also download the program here, or you can subscribe
to the weekly Gabfest podcast feed in iTunes by clicking here.
Our newest podcast, the Culture Gabfest, is back just in time to
take on the Eliot Spitzer meltdown and how it's echoing through
the media. Critics Stephen Metcalf, Dana Stevens, and John
Swansburg also discuss the recent rash of fake memoirs and a
breakout blog that claims to shed light on stuff white people like.
Here are links to some of the items mentioned in this week's
episode:
"The Fake Memoirist's Survival Guide" on Slate
A Fan's Notes by Frederick Exley
The Stuff White People Like blog
Stuff White People Like on NPR's Talk of the Nation
Dana Stevens' pick: Chop Shop
John Swansburg's pick: Amazons: An Intimate Memoir by the
First Women To Play in the National Hockey League by Cleo
Birdwell (aka Don DeLillo)
Stephen Metcalf's pick: Top Gear from BBC America
day to day
How To Speak Obamamania
Saturday, June 28, 2008, at 10:33 AM ET
Friday, June 27, 2008
Hitting Barack Bottom: Too Many Obamaisms
Obombre: That's a Spanish-speaking male who
supports Obama. Chris Wilson discusses how he
plans to profit off hundreds of mashed up
Obamaisms. (Listen to the segment. Check out
"Obamamania.")
Summary Judgment: Finding Amanda vs. Wall-E
Mark Jordan Legan sorts through the latest movies. Wall-E, an
animated feature about a young robot searching for a home in
outer space, draws rave reviews. Finding Amanda is a bit less
satisfying. (Listen to the segment.)
Posted by Andy Bowers on March 12 at 11:55 a.m.
Thursday, June 26, 2008
Feb. 28, 2008
The Breakfast Table: Supreme Court Strikes Down D.C.
Handgun Ban
In a dramatic 5-4 ruling, the Supreme Court declared for the first
time that the Second Amendment guarantees an individual's
right to self-defense and gun ownership. Will this put an end to
handgun bans nationwide? Legal analyst Dahlia Lithwick breaks
it down for Madeleine Brand. (Listen to the segment. Read
Slate's "Breakfast Table" dialogue.)
Here's the sophomore outing of our newest audio program, the
Culture Gabfest, with critics Stephen Metcalf, Dana Stevens, and
Julia Turner. To listen, click the arrow on the audio player
below:
You can also download the program here, or you can subscribe
to the weekly Gabfest podcast feed in iTunes by clicking here.
Wednesday, June 25, 2008
The Breakfast Table: Exxon Valdez Damages and Death
Penalty for Rape
Justices slashed Exxon's damages for the 1989 Exxon Valdez oil
spill. They ruled that the amount was excessive under maritime
law. Instead of $2.5 billion, Exxon now has to pay just $500
million. And in a 5-4 decision, justices banned the death penalty
for people convicted of raping a child. The ruling emphasized
that the death penalty is appropriate only in cases where the
crime results in death. NPR hosts Madeleine Brand and Alex
Cohen talk to legal analyst Dahlia Lithwick about both cases.
(Listen to the segment. Read Slate's "Breakfast Table" dialogue.)
dear prudence
House of Horrors
My friend's new home was the scene of an unspeakable crime.
Thursday, July 3, 2008, at 6:56 AM ET
Get "Dear Prudence" delivered to your inbox each week; click
here to sign up. Please send your questions for publication to
prudence@slate.com. (Questions may be edited.)
Dear Prudie,
My friend recently bought a new house. The previous owner,
whom I knew, was murdered in the house. It was horrible. This
woman was a good person—a teacher at a local school. My
boyfriend was her student, and he loved her. I understand that it's
part of life to move on, and that the woman's family had to sell
her house. What I don't understand is why my friend had to buy
it. My boyfriend has made it perfectly clear that he will not visit
my friend at his house ever. His teacher was murdered in her
kitchen, and my boyfriend cannot accept that someone else will
be living in her house. I'm not comfortable going there, either. It
makes me uneasy that someone died so violently in that place. I
don't believe in ghosts; I just have an odd feeling about it. How
do I tell this to my friend without upsetting him?
—No Housewarming
Dear No,
You don't tell your friend, because that would be a terrible
burden to put on someone who wants to make a pleasant life in
his new home. I understand your unease over the horror that
happened in the place, but I assume your boyfriend doesn't
expect that his teacher's house should stand vacant forever,
cordoned off by fraying, yellow barricade tape. You're right—
the family had to sell the house, so try to think of this situation
as your friend helping these bereaved people instead of doing
something malign. You say you don't believe in ghosts, but
wouldn't the teacher have preferred, as a tribute to her memory,
that her house be filled with happiness and good times again?
Since you are less adamant than your boyfriend, be the one to
break the boycott—go to the house and welcome your friend.
Surely, you will quickly realize that he is not living in an endless
loop of The Sixth Sense. Then try to convince your boyfriend
that shunning the house, and your friend, permanently
memorializes his teacher's loss, not her life.
—Prudie
Dear Prudence Video: Outsourced Pregnancy
Dear Prudence,
About a year ago, I was diagnosed with a rare, but not serious,
neurological disorder—prosopagnosia, also known as "face
blindness." I have a severely impaired ability to recognize facial
features. My whole life, I've always thought I was just "bad with
faces," but I (and many people with this condition) learned to
compensate by recognizing people by other clues—hair color
and length, glasses, style of dress, manner of walking, etc. The
diagnosis has been a relief, making me feel better about all the
social blunders I've made in the past, like not recognizing good
family friends when I ran into them unexpectedly. I recently
started working at a great law firm as a "floating" secretary,
which means I rotate to different desks every day, depending on
which secretaries are out of the office. Everyone is wonderful;
the problem is that I'm meeting a lot of new people, and with
everyone in suits and in the same age range, I often can't tell
people apart. My condition is difficult to explain to people who
see normally, but it's a little more embarrassing when I mistake,
say, a partner for a summer intern. Should I be upfront with
people about my condition, and if so, what can I say that doesn't
make me come off as stupid?
—(Face) Blind as a Bat
Dear Face,
Your condition doesn't impair your intelligence, just your social
interactions. Keeping it a secret seems likely to lead to awkward
encounters and inadvertent snubs when you fail to recognize
people who think you should know them by now. But by being
direct and comfortable about this disorder, you will put others at
ease and make it more understandable when you don't know
someone because she's gotten new glasses, or you repeatedly
have to ask someone's name. Go to either the human resources
department or the managing partner and explain your disorder.
Take with you information from this Web site at Harvard, where
there is a prosopagnosia research group. At the meeting, you can
discuss a strategy that makes you most comfortable. Perhaps that
means the lawyers you work with will receive a brief memo
about your condition, and be asked to remind you of their names
before they give you a task. And be aware that "floating" around
an office is a less-than-ideal situation for someone with
prosopagnosia. Make it your goal to land in a permanent place,
which will allow you to focus on telling one suit from another.
—Prudie
Dear Prudence,
I just turned 30, and my younger sister "Caity" is in her late 20s.
Caity and I generally get along very well, love each other, and
enjoy spending time together. However, since we were very
young, I have felt inadequate when compared with her in terms
of intelligence, abilities, and looks. My feelings of inadequacy
have been complicated by the fact that we grew up in an
emotionally disturbed household and our single mother openly
favored Caity. Throughout our lives, my sister has taken part in
the same classes, sports, and pastimes as me. She excelled in all
of them, far beyond what I was able to accomplish. It was a
struggle to maintain my self-esteem. As we grew older, I
developed my own identity and have been able to take pride in
my life and accomplishments. Today, I'm a doctor. Now,
however, Caity is thinking of pursuing the same profession, and
even going into the same specialty. This has dredged up many
old, unpleasant feelings, and I find myself dreading this
possibility. I have even thought about moving to a different area.
(Due to education loans, changing careers at this point is not a
realistic option.) Caity is extremely and openly competitive, and
I would not enjoy working within the same field as her. Also,
due to the real difference in our innate abilities, I will inevitably
fall short of what she is able to accomplish. So far, I have not
discussed this with Caity, though I have been thinking about her
plans frequently. Is it fair even to broach this topic with her? Or
is it my responsibility as an adult to deal with my insecurities on
my own?
—Neither the Pretty nor the Smart Sister
Dear Neither,
Let's say you're an endocrinologist. Your patients are not going
to whisper to one another in your waiting room, "Psst, for your
goiter treatment, go to this one's sister, Dr. Caity. She's a real
piece of eye candy, and smarter, too." If it's any comfort, the
Hebrew Bible has a deep understanding of the noxious effects of
parents favoring one sibling (often the younger) over another—
think of Jacob and Esau, Joseph and his brothers. It is no
surprise that you were scarred by your upbringing, and it is a
tribute to you that you are able to maintain a decent relationship
with your sister. But look at your letter and see the
contradictions in it. You say you take pride in your
accomplishments, but then you call yourself the not-smart sister.
You say you love your sister and enjoy spending time with her,
but then you say if you could afford to, you'd relocate so you
don't have to be near her. Since your sister's announcement has
provoked such distress in you, this is a good time for you to
explore in therapy the effects of your childhood, and try to put to
rest your mother's disparagement, which you still carry in your
head. After you have worked through some of these issues, you
then need to figure out whether you want to talk to Caity about
this. Though she got the bulk of your mother's praise, she too,
has to have been affected by your mother's sickness. Perhaps she
sincerely has found in herself a love of your medical specialty;
or perhaps, as she faces adulthood, she is seeking to relive the
patterns of her youth, when she could always triumph over you.
If you do decide to have a conversation with her about her career
thoughts, don't accuse her of trying to undermine you. Instead,
tell her you've been taken aback by how her choice has revived
what you thought were long-vanished feelings of rivalry and
inadequacy, and you wanted to be able to talk to her about your
painful childhoods.
—Prudie
Dear Prudence,
I'd been dating a guy for almost two years when out of the blue
he told me he wanted to date other people. We agreed to still
date each other, as I am completely in love with him. We still
talk about once a week, sharing jokes and everything we did
when we were a "couple." But it's been over two months since
I've seen him. I asked whether we were ever going to go out on a
date, and he said, yes, he's just been short on cash. I understand,
as I knew about his financial situation when we were together.
So I guess my questions are: Do I keep waiting for him to ask
me out again? Do I ask him out? Or do I say bye-bye?
—Confused With Love
Dear Confused,
His tough financial situation has probably been exacerbated by
all the money he is spending dating other women. Say bye-bye.
—Prudie
did you see this?
Pulp McCain
Monday, June 30, 2008, at 5:21 PM ET
dvd extras
Mirandize This
Was Dirty Harry a right-wing fantasy of swift justice—or a cautionary tale
about vigilantism?
By Mark Harris
Monday, June 30, 2008, at 6:18 PM ET
In 1971, when a script called Dead Right landed in Clint
Eastwood's hands, it was one step from the Hollywood
graveyard. Steve McQueen had turned it down, as had Paul
Newman. Frank Sinatra, well past his cinematic prime, stepped
in then dropped out. Burt Lancaster passed, and so did Robert
Mitchum, who later explained that he wasn't "a complete whore.
… There are movies I won't do for any amount. … Movies that
piss on the world."
Nobody but Eastwood wanted to play Harry Callahan, a San
Francisco police inspector with an aversion to certain tedious
elements of the Bill of Rights and a taste for vigilantism
administered via his .44 Magnum. And nobody but Dirty Harry's
creators was particularly happy when the movie caught on.
Roger Ebert was one of many critics to call it "fascist." Pauline
Kael—like Eastwood, a San Francisco native—was furious to
see her hometown, already known as "the red center of bleedingheart liberalism," exploited to focus the "unifying hatred of
reactionaries." (Some things never change.) Kael called the
movie a "deeply immoral … right-wing fantasy."
Warner's new seven-disc edition of the Dirty Harry series offers
all five of the movies that, between 1971 and 1988,
intermittently gripped the public, coined half a dozen
catchphrases, and launched a long-running debate about their
quaintly repugnant, strangely adaptable politics. The extras
include five commentary tracks (though none by Eastwood) and
six hours of documentaries. But the most fascinating artifacts
here are the films themselves, particularly the first three, which
offer a tour down a scuzzy side street of mainstream '70s
cinema. With their helicopter shots, plasterboard sets, nosecond-take performances, and light-jazz soundtracks, they're
the kind of movies that, for critics at the time, seemed to define
the decade as a low point in Hollywood filmmaking, no matter
what they might have been seeing from Robert Altman or
Francis Coppola.
Dirty Harry based its plotline on the same late-'60s murders that
inspired David Fincher's Zodiac (in which Harry is
unflatteringly referenced). The Zodiac killings went unsolved,
but Dirty Harry reimagines them as the work of Scorpio, a
shaggy-haired sniper who blends easily with the city's posthippie community. In one shot that especially outraged the film's
detractors, he's shown wearing a peace-sign belt buckle. The
implication wasn't that the anti-war movement was sheltering
murderers but, rather, that liberal peaceniks would never notice
one more lunatic in their midst.
The movie's most inflammatory sequence is not Harry's famous,
twice-delivered "Do you feel lucky? Well, do ya, punk?"
monologue. It's the scene in which Harry traps Scorpio and then
tortures him to learn the whereabouts of his latest victim (who,
unbeknownst to Harry, is already dead). "Rights. … I have
rights," Scorpio shrieks, sniveling as Harry's foot presses down
on his bleeding leg. Because of Harry's literal overstepping, the
killer eventually goes free; he then hires a large black thug to
beat him up so that he can work the easily duped court system by
filing a false police-brutality claim. While the city's brass wants
to bargain with Scorpio, Harry knows the only solution is to hunt
him down and kill him. Which he (spoiler alert) does.
In other words: Of course this is a right-wing fantasy.
Ideologically, Dirty Harry was a well-calculated sop to the
group of Americans that Richard Nixon identified in 1969 as the
"Silent Majority" (though neither word was entirely accurate),
those for whom everything about the period, from burning
ghettos to women's lib to anti-war marches represented steps
toward barbarism.
Over the years, though, some critics have given the film a bit of
a revisionist free pass for its particular brand of malarkey. That's
due in large part to its director, who claimed to be as appalled by
Harry as many of the movie's fiercest critics. Dirty Harry was
made by Don Siegel, a self-professed liberal whose Invasion of
the Body Snatchers and Riot in Cell Block 11 had won him a
kind of cult status among cinephiles who saw a through line in
his work, which more than once depicted prickly, amoral, or
even criminal outsiders in opposition to a corrupt or dimwitted
establishment. Siegel shrewdly began spinning even before
Harry's release: Calling the original script "terrible," Siegel
proffered his take, which was that Harry was just as bad as
Scorpio "in his way." He added, "We show that within the force
there are 'pigs' like this."
Reinforced by the ads ("a movie about a couple of killers … the
one with the badge is Harry"), some auteurists saw Harry not as
a right-winger fighting wimpy liberals, but as a cowboy
protecting a frontier that had succumbed to lawlessness. It's
almost a legitimate reading—that is, if you ignore the actual
screenplay, which was overhauled by hard-core conservative and
noted munitions enthusiast John Milius. Harry, says Milius on
the discs, was a response to "the liberal bureaucratic morass that
we all live in." There's not much political ambivalence there, or
in Eastwood's remark that in 1971, "everyone was so sick of
worrying about [rights of] the accused … [the movie] was in
resistance to out-and-out stupidity."
Out-and-out stupidity soon became a series hallmark. Siegel
wasn't a great director (and he certainly wasn't the actor's
director that Eastwood needed back then), but he had a
craftsmanly sense of visual storytelling; his impenetrably inky
night scenes and his use of the lurching verticality of San
Francisco as a sniper's dream terrain are still effective. Siegel
was also economical: "If you shake a movie," he once said, "ten
minutes will fall out."
If only someone had shaken the 124-minute Magnum Force
(1973) two or three times. Milius, who co-wrote the script with
Michael Cimino, says the movie was intended as an "answer" to
the charge that Harry was fascist; here, his enemies would be
real fascists, a jackbooted gang of motorcycle policemen that
moonlights as a death squad, killing criminals who they say
would be behind bars "if the courts worked properly." When
Harry first encounters these guys on the firing range, he's
downright giddy at their marksmanship. "When I get back on
homicide, I hope you boys'll come see me," he says, as flirtatious
as Mae West. (When another cop comments that the close-knit
pack seems almost "queer for each other," Harry replies, "If the
rest of you could shoot like them I wouldn't care if the whole
damn department was queer.")
But when Harry finds out what they're up to, he's … concerned.
"When police start becoming their own executioners, where's it
gonna end?" he muses, expressing some fear that police might
kill people for minor offenses. Apparently, it's not the principle
that's flawed—only its potential misapplication. The evil cop's
response: "Either you're for us or you're against us."
(Congratulations to George W. Bush for being the only
politician ever to lift the villain's line from a Dirty Harry movie.
Perhaps Harry's oft-repeated mantra from this film—"A man's
got to know his limitations"—wasn't as appealing.)
As early as 1972, Eastwood and Co. already knew that Harry's
image needed cleaning up; the sequel offers no reprise of the
original's not-quite-serious statement that "Harry hates
everybody—limeys, micks, hebes, fat dagos, niggers, honkies,
chinks." Thus, Magnum Force teams Harry with a black
officer—temporarily, of course, since Harry's partners tend to
meet their makers in the line of duty before the closing credits.
In The Enforcer (1976), he's forced to pair with a woman—
"Lady fuzz!" a bad guy calls her—played by a pre-Cagney &
Lacey Tyne Daly with every shred of dignity she can muster
while performing chase scenes in knee-length suede boots and
carrying a huge purse. The Enforcer draws its boogeyman
inspiration everywhere, from the Manson family to the SLA,
inventing the "People's Revolutionary Strike Force" and, better
still, a black-power group called "Uhuru" run by one "Big Ed
Mustapha." There's little ideology on display, however, just a
silly climax involving an exotic new weapon called a "taser gun"
which seems to have been fashioned by Warner's props
department out of a shoe box and a can of silver paint. By now,
Harry is almost a teddy bear; he approvingly tells Daly,
"Whoever draws you as a partner could do a hell of a lot worse,"
just before she takes a slug to save his life and, possibly, her
future acting career.
Historically, Harry has come out to play only for Republican
presidents; he went into mothballs during the Carter
administration, and probably should have stayed there. The last
two Dirty Harry movies feel like studio horse-trades that bought
Eastwood freedom to pursue the more ambitious, nuanced path
he was already clearing for himself as an actor and director. He
stepped behind the camera for 1983's bloody, brutish Sudden
Impact, in which Harry acquired a farting bulldog as a sidekick
while pursuing, not unsympathetically, a woman who is picking
off the men who raped her. But it's memorable chiefly for
handing Ronald Reagan a re-election-campaign present with "Go
ahead—make my day" (a line that actually originated in the
exploitation movie Vice Squad a year earlier).
As for The Dead Pool (1988), in which Harry investigates a
series of murders surrounding the production of a horror movie,
the "before they were stars" casting is a happy accident; the
supporting players include Liam Neeson, Patricia Clarkson, and
"James" Carrey as a heroin-addicted pre-Goth rock star who lipsyncs "Welcome to the Jungle." But the script is little more than
an especially gory episode of "Murder, She Wrote." The streak
of political taglines also ended with this tin-eared enterprise—
unless John McCain decides to deploy "You forgot your fortune
cookie—it says you're shit outta luck" during a debate.
Eastwood recently scotched rumors that he'd be blowing the dust
off Harry for one final escapade, saying the character would
simply be too old to remain remotely credible as a police officer.
(Now he worries about credibility?) More to the point, though,
the man who incarnated him is, at this point, simply too smart to
try to rehabilitate a cop who was a relic the day he was
conceived. "It was fun for a while," says Eastwood in a typically
laconic 2001 interview on the DVD. But, he adds, "[S]ometimes
it's best to leave a good thing alone." Perhaps wisely, he doesn't
elaborate on exactly what the good part was.
sidebar
Return to article
Outside that spring's Oscars, demonstrators carried placards
reading "Dirty Harry Is a Rotten Pig." It's not clear why they
were protesting, since Dirty Harry received zero nominations,
but it's worth noting that the evening's big winner, The French
Connection, offered a similar, though more skillful and sane,
positioning of a so-bad-he's-good cop against the so-fair-it'suseless legal system.
explainer
Secret Muslims
Are Muslims allowed to hide their faith?
By Juliet Lapidos
Wednesday, July 2, 2008, at 6:57 PM ET
According to a poll published in March, one in 10 registered
voters believes that Barack Obama is a Muslim. He's not—the
presumptive Democratic nominee for president is a Christian—
but this rumor got the Explainer wondering whether there's a
history of Muslims who deny their faith publicly while
maintaining it privately. Are Muslims allowed to pass?
Yes, if you're a Shiite; maybe, if you're a Sunni. According to
Chapter 16, Verse 106 of the Quran, "Any one who, after
accepting faith in Allah, utters Unbelief—except under
compulsion, his heart remaining firm in Faith—but such as open
their breast to Unbelief, on them is Wrath from Allah, and theirs
will be a dreadful Penalty." Shiites cite this verse to justify
taqiyya, a religious dispensation by which persecuted Muslims
may hide their beliefs. But Sunni scholars have a more equivocal
take. Some reject taqiyya as unacceptable hypocrisy and
evidence of cowardice: Muslims shouldn't fear other humans,
only Allah. Others argue that concealment is warranted under
life-threatening circumstances.
The difference in interpretation may have to do with the
historical relationship between the two Islamic sects. Since
Shiites make up just 15 percent of the global Muslim population,
they have sometimes faced persecution as a minority group.
(Sunnis are the minority in certain countries, including Iran and
Azerbaijan.) As a result, Shiite leaders have for centuries
allowed followers to dissimulate publicly rather than face
discrimination.
Some Muslims would argue that it's better to run away than hide
your faith, citing Chapter 4, Verse 97 of the Quran: "Those
whose lives are terminated by the angels, while in a state of
wronging their souls, the angels will ask them, 'What was the
matter with you?' They will say, 'We were oppressed on earth.'
They will say, 'Was God's earth not spacious enough for you to
emigrate therein?' For these, the final abode is Hell, and a
miserable destiny." According to one interpretation of this verse,
those who can't practice Islam freely and publicly should simply
move to a more hospitable country.
Outside the Islamic world, there are two major historical
examples of Muslims practicing taqiyya. During the 16th
century, Catholic authorities in Spain gave the local
(predominantly Sunni) Muslim population an ultimatum:
Convert or leave the country. Some of the converts (called
Moriscos by the Spanish) became sincere Catholics while others
perpetuated their faith in private. Crypto-Muslims attended
church services on Sundays but used Aljamiado—an Arabic
alphabet for transcribing Romance languages—to secretly pass
down Islamic traditions. In antebellum America, slaves from
West Africa, many of whom were Muslim, were forced to
convert to Christianity. As in medieval Spain, some slaves
converted sincerely while others maintained their religion in
secret.
Got a question about today's news? Ask the Explainer.
Explainer thanks Edward E. Curtis IV of Indiana UniversityPurdue University Indianapolis, Frederick Denny of the
University of Colorado, Yvonne Yazbeck Haddad of Georgetown
University, Muqtedar Khan of the University of Delaware, and
Maria Rosa Menocal of Yale University.
explainer
The Spam Superhighway
What's "Port 25," and what does it have to do with Internet junk mail?
By Chris Wilson
Tuesday, July 1, 2008, at 6:03 PM ET
A set of guidelines, published last week, for how to crack down
on spam e-mail recommends that Internet service providers
block outgoing traffic from customers on "Port 25," a major
conduit for unwanted e-mail. (Read the guidelines here.) What is
Port 25, anyway?
The virtual pathway that most e-mail traffic follows when it
travels from your computer to a server. Because there are so
many different kinds of information being transferred on the
Internet—Web pages, e-mail, and database requests, to name a
few—data are divided into separate streams, called ports. A
given packet of information will have a number attached to it
that tells the receiving computer what kind of information it's
receiving. This allows the receiver to deal with it accordingly.
For example, normal Web traffic will arrive at your desktop
tagged for Port 80, while secure Web data often uses Port 443.
(These "ports" are purely virtual, not to be confused with the
physical ports on the side or back of your computer that connect
it to other devices.) Most e-mail is sent on Port 25.
When you send an e-mail to a friend, your computer will
typically use Port 25 to route the outgoing message to a local
server has been especially designated for handling e-mail by the
network operator. That pre-approved e-mail server then finds the
server that handles your friend's incoming e-mail and sends
along your message.
Port 25 can get clogged with thousands of spam e-mails when
computers on a network become infected with a virus or other
malicious software. Security experts believe armies of these
infected computers are responsible for sending the vast majority
of spam. (See the Explainer's take on these "botnets.") Instead of
using Port 25 to route their messages internally to an approved
mail server the way they're supposed to, these "zombie"
computers use it to send spam directly to the recipients' servers.
This enables them to send large quantities of e-mail without
being easily detected by the network operator.
The anti-spam guidelines propose shutting down Port 25 for only
this particular type of traffic—which goes straight from an
individual computer to the destination server and skips over the
middleman of the local mail server. In other words, only those
local mail servers would be allowed to use Port 25 to send email to external locations.
In fact, most major Internet service providers in North America
are already doing this, and they generally report a decrease in
spam originating from their users. Blocking traffic out of Port 25
from computers not recognized as designated mail servers does,
however, have the potential to block legitimate traffic as well.
Small businesses that don't have the resources to maintain a
designated mail server may send out e-mail in the same way an
infected computer does. There are also some tech-savvy users
who don't want to route their messages through their service
provider's mail server, sometimes out of security concerns.
Nonetheless, the recent guidelines outline some alternatives
(PDF) for ISPs that don't want to cut off such customers.
Most anti-spam researchers acknowledge that blocking Port 25
wouldn't snuff out spam altogether and may provide only a
temporary fix. In the last year, spammers have succeeded in
breaking CAPTCHA systems—those tests with distorted
numbers and letters meant to determine whether you're human—
and registered for thousands of Web mail accounts. That lets
them send out their spam without using infected machines.
Got a question about today's news? Ask the
Explainer.
Explainer thanks Matt Bishop of the University of California,
Davis; John Levine of the Messaging Anti-Abuse Working
Group; and Joe Stewart of SecureWorks.
explainer
Hostage Rescue for Tots
What was a 3-year-old doing at a paramilitary simulation exercise?
By Jacob Leibenluft
Monday, June 30, 2008, at 6:04 PM ET
A French soldier wounded 17 people—including a 3-year-old
child—when he accidentally loaded his gun with live
ammunition during a hostage-taking simulation in the southern
city of Carcassonne. What on earth was a 3-year-old doing in a
military training scenario?
Enjoying the spectacle. According to news reports, the
simulation was part of an army open house designed to allow
French citizens—including the soldiers' families—to get a closer
look at the elite paratrooper unit stationed in their town. ("There
were loads of children, because it was a party for children above
all," one witness said, according to the Times of London.) The
scenario appears to have been relatively low-intensity—prior to
the accident, the soldiers reportedly completed it five times
without a hitch.
More sophisticated hostage-rescue training is usually conducted
without a public audience. Civilians might be on the scene, but
only as full participants—acting out the part of a hostage or a
bystander, for example. At the Department of Justice-sponsored
Mock Riot, an annual event in West Virginia that includes a
hostage scenario, local criminal justice students volunteer as
prison inmates; they must be over 18 and sign a legal release. (In
one recent Mock Riot simulation, the faux prisoners—led by an
inmate named "K-Dog"—took a hostage and issued a demand
for Hot Pockets before being subdued with PepperBall
ammunition.) In other cases, simulation leaders recruit
professional actors or police volunteers to play a role in their
scenarios. (To learn how to volunteer for a terrorism drill, read
this 2005 "Explainer.")
Even without civilian bystanders, however, simulations can
become dangerous. According to research (PDF) compiled by
the National Tactical Officers Association, at least 36 law
enforcement officers have died since 1970 due to accidental
weapons discharges during training exercises. In 1994, for
example, a Palo Alto, Calif., reserve police officer playing the
role of a terrorist was shot during a drill when a fellow officer
forgot to unload his gun. Law enforcement agencies and military
units are supposed to follow a strict protocol (PDF) before using
firearms in simulations, which typically includes a search of
every weapon before it enters the training area. Participants
should also be able to tell whether or not they are using live
ammo: Blanks are usually lighter than regular ammunition, and
in the case of the French paratroopers, they were colored
differently, too.
It's not a great idea to fire blanks near a 3-year-old, no matter
what the situation. While a blank cartridge doesn't include a
bullet, it still contains gunpowder, and a blank-loaded gun will
expel a burst of hot gas when fired. (Historically, blanks also
included a wad of cardboard or paper that served as a projectile.)
At very close range, blanks can be deadly, and Army regulations
suggest that they be fired at a range of at least 20 feet. In 1977,
an Oklahoma City police officer was mortally wounded by a
blank during training; 10 years later, actor Jon-Erik Hexum
accidentally killed himself when he fired a blank-loaded pistol
into his head on the set of the show Cover Up.
Got a question about today's news? Ask the Explainer.
Explainer thanks John Gnagey of the National Tactical Officers
Association, Lt. Jeff Lanz of the Oregon State Police, Stuart
Meyers of OpTac International, Steve Morrison of the Office of
Law Enforcement Technology Commercialization, and Rick
Washburn of Weapons Specialists LTD.
explainer
Rent-a-Hive
How much does it cost to borrow a colony of honeybees?
By Jacob Leibenluft
Friday, June 27, 2008, at 7:00 PM ET
The House Agriculture Committee heard testimony on Thursday
about the toll Colony Collapse Disorder was taking on beehives
nationwide. Growers complained that the skyrocketing cost of
renting bees was forcing them to raise prices on crops. Just how
expensive is it to rent a colony of bees?
Between $10 and $180, depending on the season. When you rent
a colony of bees, you aren't just shelling out for the insects—the
per-colony rental fee typically covers the cost of transporting the
bees, setting up the hive and collecting the colony at the end of
the contract. (Click here [PDF] to see a sample contract.) If you
don't need a full hive's worth, you can buy (not rent) a package
of bees and have them delivered via the U.S. Postal Service;
three pounds of them might set you back $75.
Colony rental prices are highest from early February to midMarch, during the pollination season for almonds. The almond
crops in California are entirely dependent on honeybees, and
every spring they require more than half the commercial bee
colonies in the nation. (Beekeepers as far away as Florida send
their product to the West Coast to meet the demand.) This year,
California almond farmers paid up to $180 a colony, and their
appetite for the insects pushed up prices for growers all over the
country. Rental fees can drop by more than a factor of 10 later in
the spring, as beekeepers look for a place to leave their bees until
a more lucrative season.
The price of a colony also depends on what you plan to do with
it. In the Northeast, pumpkin and cucumber farmers pay more
for hives because pollinating their patches isn't quite as
nutritious for the bees and may limit the hive's growth. (Apple
producers in Pennsylvania are reporting prices around $65 per
colony this year, compared with $100 for pumpkin farmers.) But
no matter what you're pollinating, prices are higher than they
used to be: Increased demand overall, combined with a reduction
in supply as a result of Colony Collapse Disorder, has made
costs double or even triple in recent years (PDF).
When you order up a colony, expect your delivery to arrive via
truck: For the cross-country shipments, about 450 boxlike hives
are loaded into a semi and transported as quickly as possible,
taking care that the bees don't overheat. Once the bees arrive, the
hives will be unloaded at night—most bees don't fly in the
dark—and placed in the fields. Over the course of pollination
season, forager bees will roam free during the day and then
return to the hive by dusk. The exact number of colonies needed
to pollinate a field varies, but it's between one and two hives per
acre for most crops. Depending on the time of year, the
population of a colony will ebb and flow. A high-quality rental
colony often has eight frames, each holding a sheet of
honeycomb; each frame might have only 1,500 or 2,000 bees at
the beginning of the almond season. Later in the year, however,
the populations might triple in size.
Got a question about today's news? Ask the Explainer.
Explainer thanks Keith Delaplane of the University of Georgia,
Joe Traynor of Scientific Ag Co., Dennis van Engelsdorp of the
Pennsylvania Department of Agriculture, and Shannon Wooten
of Wooten's Golden Queens.
faith-based
"Good Muslim, Good Citizen"
And other lesson plans from U.S. prisons in Iraq.
By Andrew K. Woods
Thursday, July 3, 2008, at 6:58 AM ET
The coalition's detention centers in Iraq have received a lot of
attention lately, largely because Commanding Gen. Douglas
Stone's tour ended last month after a year in which he cleaned up
the facilities, improved due process, and oversaw a vast
reduction in recidivism rates. Stone—with his Stanford MBA
and Silicon Valley fortune—is a compelling character. But few
of the recent stories focus on the most controversial legacy of
Stone's tenure: his attempt to engage with the detainees' faith.
In addition to improving the prison conditions, Stone instituted a
series of programs designed to "isolate extremists and empower
moderates." The programs—partly run by Russian and East
European Partnerships Inc., a contractor specializing in
"intercultural communications"—feature Islamic civics courses,
a directory of radical refrains with responses from moderate
passages of text, and religious discussion groups, run by imams
who teach from what Stone calls a "moderate Hadith." It's all
part of a viral marketing campaign, designed to get the detainees
and their ilk to spread Islamic moderation by word-of-mouth.
Only a small percentage of the detainees have taken part in the
religious discussion courses, but they are oversubscribed. Many,
if not all, of the detainees will eventually take the separate
"civics course," which features Quran-based lesson plans such as
"good Muslim, good citizen," "loving humanity and avoiding
hatred," and "making a good impression."
What is striking here is not that the United States is waging an
ideological battle with Islamic extremists. As Robert Wright
elegantly argued in 2002, the war on terror is a semiotic war, and
religion provides many symbolic and narrative weapons. Rather,
it is remarkable that the Pentagon would have the chutzpah to
locate what Stone calls the "battlefield of the mind" in its own
detention centers.
Prisons are where so many Islamist identities are born, nurtured,
and plugged into violent networks. It was in Cairo's prisons that
Sayyid Qutb crafted an intellectual framework for modern
Islamist terrorism, and Ayman al-Zawahiri underwent the
transformation that would lead him to launch al-Qaida. Or think
of our own little "jihad university" on Guantanamo Bay.
Detention centers present a second-order problem, too, in how
the global public receives them. The torture at Abu Ghraib may
have been the best thing the United States ever did for al-Qaida.
And now, along comes a Marine reservist from California, hard
as hell, McKinsey-savvy, who claims he can turn detention
facilities into a strategic asset. Can it possibly work?
Looking at similar programs in other countries, the answer
seems to be "maybe," but only if the focus is on fulfilling basic
human needs rather than interpreting Islamic texts. Any mention
of religious doctrine will make the project look more like a war
on Islam than a war on terror. And after our Christian president
invaded and destroyed Baghdad, our legitimacy on that front
isn't great.
Deradicalization programs aren't new. They have been tried in
several countries, including Yemen, Algeria, Saudi Arabia,
Indonesia, and Egypt, with mixed success. Saudi Arabia runs its
program in a facility called the Care Rehabilitation Center,
where men are reported to live like princes: good food, new
clothes, and plush quarters, all while they engage in discussions
about faith and nonviolence. Some of them get job placements,
money, and even a new car. The Saudi Advisory Committee, the
state agency that runs the program, even offers the families of
detainees remuneration while their breadwinner is in "rehab."
The program is said to have convinced 700 of 2,000 detainees to
renounce their violent ways.
The coalition's Iraq program is much larger, so it cannot provide
such posh digs. But Stone oversaw a vast improvement in
detainee conditions, almost solely for the purpose of reducing
the risk that they would radicalize. During my visit earlier this
year, I saw detainees playing soccer, studying math, and taking
an art class, elements found in the Saudi program. I also sat with
a few detainees in their religious discussion group. Sheikh
Sattar, on leave from his Baghdad mosque, kneeled with the
detainees for about an hour fielding their questions, including
one about whether lying was prohibited by the Quran. "I told
him—'No, you can't lie, because the prophet says "people
mustn't lie." ' He said, 'Even about the Americans?' and I said,
'About all people! The prophet says you must not lie about
anyone, even if they are the Americans. You must show them
the real ethics of a Muslim.' "
Doctrinally, this work isn't very hard. Sheikh Sattar notes, "The
Quran points in one direction only—moderate Islam." Despite
the common refrain that most of the Quran deals with jihad, it
would be equally fair to say that most of the Quran deals with
charity. As Ahmed Rashid wrote recently, the Quran clearly
bans both suicide and the killing of civilians. (It is true that
sharia calls for capital punishment for apostasy, if that can be
proven unequivocally, but most Muslims leave this judgment,
called takfir, up to God, rather than the local thug.)
One released detainee told me the programs were "a really good
way to change [the detainees'] minds about the coalition and the
government in terms of Islam." Yet the Pentagon's data show
that most of the detainees were never religious to begin with,
and most of Stone's reforms—better conditions, shorter
detentions—merely ensure that the detainees don't turn to
religion out of anger.
Indonesia's program, perhaps the most aggressive and successful
of its kind, raises doubts about whether changes in detainees'
beliefs are influenced more by questions of faith than of
economics. The Jakarta government has used its prisons to try to
change the attitudes of more than 100 captured members of the
Jemaah Islamiyah, the violent Islamist group responsible for the
Bali nightclub bombing in 2002. The program's innovation was
to hire released, reformed detainees to go back into their
communities—whether or not in prison—to spread the
moderate, or at least nonviolent, gospel. According to some
reports, the Indonesian program has drastically reduced the
radicalism of JI members, but as the International Crisis Group
notes, there are no hard data to suggest that the detainees' views
have really changed. The program's biggest success, converting
more than 20 terrorists to work for the police, was the result of
negotiations that included monetary settlements for the family of
each detainee.
Then there's the Egyptian program. Larry Wright wrote recently
in The New Yorker about the former intellectual leader of alQaida, Sayyid Imam al-Sharif, aka Dr. Fadl, and other members
of the violent Egyptian Islamic Group, who seem to have been
influenced by visits to their prison cells from clerics like Sheikh
Ali Gomaa, the grand mufti of Egypt. But after Dr. Fadl issued a
statement denouncing al-Qaida's violence, Zawahiri shot back
with a note reminding observers that Dr. Fadl's statement was
likely produced in an Egyptian torture chamber. If Dr. Fadl's
statement is not completely undermined by the fact that he is in
an Egyptian prison, it is only a testament to his own stature in
the Islamist community.
To say that the United States should play no role in religious
deradicalization programs while its tanks roll through Baghdad
is not to say they shouldn't exist. It's just that heavy hands don't
wield soft power. As the Crisis Group concludes in their review
of Indonesia's deradicalization programs, "economic aid … is
ultimately more important than religious arguments in changing
prisoner attitudes." This won't be the case for everyone—"bad
men" from well-to-do families, like Zawahiri, will never be
bought off. But even Zawahiri can be defeated if his audience
has something better to believe in. They won't condone his
violence if it seems as unilateral as our invasion of Iraq; most of
them already don't.
One of the sharpest Cold War thinkers, George Kennan, argued
that the way to win the hearts and minds of the unaligned
countries was through social and economic development
programs—not military action. In our better moments, we even
funded art programs and literary journals that were explicitly
anti-American, under the theory that free speech itself is more
important than the contents of that speech. Kennan's thinking has
resonance today. Rather than make appeals directly to the
detainees' faith—which may or may not work, and are offensive
regardless—we ought to seek to empower people with economic
and social opportunity. Open societies, after all, become liberal
societies, even when they begin in detention centers.
What does Sheikh Sattar cite as his most effective tool for
fighting radical ideology? Teaching the detainees how to read.
faith-based
How Sally Quinn Made Me a Better
Catholic
The strange Tim-Russert-funeral, communion-blogging controversy.
By Melinda Henneberger
Friday, June 27, 2008, at 7:03 PM ET
For years, Catholics have been arguing about who is and is not
supposed to receive Communion. Until now, these were family
fights, always over abortion, and nearly always involving elected
officials. After pro-choice presidential candidate John Kerry
received the Eucharist at my parish in 2004, for instance, the
priest was so excited, he announced the big news at a subsequent
Mass, and got a standing ovation. (I know, right? Oy.) While at
the other end of the spectrum, some cowboy in vestments
recently refused to serve the conservative pro-life jurist Doug
Kmiec, for the supposed sin of having smiled at Barack Obama.
(OK, he endorsed him, in Slate.)
But then non-Catholic Sally Quinn took Communion at Tim
Russert's funeral—and blogged about the body and blood in the
Washington Post-Newsweek religion site "On Faith."
Last Wednesday at Tim's funeral mass at
[Holy]Trinity Church in Georgetown (Jack
Kennedy's church), communion was offered. I
had only taken communion once in my life, at
an evangelical church. It was soon after I had
started "On Faith" and I wanted to see what it
was like. Oddly I had a slightly nauseated
sensation after I took it, knowing that in some
way it represented the body and blood of Jesus
Christ. Last Wednesday I was determined to
take it for Tim, transubstantiation
notwithstanding. I'm so glad I did. It made me
feel closer to him. And it was worth it just to
imagine how he would have loved it. After I
began "On Faith," Tim started calling me
"Sister Sal" instead of "Miss Sal."
This reads a little too much like a restaurant review for my
comfort; Christ Almighty: Tangy Yet Nauseating? And good as
he was, we don't really take Communion to feel closer to Tim
Russert.
Not surprisingly, Quinn inflamed conservative Catholics.
William Donohue's Catholic League responded with the usual
outrage: "Just reading what Sally Quinn said is enough to give
any Christian, especially Catholics, more than a 'slightly
nauseating sensation.' In her privileged world, life is all about
experiences and feelings. … Moreover, Quinn's statement not
only reeks of narcissism, it shows a profound disrespect for
Catholics and the beliefs they hold dear."
Well, yes, but she's also brought progressive and conservative
Catholics together for a minute; as a left-leaning Catholic writer
I know said in an e-mail this morning, "For the first time ever, I
may agree with Bill Donohue!'' At America, Jesuit writer James
Martin distanced himself from the Catholic League but gave
Quinn a (gentler) lecture:
Catholics believe in the "real presence," the
actual presence of Christ in the elements of the
Eucharist: the bread and the wine. It is a
central element of our faith, and reception of
Communion is something that a Catholic does
not do lightly. Which is something of an
understatement. … [I]t is probably not too
much to expect that the co-founder of a
prestigious online blog about religion run by
two of the nation's premier journals would
understand something about the most basic
practices of the Catholic church. Most
intelligent people know a few facts about the
Catholic church: this is one of them. And even
if one doesn't know this, one would know to
act with great care when in the midst of a
worshiping community not your own.
Alas, when the New Republic reached Quinn for comment, she
made things worse for herself by asking What Would Jesus Do,
lecturing that real Christians wouldn't turn anyone away and
confusing her situation with that of Catholic pro-choice
politicians. "Sally Quinn's comments on her decision to take
communion was one of those moments that makes professionals
on the religion beat cringe," said David Gibson, a longtime
religion journalist and former member of the board of the
Religion Newswriters Association, the organization for those
covering religion in the secular media. "Her explanation
displayed such ignorance of the most fundamental tenets of a
major faith as well as the basic proprieties of how journalists—
and other guests—should conduct themselves at the services of a
faith not their own."
Still, I have to give Quinn credit for bringing me, for one, into
line: I'd always been squishy on who should receive
Communion, and never really saw the harm in setting a few
extra places at the family dinner. But thanks to "Sister Sal,'' oh
Lord, now I do.
Excessive timeouts do more harm than good, making a child
irritable and more volatile in his reactions, and more inclined to
escape and avoid the adults who punish him. Just as important,
parents who punish excessively tend to escalate punishment,
increasing the side effects and losing track of the original intent
of giving a timeout, which is to improve a child's behavior. The
opposite happens, in fact.
A reliable body of scientific research accruing over decades has
given us a clear idea of how to use timeout most effectively. The
technique's full name, "timeout from reinforcement," provides
the key. Timeout has nothing to do with justice, repentance, or
authority. Rather, it follows a simple logic: Attention feeds a
behavior, and a timeout is nothing more than a brief break from
attention in any form—demands, threats, explanations, rewards,
hugs ... everything.
So, what does this tell us about the right way to use timeouts?
They should be:
family

Family Feuds
How to make "timeouts" less like bar fights.
By Alan E. Kazdin
Friday, June 27, 2008, at 7:24 AM ET
The "timeout" has replaced the swat on the behind as many
parents' default punishment for a misbehaving child. It's worth
noting, then, that this parenting tool is widely misunderstood and
frequently misused.
Most parents already have a rough working notion of how to use
timeouts. When a child does something wrong, you send him off
to sit somewhere by himself and do nothing for a set amount of
time, like a hockey referee putting a player in the penalty box.
Two minutes on a bench for hitting at the playground, five
minutes on a stool in the corner for talking back, and so on.
Because the timeout seems so simple, most people feel
comfortable using it intuitively, guided by assumptions that the
punishment should fit the crime, that a timeout gives the child an
opportunity to reflect and repent, and that it teaches the child
who's in control.
These assumptions lead many parents to use more and longer
timeouts to match the frequency and severity of a child's
offenses. If a child gets five minutes for, say, hitting a sibling,
then a more serious offense, such as biting, should rate 15 or 30
minutes, right? Not necessarily. Using more and longer timeouts
might seem proportional, and it might even conceivably teach a
lesson about justice, but it won't help change the behavior that's
causing you to give timeouts in the first place. And if you don't
change the behavior, you're going to be enforcing a lot more
timeouts.




used sparingly, because the side effects of excessive
punishment are more significant than any benefits the
timeouts might have. If you're giving more than one or
two per day for the same offense, that's too much.
brief, because the timeout's positive effect on behavior
is almost all concentrated in its first minute or two.
Some parents feel obliged to add more time to satisfy
their sense of justice, but the extra time has no value in
terms of changing behavior. If you feel that you must
go beyond one or two minutes, treat 10 minutes as the
extreme upper limit.
immediate, following as closely as possible upon the
behavior that made it necessary. If you can, do it on the
spot, not when you get home from the store or
playground. Delayed timeouts are ineffective.
done in isolation from others, with the child in a
separate room or sitting alone in a chair off to one side.
Complete isolation is not needed if you feel it would be
good to keep an eye on the child.
administered calmly, not in anger or as an act of
vengeance, and without repeated warnings, which
lose their effect if they are not regularly followed with
consequences. Make clear to the child which behaviors
lead to timeout, and then be consistent about declaring
one when such behavior occurs. One warning is plenty.
If you're calm, you will also be in the right frame of mind to do
something important that's nearly impossible to do when you're
angry: Praise compliance with the timeout, such as going to the
isolated spot when asked, sitting quietly, and completing the
whole timeout. A lot of parents balk at this. "WHAT?! Praise
the child when I'm punishing him for misbehaving?" Absolutely.
We want to build compliance whenever it occurs, and especially
under difficult situations. We want the child to go to timeout
when we tell him to, so we reward that behavior with praise. It
does not have to be effusive, but, like all effective praise, it
should still specify what the child did—It's good that you went
straight to timeout when I asked you to, and you sat quietly for
the whole time, like a big boy—and combine verbal
encouragement with a gentle pat or other contact.
If you have to touch, drag, or restrain the child to make the
timeout happen, you're doing it wrong, and the timeout won't
work. During punishment, a child will be more oppositional than
usual and is likelier to physically resist going into timeout,
which may inspire stronger physical control by the parent.
Things escalate from there into dragging, pushing, pulling, and
perhaps hitting. What's happening is more like a fight in a bar
than timeout from reinforcement, and you're reinforcing all the
wrong behaviors. The same goes for locking a child in a room to
enforce a timeout. Besides being unsafe, locking a child in, like
dragging him, is what psychologists call a "setting event" for
opposition—an event that makes a behavior more likely. You're
saying, in effect, Resist me! I expect it from you, and your child
will get the message.
Let's say you declare the timeout and your child says, "No, I'm
not going." Instead of using force, give her an extra minute
penalty. You can do this twice: Up the timeout from two minutes
to three, then to four. Then, if that doesn't work, take away a
privilege—something significant but brief, like no TV today. (It
helps to decide on this penalty in advance rather than winging it
on the spot when everybody's excited and upset. You can also
use it if the child comes out of timeout too early; one warning, if
you wish, and then invoke the penalty.) Then pivot and walk
away. Don't give in if she then says, "OK, OK, OK, I'll do it,"
because that reinforces an unwanted sequence. Let the
consequence do the work, and resist the temptation to add a little
zinger like, "You never listen, and now you're paying the price!"
Saying such things may release steam, causing your childinduced aneurisms not to burst, but it will increase the side
effects of punishment.
Finally, and this is the greater key to success, research shows
that the effectiveness of timeout depends on the effectiveness of
time in. You must devote your energies to identifying the
problem behavior (hitting, for instance), identifying a desirable
behavior to replace it (keeping your hands to yourself), and
reinforcing that desirable behavior with lots of praise and other
rewards. Timeout won't get rid of an unwanted behavior, not on
its own. It's a consequence you can use to control that behavior
while you work on replacing it with something better.
And consider giving yourself an informal timeout now and
again. Everyone will benefit. When your child is singing the "I
Hate Mommy" song for the 17th time in a row and you feel
yourself about to lose control and run wild up the parental
misbehavior scale—nagging, shouting, threatening,
overpunishing, all the way up to laying hands on the little
miscreant—try turning around and walking out of the room. Go
sit somewhere quiet for a couple of minutes and cool off.
Sometimes a little timeout from reinforcement is just what you
need.
fighting words
Book Drive for Iraq
How you can do your bit to build democracy.
By Christopher Hitchens
Monday, June 30, 2008, at 7:15 AM ET
It's quite common to read, usually from liberal opponents of the
engagement in Iraq, that George W. Bush's administration hasn't
asked the American people to make any sacrifices. I must
confess that I never quite understand this criticism. As a society,
we collectively contribute a great deal from our common
treasury to give Iraq a fighting chance to recover from three
decades of war and fascism and to prevent it from falling into
the hands of the enemies of civilization. And as fellow citizens,
we experience the agony of loss when our soldiers, aid workers,
civil servants, and others are murdered. (That each of these is a
volunteer is a great cause for national pride.)
However, I do believe that many people wish they could do
something positive and make a contribution, however small, to
the effort to build democracy in Iraq. And I have a suggestion. In
the northern Iraqi city of Sulaymaniya, the American University
of Iraq has just opened its doors. And it is appealing for people
to donate books.
Here is some background: In 2006, the McKinsey consulting
group was hired by my friend Barham Salih, the deputy prime
minister of Iraq, to produce a business plan for a university
along the lines of the existing success stories of the American
Universities in Cairo and Beirut. The board of trustees includes
Ayad Allawi, Iraq's former prime minister, Fouad Ajami of
Johns Hopkins, Kanan Makiya of Brandeis, and Iraqi President
Jalal Talabani. The U.S. Congress has pledged more than $10
million to the project, as has the Kurdish Regional Government,
the autonomous administration of the country's northeastern
provinces. For reasons of security, the only campus open at
present is in this area of Iraq, where Americans are not targeted
and where al-Qaida dares not operate. But Salih, who is himself
a Kurd and a native of Sulaymaniya, hopes that as the situation
on the ground improves, there will also be campuses in Baghdad
and Basra.
Among the projects already underway are an M.B.A. program in
concert with Hochschule Furtwangen University in Germany
and an English preparatory program run jointly with the
American English Institute at the University of Oregon. An
environmental-studies department is envisioned, with money
from the government of Italy, to address the recuperation of
Iraq's southern marshes, the largest wetlands in the region, which
were subjected to deliberate destruction by the regime of
Saddam Hussein. The University of Vermont is hosting
videoconferencing sessions in political science on such topics as
federalism and church-state separation.
As anyone who has read the Arab Human Development Reports
will know, the Arab region—which at the time of the Abbasid
caliphate in Baghdad was one of the world centers of humanistic
learning and philosophy—is in a profound crisis of intellectual
unfreedom. It boasts of no great centers of study; it translates
pathetically few books from other languages and cultures; it is
prone to waves of intolerance and fanaticism under which books
are actually burned. Thus the attempt to reverse this trend and to
lay the foundation of a liberal and cosmopolitan education for
the next generation of educated Iraqis is of the highest
importance from every conceivable point of view.
I recently received a progress report from Sulaymaniya from
Thomas Cushman, who is a professor in the sociology
department at Wellesley College and the founding editor of the
Journal of Human Rights. He tells me that the American
University attaches very special importance to the establishment
of a library in English. An initiative has been set up to furnish
the campus with the most up-to-date books that can be provided.
As Cushman writes:
What I did was ask colleagues to donate
books, which they did in good numbers. We
sent thirty cartons of first-rate books,
especially on global affairs, history and
literature and they are housed in the new
library. … The university is especially in need
of technical books, social science books,
software even. … Nathan Musselman, the
Prefect of the University who is teaching a
class, wrote to me thrilled to tell me that the
students were now writing their term papers in
English and using many of these books as their
main sources for research. He is greatly
desirous of receiving more, now that the initial
library is set up. … So the idea is to get people
to donate in a more micro way; to send one or
two new, current and important books
(perhaps they have review copies, extra copies,
etc) to the new library of the University. All of
these small polyps could yield a substantial
coral reef of knowledge for the new generation
of students there.
So here's what to do. Have a look at the university's Web site.
Get some decent volumes together, pass the word to your friends
and co-workers to do the same, and send them off to:
Nathan Musselman
The American University of Iraq—Sulaimani
Building No. 7, Street 10
Quarter 410
Ablakh Area
Sulaimani, Iraq
(+964) (0)770-461-5099
It's important to include the number at the end.
When I first saw the city of Sulaymaniya in 1991, it was still
under occupation by Saddam Hussein's army, and the Kurdish
region in general was a howling wilderness of wrecked towns
and gassed, "cleansed" villages. The graves from that time are
still being dug up, but on my last visit, in 2006, the main
emphasis was on reconstruction and investment, with the city
proudly opening its own airport with direct flights from outside
the country. Anyone who can help in this process of
emancipation, in however small a way, should be proud to do so.
five-ring circus
Summer Olympics Disaster Guide
What could go wrong in Beijing? Everything.
By Lucy Morrow Caldwell, Kara Hadge, Nayeli Rodriguez, and
Derek Thompson
Wednesday, July 2, 2008, at 1:15 PM ET
Toxic air, algae blooms, Tibetan uprisings—welcome to the
2008 Summer Olympics! As the Aug. 8 opening ceremony
inches closer, the list of potential disasters gets longer every day.
Below, we've collected all of the crises and glitches that might
spoil the Beijing games. On our ranking scale, one torch is no
big deal; 10 torches is a potential catastrophe. Print out this
handy guide, and be prepared for the worst.
The world's top marathon runner won't compete in the Olympic
marathon because of concerns about Beijing's toxic air. Pollution
worries have also led more than 20 countries to move their preOlympic training to Japan. But nobody knows quite what to
expect in August. At worst, droves of athletes could make an
eleventh-hour exodus on account of not being able to breathe. At
the very least, the thick air could make the 200 meters feel like
the steeplechase. So far, though, reports out of China point to
vastly improving air quality. Beijing's radical anti-pollution
measures—shutting down all chemical plants, freezing
construction projects, ordering half of the cars off the road—
point out what's possible when you have tight state control.
Chance it could happen: 90 percent
Scary quote: "The magnitude of the pollution in Beijing is not
something we know how to deal with. It's a foreign environment.
It's like feeding an athlete poison," said a respiratory expert
assisting American marathoners.
Scenario: The Yellow Sea, the Olympic sailing venue, is full of
ships this week. Unfortunately, they're not racing vessels; they're
gunk removers, dispatched to clean up an enormous algae
outbreak that's choking 5,000 square miles of open water. The
Chinese government hopes to remove the green stuff by midJuly. But for now, international sailing teams are practicing in
what looks like a putting green.
Chance it could happen: 50 percent
Scary quote: "There's no way you can sail through it," said
British windsurfer Bryony Shaw. "If it's still here in August, it
could be a real problem."
Scenario: International concern for Chinese repression in Tibet
has already sparked protests in San Francisco, London, and
Paris, where the Olympic torch was briefly extinguished. The
Chinese government has cracked down violently on
demonstrations in recent months, and numerous world leaders
have responded by boycotting the opening ceremony. The worstcase scenario, as seen earlier this year: The Chinese government
goes overboard trying to squelch demonstrations and kills more
than 100 pro-Tibetan activists.
Chance it could happen: 60 percent
Scary quote: "There are people all over the world who are Tibet
supporters and this is just the first of a cascading waterfall of
actions," said American Shannon Service, who was expelled
from China after staging an anti-Olympic protest on Mount
Everest.
Scenario: The chance of precipitation in Beijing in early August
is 50 percent, but China isn't leaving anything to chance. The
government plans to stop the rain by firing silver iodide rockets
into the sky in the hope of wringing water from the clouds
before they soak the opening ceremony. With so much
invested—financially and publicity-wise—in weathercontrolling technology, a wet opening ceremony would be a
major embarrassment, not to mention a major bummer for the
fans.
Chance it could happen: 30 percent
Scary quote: "I don't think their chances of preventing rain are
very high at all," said Roelof Bruintjes of the U.S. National
Center for Atmospheric Research. "We can't chase away a cloud,
and nobody can make a cloud, either."
Scenario: What if everything goes off without a hitch in Beijing
but no one is watching? Television rights-holders have
complained that the Chinese bureaucracy is making it impossible
to plan their coverage, with reports of broadcasting equipment
being tied up for security reasons. Even if the cameras do arrive,
it's highly unlikely that China will allow live coverage from
Tiananmen Square or the Forbidden City. Then again, NBC paid
$1.5 billion for broadcast rights to the 2006 and 2008
Olympics—that's a big incentive to make sure that millions don't
tune in to see nothing but static.
Chance it could happen: 1 percent
Scary quote: "We are two weeks away from putting equipment
on a shipment and we have no clearance to operate, or to enter
the country or a frequency allocation," said Sandy MacIntyre,
director of news for AP Television News.
Scenario: More stringent visa policies put in place in the last
few months have already hurt tourism in Beijing. The new rules
require certain travelers to show invitation letters, airline tickets,
and proof of hotel arrangements before applying for entrance
into China. A foreign ministry spokesman has stated that these
policies reflect China's concern for security during the Olympics.
If high-profile visitors, journalists, or athletes can't get into the
country, though, the bad PR might drown out any potential
security gains.
Chance it could happen: 90 percent
Scary quote: "Business is so bleak. ... Since May, very few
foreigners have checked in. Our occupancy rate has dropped by
40 percent," one hotel operator told the New York Times.
Scenario: The U.S. Olympic team, among other delegations, has
raised concerns about the safety of the food in the Olympic
Village. In response to a New York Times report that the U.S.
team was bringing its own beef, chicken, and pork to Beijing, a
Chinese official said that outside food would not be allowed in
athletes' lodgings. China might come to regret that decision if a
sprinter is seen heaving on the starting line.
Chance it could happen: 50 percent
Scary quote: "We had it tested and it was so full of steroids that
we never could have given it to athletes. They all would have
tested positive," said an American caterer, explaining the
potential problem with serving the U.S. team Chinese chicken
breasts.
Scenario: Getting water to Beijing, a landlocked city, is a major
undertaking. The Chinese government has begun diverting more
than 39.6 billion gallons to a dried-up lake near the capital
city—a public-works project that has displaced an estimated
300,000 citizens. Northern China has been fighting drought for
years, so Beijing's added demands have many Chinese fearing
that there won't be enough water to go around. There's also the
(slim) possibility of protests by the parched at this year's Games.
Chance it could happen: 30 percent
Scary quote: "Sometimes you wonder if they need all the water
more than us here," said Shi Yinzhu, a Chinese sheep herder.
Scenario: If you thought locusts were a problem only in Old
Testament times, think again. In 2002, the pests devoured 3.7
million acres of farmland in northern and central China. The
insects are now eating their way through Inner Mongolia just in
time for the start of the games. The last time locusts reached the
capital, locals snagged the protein-filled insects for midsummer
snacks. International athletes unaccustomed to the Chinese diet
might not be so pleased to find one in their mouth during
competition.
Chance it could happen: 50 percent
Scary quote: "The first generation locusts this year in the areas
have already hatched," said Gao Wenyuan, a Chinese official.
"The harm they do is obvious."
Scenario: The official Web site of the Beijing Olympics says,
"Terrorism, in particular, poses the biggest threat" to this year's
games. More than 500 detailed security plans have supposedly
been mapped out, and one Communist Party official announced
that Chinese authorities have already raided a "terrorist gang"
with plans for an Olympics takedown. While al-Qaida is a
natural suspect for sabotage, keep an eye on Uighur extremists,
Muslims in Western China who have become increasingly active
in recent months.
Chance it could happen: 10 percent
Scary quote: The U.S. State Department has warned Americans
that there is a "heightened risk that extremist groups will conduct
terrorist acts within China in the near future."
Host's Manual, the great French gourmand Grimod de la
Reynière shamed gentlemen who did not know how to cut up a
roast: "The host who does not know how to carve, nor to serve is
like someone who has a fine library and cannot read. The one is
almost as shameful as the other." These days, cooking-school
students compete in knife-skills contests where they are judged
on both the alacrity and the precision of their work (this knife,
with a built-in ruler, is made for such competitions), and TV
chefs from Martin Yan of Yan Can Cook to last year's Top Chef
winner, Hung Huynh, have shown no small degree of
satisfaction in their own rapid-fire food prep.
Alas, such pride of knife cannot be attributed to the man in my
household, my husband, Andrew. Though not otherwise lacking
in manly skills (like technical support or IKEA assembly), he is
happy to defer to me when it comes to cutting up flesh,
vegetable, or fruit. This has something to do with the eight years
I spent as a professional cook, slicing mountains of onions,
chopping forests of parsley, and gutting and filleting more fish
than I care to remember. I was never the best knife worker in the
kitchen, but those years of practice have paid off when it comes
to prepping at home.
I had two major breakthroughs in my own knife-skills training.
First, I learned to seek stability in whatever object I was cutting,
usually by slicing a thin piece off the bottom of the carrot or
zucchini or lemon in question, in order to keep it from rolling.
It's simple, but it made my gleaming chef's knife seem a lot less
dangerous. Secondly, I learned to work systematically left to
right—keeping a pile of uncut items on the one side of my knife,
and the chopped items on the other—so that I didn't waste time
shuffling the ingredients around the board. That kind of
organization keeps you moving along at a fast clip.
food
Husbands and Knives
Can a book teach my husband to dice onions, slice bagels, and core
strawberries?
By Sara Dickerman
Wednesday, July 2, 2008, at 6:31 AM ET
Just as no figure skater ever won a gold medal solely for
executing perfect figure eights, no one will become a great chef
simply on the elegance of his brunoise. Show too much focus on
juliennes and chiffonades, and you can be dismissed as a
technician without soul. But without sharp knife skills, food
cooks unevenly, expensive meat and fish turn raggedy, and lots
of time and ingredients are wasted.
Beyond the purely practical value in good knife skills, there is a
certain pride of blade—more often than not, a masculine pride—
that goes with elegant handling. The kitchen knife is the
domestic stand-in for the sword, and men who might otherwise
show little interest in cookery can be quick to volunteer when it
comes to cutting up whatever beast is for dinner. In his 1808
Somehow, Andrew hasn't sought out such pearls of wisdom
from me, but the release of Norman Weinstein's new book-plusDVD, Mastering Knife Skills, got me wondering whether it
would be possible to get Andrew dicing the occasional onion
and cutting bagels in a way that doesn't threaten his brachial
artery. Weinstein is a longtime chef instructor at the Institute of
Culinary Education in New York, and Mastering Knife Skills is
copiously illustrated with photo close-ups demonstrating grips
and knife positions. In the accompanying video, Weinstein is
pleasantly fluid and matter-of-fact. He mostly focuses on the
basic cuts that are useful to home cooks: dicing vegetables,
segmenting citrus fruit, breaking down chickens, filleting fish,
and other essential maneuvers (although for some reason he
spends a few pages explaining how to make hotel-style garnishes
like lemon baskets and tomato roses). Could Weinstein provide a
knife-skills makeover for Andrew? Lured by the promise of an
appearance in Slate, my hammy spouse volunteered.
I videotaped Andrew before and after he had watched and read
Weinstein on four basic knife operations: slicing a bagel, carving
a roast chicken, coring strawberries, and dicing onions.
Weinstein managed to reform my husband when it came to bagel
slicing—for years I've shivered as he cuts his bagel towards the
palm of his hand.
The roast chicken test wasn't really fair—I picked up two birds
from the grocery store that were so plumped with fillers and
overcooked they fell apart as soon as he touched them with a
knife. Besides, even before reading the book and watching the
video, Andrew already had the bird-carving basics down, though
he needed some more practice in skimming the knife close to the
rib bones to minimize wasted breast meat. A minor complaint
from me: Weinstein did not remind newbie carvers to pay
particular attention to the "oyster" of the chicken—the tasty
morsel of flesh that clings to the top of the thigh, and is easily
lost if the carver does not keep it in mind.
Weinstein's scary-looking method for hulling strawberries
improved Andrew's technique, which had involved rolling the
berries on a cutting board while awkwardly spearing them with a
paring knife. Weinstein recommends pinching the knife blade
and turning the strawberry around it. It worked nicely, though
Andrew isn't ready to change his working habits just to beautify
our 3-year-old's lunch box.
The biggest teaching triumph came with the onion—one of the
most common items cut in the kitchen, and one that I see
bungled regularly by amateur cooks. Andrew's pre-Weinstein
cuts were awkward and haphazard, but he quickly got the gist of
leaving the onion connected at the root end, crosshatching it, and
then slicing it into regular-sized pieces. Weinstein didn't invent
this method but he communicates it well, and Andrew took to it
right away.
Weinstein has impressively managed to put words to motions
that I could only learn by watching and doing. Like any tennis
coach worth his salt, he talks of follow-through in the basic knife
stroke—"this is really a continuous, elliptical sequence of
motions, not a push-stop-pull-stop sequence." Yet as I watched
Andrew work, I was often tempted to jump in and correct his
little inefficiencies—it's one thing to read about "elliptical
sequences," and quite another to execute such a maneuver
without someone on hand to explain what you're doing wrong. I
also couldn't help but think that in the end, Andrew would need
to set aside Weinstein's book and just practice. Somewhere
around the 100th minced clove of garlic, he'll get the essence of
the action. By the 1,000th, he'll stop thinking about what he's
doing.
Mastering Knife Skills is not really for accomplished bladehandlers—a large portion of the book is devoted to elementary
purchasing information, and when it comes to cutting
techniques, Weinstein tries to keep the book uncomplicated and
unintimidating by winnowing down the available information.
He doesn't tell you how to bone out a leg of lamb, because that's
something you'd probably have your butcher do. But he leaves
out a few handy techniques: how to prepare an artichoke, for
example; how to handle a pear's funky core; or how to portion a
fish once you've filleted it. On a larger scale, it would also be
helpful to have some information on knife skills in context: how
to manage your cutting board as you scale up an operation like
peeling and slicing multiple onions for a soup. (Perform each
step of the operation to all of the onions before moving on to the
next step.) This systematic stuff is harder to find for free on the
Web, unlike, say, the technique for dicing an onion, which can
be had in countless variations, both in still photos and in video
form.
Despite my quibbles, I'm grateful to Weinstein for giving
Andrew a primer in how to chop an onion safely, something I
never managed to do in the 16-odd years we've been together.
Now if I can just keep him from gesticulating wildly with our
10-inch chef's knife as he does it, our kitchen will be a safer
place.
foreigners
Citizen Athletes
How did a guy who can't speak Polish end up scoring Poland's only goal of
Euro 2008?
By Anne Applebaum
Monday, June 30, 2008, at 8:02 PM ET
Myself, I was rooting for Spain in the finals. The Spanish
economy is in the doldrums at the moment, and I thought it
might cheer up the Spaniards if they won—which it did, judging
by the all-night street party that followed the victory. My son,
however, was rooting for Germany. This, paradoxically, is
because he is half-Polish, and two of the German players are
actually Poles, born in Poland, who speak Polish to each other
on the field. One of them—Lukas Podolski—scored both of the
goals during the Poland-Germany game three weeks ago.
Germany won that match, 2-0.
But then, that was fairly typical of this year's European
championships, in the sport Americans call soccer and the rest of
the world calls football (or futbol, or futebol, or pilka nozna, and
so on). True, this year's tournament proceeded more or less as
usual, and all the nationalistic rituals were fully observed.
Everybody dressed in their national colors, painted their faces,
sang their national anthems, and chanted their chants. The Dutch
dyed their hair orange; German girls wore red-black-and-yellow
bikini tops; and the Poles—who didn't used to go in for this sort
of thing, as far as I remember—painted their faces half-red and
half-white. Everybody does it now, and generally speaking it's a
benign phenomenon, as I've written before. Most European
countries don't have a Fourth of July, and most Europeans don't
have flag poles in front of their houses, so soccer tournaments
are really the only chance they have to scream their national
anthems and chant their national chants without being thought
fascist.
Nevertheless, this year's festivities made me wonder whether
these sweetly atavistic rituals are not merely over the top but
also increasingly somewhat off-target. I first noticed the problem
when both Polish and German journalists swarmed over
Podolski, following the German victory over Poland, demanding
to know "how he felt" about scoring against his own country. He
didn't have any terribly edifying answers, being a 23-year-old
soccer player, though his garbled comments about his mixed
feelings did produce a national lament in Poland, along the lines
of "Why do all the really talented Poles end up leaving the
country?" Yet it turns out that he was not at all unusual. In Euro
2008, something like a third of the goals were scored by people
who had not been born citizens of the country for which they
were playing, either thanks to some horse-trading with passports
or—and this is perhaps the more interesting point—thanks to the
ever-higher levels of immigration both into Europe from the
outside and within Europe itself.
Thus, Poland's single tournament goal was scored by Roger
Guerreiro, born in Brazil. One of the Austrian stars was Ivica
Vastic, a Croat. The Turkish team had five foreign-born players,
Portugal had five, and Croatia and France had seven each. Even
the coaches, nowadays, are foreigners. Both Poland and Russia
have Dutch coaches—though the former is now in the doghouse
while the latter became a national hero when Russia's team,
against improbable odds, made it to the semifinals. Apparently
there are now calls to make him an honorary Russian citizen.
Perhaps because of the increasingly multinational nature of these
supposedly national teams, there was also a certain
circumspectness on the part of fans this year, and even from
their governments, which I don't remember from the past. The
Germany-Turkey semifinal was, for example, a veritable model
of anxious, ostentatiously multicultural goodwill. I happened to
be in Berlin when it was played, a city that is home to a couple
of hundred thousand Turks (there are 2.6 million in all of
Germany) not all of whom either feel like or are treated like
natives most of the time. Nevertheless, on the day of the game,
the city's residents celebrated with something like forced good
humor. Berlin cars flew both the Turkish and German flags,
Berliners ostentatiously wore T-shirts featuring a German eagle
and a Turkish crescent moon, and the Berliner Morgenpost put a
studiously cheerful article about good sportsmanship on its front
page—in both German and Turkish. After the Germans won,
everybody, up to and including German Chancellor Angela
Merkel, immediately agreed that the German victory was very
nice—but of course it was absolutely crystal clear that the Turks
had played better and had deserved to win. Phew!
But then, that is part of the charm of soccer—which is, let's face
it, a fundamentally unjust sport: Since it is very often the case
that the wrong team wins, or that the team that has dominated
the game doesn't manage to score, or that the referee makes an
arbitrary call and gives away an unfair penalty kick, you can
always be gracious about your opponents if you want to be. And
perhaps that helps explain soccer's enduring appeal in Europe, a
continent where the ethnic composition of the teams is nowadays
as fluid as the ethnic composition of the nations they claim to
represent.
gabfest
The Supreme Court Wrap-Up Gabfest
Listen to Slate's review of the week in politics.
By Emily Bazelon, Dahlia Lithwick, and David Plotz
Friday, June 27, 2008, at 12:13 PM ET
Listen to the Gabfest for June 27 by clicking the arrow on the
audio player below:
You can also download the program here, or you can subscribe
to the weekly Gabfest podcast feed in iTunes by clicking here.
John Dickerson is on vacation this week, but Dahlia Lithwick
stepped in to chat with David Plotz and Emily Bazelon. They
discussed the final decisions of the Supreme Court term,
campaign high jinks, and elections in Zimbabwe.
Here are links to some of the articles and other items mentioned
in the show:
Dahlia, David, and Emily discuss several recent rulings by the
U.S. Supreme Court, including decisions on the right to bear
arms, the 1989 Exxon Valdez oil spill, and the death penalty for
child-rapists.
Presumptive Democratic nominee Barack Obama spoke out
against some of the court's decisions.
Yale law professor Jack Balkin writes that Obama supports a
compromise on wiretapping legislation because he feels he may
need such a measure if he becomes president.
John McCain's adviser Charlie Black says a terrorist attack on
U.S. soil before November would help the Republican's
candidacy.
As Africa prepares for Friday's presidential run-off election in
Zimbabwe, in which opposition candidate Morgan Tsvangirai
has refused to run following increased violence against his
supporters, some are calling for military intervention in the
southern African nation.
Emily chatters about a visit to Capitol Hill by Dick Cheney aide
David Addington and former Deputy Assistant Attorney General
John Yoo. The two appeared to testify about their roles in
developing the Bush administration's interrogation policies.
Dahlia giggles over a Department of Justice inspector general's
report about the politicization of the department's summer intern
program.
Daniel Kimmage, a senior regional analyst for Radio Free
Europe, wrote an op-ed in the New York Times about al-Qaida's
failing Internet operation.
The e-mail address for the Political Gabfest is
gabfest@slate.com. (E-mail may be quoted by name unless the
writer stipulates otherwise.)
A June 18 poll by Quinnipiac University found that Obama leads
McCain in three crucial swing states: Florida, Ohio, and
Pennsylvania. Obama commands a particularly strong lead
among women.
Content analysis of the past week's news by the Project for
Excellence in Journalism finds that Obama received far more
coverage, both positive and negative, than McCain did.
Emily talks about Michelle Obama's visit to The View.
Michelle Obama thanks first lady Laura Bush for coming to her
defense over the attacks on her husband's patriotism.
McCain's first wife told British newspaper the Daily Mail that he
divorced her because he "didn't want to be 40, he wanted to be
25."
Posted by Dale Willman on June 27 at 12:00 p.m.
As gay marriage becomes legal in California, William writes
about what science has to say about the brains of gay and
straight people.
June 20, 2008
Emily chatters about the end of the Supreme Court term.
Listen to the Gabfest for June 20 by clicking the arrow on the
audio player below:
William talks about so-called pro-life pharmacies that are
refusing to fill prescriptions for any form of birth control.
John pays a final tribute to Tim Russert, who died on June 13.
You can also download the program here, or you can subscribe
to the weekly Gabfest podcast feed in iTunes by clicking here.
Emily Bazelon, John Dickerson, and special guest William
Saletan talk politics. This week, a discussion of flip-flops from
both John McCain and Barack Obama, the role of candidates'
spouses, and legalizing gay marriage.
Here are links to some of the articles and other items mentioned
in the show:
The e-mail address for the Political Gabfest is
gabfest@slate.com . (E-mail may be quoted by name unless the
writer stipulates otherwise.)
Posted by Dale Willman on June 20 at 11:08 a.m.
June 13, 2008
Listen to the Gabfest for June 13 by clicking the arrow on the
audio player below:
John opens the show with a discussion of flip-flopping by
McCain and Obama.
Emily thinks flip-flopping on domestic oil drilling is a worthless
exercise.
Obama decides not to accept campaign-matching funds. One
reason is the belief that McCain's Republican supporters are
going to use so-called 527 political groups to attack Obama, so
his campaign will need as much money as possible to counter
those hits. Perhaps the most well-known 527 group was Swift
Boat Veterans for Truth, which attacked John Kerry's Vietnam
service during the 2004 presidential campaign.
You can also download the program here, or you can subscribe
to the weekly Gabfest podcast feed in iTunes by clicking here.
Emily Bazelon, John Dickerson, and David Plotz talk politics.
This week, Obama's vice-presidential misstep, Clinton
supporters for McCain, and the Supreme Court rules on
Guantanamo—again
Here are links to some of the articles and other items mentioned
in the show:
David Plotz is Slate's new editor.
Jim Johnson, who headed Obama's vice-presidential search
committee, resigned because of a question of improper home
loans, as well as his role in providing lavish compensation
packages for CEOs while he was a member of corporate
compensation committees. David says there are lots of people
who want to be a vice-presidential candidate.
The debate continues about whether supporters of Hillary
Clinton will now vote for John McCain, and, if so, why.
The Bush administration loses another case involving detainees
at Guantanamo.
Where do Hillary and her fans go, now that Obama has clinched
the nomination?
As the political discussion turns to the vice-presidential parlor
game, observers are asking whether there could be an ObamaClinton "dream ticket."
Emily, John, and David discussed what the heck a parlor is,
anyway. None of them actually got it right.
As the Democratic presidential nominee, Obama will once again
face all the rumors surrounding his candidacy, including the
claim that he is a Muslim.
More on what LBJ brought to the ticket for John F. Kennedy.
Hanna Rosin writes about a puzzling increase in violent crime in
the nation's midsize cities in this month's Atlantic.
John chatters about the lack of transparency when it comes to the
spending programs being proposed by both Obama and McCain.
Emily recommends two books: Now the Hell Will Start, by Slate
writer Brendan I. Koerner, and The Beautiful Struggle, by TaNehisi Coates.
As John McCain and Barak Obama discuss a possible series of
town hall debates, the Gabfest lingers for a moment on the
Lincoln-Douglas debates of 1858.
Emily chatters about new findings for bed-wetters and their
sleep patterns.
David recommends the book Final Salute.
The e-mail address for the Political Gabfest is
gabfest@slate.com. (E-mail may be quoted by name unless the
writer stipulates otherwise.)
John chatters on the science of sarcasm and how it relates to
politics.
Posted by Dale Willman on June 13 at 11:55 a.m.
The e-mail address for the Political Gabfest is
gabfest@slate.com. (E-mail may be quoted by name unless the
writer stipulates otherwise.)
June 6, 2008
Posted by Dale Willman on June 6 at 12:00 p.m.
Listen to the Gabfest for June 6 by clicking the arrow on the
audio player below:
You can also download the program here, or you can subscribe
to the weekly Gabfest podcast feed in iTunes by clicking here.
May 30, 2008
Listen to the Gabfest for May 30 by clicking the arrow on the
audio player below:
Emily Bazelon, John Dickerson, and David Plotz talk politics.
This week: Obama claims a sweet victory, what's next for
Hillary, and the vice-presidential parlor game begins in earnest.
You can also download the program here, or you can subscribe
to the weekly Gabfest podcast feed in iTunes by clicking here.
Here are links to some of the articles and other items mentioned
in the show:
Emily Bazelon, John Dickerson, and David Plotz talk politics.
This week: Scott McClellan comes clean, Democratic delegates
from Michigan and Florida come knocking, and Sex and the City
comes to the big screen.
Barack Obama goes over the top, so the question becomes—now
what?
Obama moves quickly to decide what to do with Hillary now
that he has won the nomination.
Here are links to some of the articles and other items mentioned
in the show:
John's take on Scott McClellan's revelations
A Slate V video showing what McClellan said about turncoats
before he became one
Dana Stevens' review of Sex and the City
The e-mail address for the Political Gabfest is
gabfest@slate.com. (E-mail may be quoted by name unless the
writer stipulates otherwise.)
They talk about the Democrat Leadership Council's role in
establishing the party's core beliefs.
The e-mail address for the Political Gabfest is
gabfest@slate.com. (E-mail may be quoted by name unless the
writer stipulates otherwise.)
Posted at 11:20 a.m. by Dale Willman.
Posted by Andy Bowers on May 30 at 1:10 p.m.
May 23, 2008
gearbox
Listen to the Gabfest for May 23 by clicking the arrow on the
audio player below:
Get Your Motor Runnin'
If gas prices are killing you, here's a guide to thrifty motorcycles and scooters.
By Sam Whitehead
Thursday, July 3, 2008, at 6:57 AM ET
You can also download the program here, or you can subscribe
to the weekly Gabfest podcast feed in iTunes by clicking here.
Emily Bazelon, John Dickerson, and David Plotz talk politics.
This week: Speculation about vice-presidential nominees begins,
Hillary Clinton is demonized, and Sen. Edward Kennedy is
diagnosed with a brain tumor.
Here are links to some of the articles and other items mentioned
in the show:
The group owns up to a mistake in last week's podcast involving
the California Supreme Court ruling on gay marriage in that
state.
David discusses John's recent piece in Slate that likens the
Democratic race to a problem in quantum physics.
Barack Obama this week declared that he now has a majority of
the pledged delegates and is very close to winning the
Democratic nomination.
The Democratic National Committee's rules and bylaws
committee meets in Washington, D.C., at the end of the month to
discuss whether delegates from Florida and Michigan should be
seated at the national convention.
There is speculation that if Obama becomes president, he will
appoint Hillary Clinton to the Supreme Court.
Both Obama and John McCain are starting to look for running
mates.
The panel reacts to the news of Ted Kennedy's brain tumor.
There's nothing like paying upward of $5 for a gallon of gas. It's
exhilarating, like being Tasered or getting clocked in the kisser.
Seriously, if filling up your four-wheeler doesn't make you
wince, you might as well stop reading this article now. For the
rest of us, there's the brutal reality that prices at the pump are
higher than they've ever been in this country—up more than 38
percent in the last four months, according to data from the
Energy Information Administration. What can be done to ease
the pain? Ditch your cage, and get out and ride. That's what.
Yes, motorcycles, those inherently dangerous beasts that you've
either loved or loathed (or maybe both), are where it's at when it
comes to fuel efficiency. With gas prices through the roof,
Consumer Reports recently conducted a nationwide survey of
car drivers contemplating their next move. "More than one
quarter of consumers have considered giving up two wheels,"
the CR study reveals. "Among them 18 percent have
contemplated a motorcycle and 14 percent were drawn to motor
scooters." Those are staggering numbers given such a
historically marginalized, and even demonized, mode of
transport.
So, perhaps you're ready to come to the dark side. First of all,
you should get an actual motorcycle license (you'd be surprised
how many people forgo this major detail) and definitely look
into some sort of training. Sliding down the road creating sparks
or tossing your bike into the bushes is no way to treat your ride
or yourself. (Scooters, by the way, can get you in just as much
trouble as their beefier brethren.) Take a Motorcycle Safety
Foundation course or any similar program.
Anyone who's interested in bikes and has done a little research
knows that there are literally tens of makes and hundreds of
models. So, we can't cover it all here, and we're not trying to
stump for any specific bikes. What follows is an extremely broad
and completely unscientific, yet infinitely wise, guide to what
you might consider when buying a motorcycle or scooter.
Before you set foot in a dealership or comb the used-bike ads,
think about what your plans are for riding: What's your budget,
where and how often do you plan on using the machine, will you
park it on the street or in a garage, and so on.
If you're a city dweller, you'll be facing a lot of nasty obstacles,
many of them coming at you fast, within inches of you and your
sled. There's also the joy of monster pot holes, opening car
doors, oblivious pedestrians, and even-more-oblivious drivers.
The best sleds to tackle such terrain are "dual-sports," essentially
bikes meant for both on- and off-road use. They're nimble, light,
tough, and have plenty of shock travel to eat up what the mean
streets will feed you. Look into the venerable, remarkably
inexpensive, and famously fuel-efficient Kawasaki KLR 650
($5,349 MSRP) or the less-ambitious and even more fuelefficient Suzuki DR 250 ($3,949 MSRP).
Not bad for the city and perfect for the 'burbs, "cruisers" are
more laid-back in style and come in a variety of displacements,
from the ultraforgiving, featherweight Honda Rebel 250 ($3,199
MSRP) to the massive, mighty, and mad Triumph Rocket III
2500 ($14,999 MSRP). Those feeling a little sportier should
mount a "standard." Like cruisers, standards are adept rides for
the city and the 'burbs. Novices could hop on the zippy, entrylevel Buell Blast 500 ($4,695), the smallest of HarleyDavidson's answer to anything other than its famous cruisers.
Want to get a lot more aggressive? An Aprilia Tuono 1000R
($12,999 MSRP) will definitely set you straight, and could make
you tremble with fear.
Anxious to rip down the highway, terrorize country towns, and
eat up the twisties? Go with a sport bike. If a big-muscle liter
bike is your goal, then you should already know what you want
and certainly know what you're doing. No explanations needed.
Greenhorns eager to dip their toes would do well to check out
the UM V2S-250R ($3,699 MSRP) or step up a bit and tackle
the perennial favorite Kawasaki Ninja 500R ($5,099).
Consumers hoping for maximum fuel efficiency had best settle
on a scooter, currently the fastest-growing section of the
motorcycle market. In most states, any scooter above 150cc
requires a motorcycle license. Although some of these largely
automatic, step-through machines boast impressive power
plants, such as the Burgman 650 Executive ($7,799 MSRP), and
are capable of triple-digit speeds, the majority aren't that
intimidating and are incredibly easy to ride. They've also been
known to get up to 100 miles per gallon. One of the lowestpriced scooters is the TNG TS 250 ($2,495 MSRP). Shooting
big or small, you're bound to have fun and save money on a
scooter. And you can park them just about anywhere without
getting heat from the heat. Bonus!
This modest roundup barely scratches the surface of the many
motorcycles and scooters available today. But if you make your
choice carefully and with a degree of knowledge, the benefits
you stand to reap in terms of pleasure and finance are massive.
And who knows? You might even look cool in the saddle. But
maybe that's asking too much.
hey, wait a minute
Gut Instinct
What health benefits, exactly, is Activia yogurt supposed to offer?
By Lauren Sandler
Thursday, July 3, 2008, at 6:58 AM ET
In 1976, when yogurt was fast becoming a brave new trend in
the American diet, televisions lit up with a Dannon
advertisement that showed 125-year-old Soviet Georgians
slurping down the stuff. The notion of yogurt as fountain of
youth wasn't a new one: Nobelist Russian biologist Ilya Ilyich
Mechnikov believed—but never managed to prove—that yogurt
was the reason for the remarkable longevity of a tribe of
Bulgarian peasants. Thirty years after the Georgian ad, Dannon
launched a new yogurt in the United States with a perhaps more
pedestrian promise that claimed to be scientifically "proven." By
pitching itself as the cure to vaguely defined tummy troubles,
Dannon's Activia has become a billion-dollar global brand.
Activia is the leader in the probiotics craze—a fad for
microrganisms you can now find in a new Kashi cereal,
"wellness" bars, a host of competing yogurts, and the "functional
food" industry, products consumed not for traditional nutrition or
pleasure but for presumed medicinal qualities. Probiotic yogurts
recently have been alleged to ward off everything from hay fever
to secondary infection. But an appeal to digestive health seems
to be aimed specifically at women, of whom half report ailments
of the midsection and nearly 100 percent, one can surmise,
would prefer a slimming of the midsection. By targeting the
female stomach, Activia sales topped $130 million in 2006, a
very unusual success for a new food product's first year. The
following year, profits increased by 50 percent. As a very funny
video on Current TV puts it, open the refrigerator of any woman
over 40, push aside that rotisserie chicken, and there you'll see a
tidy row of green plastic yogurt containers.
Those green containers are loaded with live organisms, called
Bifidobacterium animalis in the microbiology world, that were
renamed and trademarked Bifidus regularis by Dannon.
Probiotics are what's known as "beneficial bacteria," which, if
carried in the intestinal tract in significant amounts, are thought
to ease some digestive concerns. Which concerns Dannon
intends Activia to address are left intentionally vague. In their
$100 million ad campaign, when Jamie Lee Curtis rubs her
tummy and refers to occasional irregularity, you may think she's
just being polite. After all, nobody wants to be explicit about the
specifics of waste elimination when pitching food.
But is Ms. Curtis referring to excessive or inadequate, um,
passage? Dannon issued a press release about a poll on digestion
in conjunction with the product's U.S. launch that tried to
ascertain America's most "backed up" cities—"Orlando is at a
standstill, and we're not talking traffic"—suggesting that
constipation is the scourge that dare not speak its name. And,
indeed, the Activia Web site says that the product "helps to
regulate your slow intestinal transit."
There are two curious aspects to this clam. First of all, Dannon
has to be careful about using the C-word. The FDA classifies
constipation as a disease, and any product that claims to treat a
disease must carry an FDA-approved health claim. Activia does
not. But what's stranger is that probiotics are usually used to
treat diarrhea—that's why they are often prescribed to travelers
journeying to don't-drink-the-water destinations.
The studies Dannon cites on its Web site point toward Irritable
Bowel Syndrome, or IBS, which to some has become a catchall
for digestive issues, in part because it clinically encompasses
both constipation and diarrhea. Up to 75 percent of people
diagnosed with IBS are women (though, as the Department of
Health and Human Services says on its Web site, it hasn't been
proved that IBS affects women in greater numbers than men; "it
may be that women are more likely to talk to their doctors about
their symptoms"). With this new female trouble has come a vast
marketing demographic eagerly filling their shopping baskets
with the hope of vanilla-flavored cures.
As Consumerlab.com's Tod Cooperman points out, even the
study that Dannon's Web site cites as validation says the clinical
relevance is open to discussion. "It just hasn't been shown that
that's a clinical benefit," says Cooperman, whose group has
studied the effect of probiotics. Four additional studies concur.
Larry Bergstrom, staff consultant at the Mayo Clinic, says that
isn't necessarily a reason to dismiss the possibility that Activia
can help alleviate IBS. He has found that people describe feeling
worse after the first week eating Activia, and then better after the
second week. (That's presumably why the product launched with
a "two week challenge.") That's hardly a clinical study, to be
sure. But he says that it's tough to assess IBS empirically, since
studies (so far) can only assess symptoms, and symptoms are
harder to read conclusively.
If you dig a little, Dannon seems aware that the studies it
adduces to support Activia's effectiveness are inconclusive.
After all, the company funded a study by the American Society
of Microbiologists that concluded, "[A]t present, the quality of
probiotics available to consumers in food products around the
world is unreliable." (Dannon's spokesman Michael Neuwirth
told me, "It's not a scientific study.") The ASM report plays a
prominent role in a class-action suit a California woman has
brought against Dannon; the suit demands refunds for everyone
who has paid for the yogurt, which is sold at a 30 percent
inflated price for its "proven" medical promises.
This isn't the first time the company has been accused of
deceptive advertising. Last year, the U.K. Advertising Standards
Authority told Danone (as the French-owned company is called
in Europe) to pull ads for their probiotic yogurt Actimel that say,
"Actimel is scientifically proven, and you can see that proof for
yourself on our Web site." The Actimel Web site reads: "The
disclosure of these studies is restricted to Health Care
Professionals not the general public." And in 2006, the same
agency put the kibosh on Actimel ads that implied the yogurt
could help prevent children from catching bacterial infections.
Though Activia's ad copy in the United States refers to
"occasional irregularity," its animated imagery of a bronzed,
washboard-flat, tiny-waisted stomach with a canary-yellow
arrow pointing down (er, out) suggests a different promise, says
Jean Kilbourne, author of Killing Us Softly: Advertising's Image
of Women. "I see that as a weight loss implication," she tells me.
"It's meant to evoke the idea, 'This is the kind of tummy you can
end up with.' The arrow is code for 'This will go right through
you.' It's a dieting subtheme that plays on the whole idea of
women being much more focused to do whatever it takes to
make our bodies feel thin."
Indeed, outside the United States, Activia/Actimel is often
associated with weight loss. A friend of mine recently back from
living in Moscow says Activia—along with tomato juice and
cigarettes—comprises what she calls the "oligarch's wife's diet."
In Europe, where Activia ads are ubiquitous, you won't see
AARP cover model Jamie Lee Curtis as a pitchwoman but,
rather, a parade of skinny twentysomethings in tight jeans and
cinched bathrobes—it's no secret that younger women are
looking to the yogurt to help them be more effective at the bar
than in the bathroom.
Yoplait yogurt—another billion-dollar brand—has done its own
research into yogurt and weight loss. The company suggests that
the miracle food yields a lower body-mass index and has been
selling Yoplait on a thinner-you premise in its ads, referring to
nothing more "proven" than the fact that replacing actual Boston
cream pie with Boston-cream-pie-flavored yogurt can result in a
very confused seamstress taking in your chinos.
By comparison, even with tons of men's weight-loss products
now on the market, one sees very few yogurt pitches to men.
Jeremy Nicholson, who holds the chair in biological chemistry at
Imperial College in London, says "there's no real reason for
thinking that there is a big sex difference" in yogurt's health
benefits and can see no discrepancy "other than possibly for
marketing reasons." Dannon says it's never targeted anyone but
women, going all the way back to that 1976 ad with the longlived Georgians. Dannon's Michael Neuwirth says the company's
strategy is motivated by the idea that women tend to do
household grocery shopping. But following that logic, all food
would be swathed in feminine mystique, and it's not.
And for all Activia's gynocentric marketing, I'm amazed my
father and husband ever get near the stuff, which they do most
every morning. But they eat Activia for the reason I do: not for
its "regularis" properties but for its taste. After all, some of us
actually choose what we eat not just to self-medicate, or to fit
into a bridesmaid dress, or to indulge in a solitary escape. For
some of us, countering our hunger with pleasure is promise
enough. And you don't need a microbiologist or the FDA to
explain creamy, vanilla satisfaction.
history lesson
Waving the Flag
How the "patriotism" debate might actually help Obama.
By David Greenberg
Thursday, July 3, 2008, at 11:09 AM ET
From: David Greenberg
Subject: How the Republicans Claimed the "Patriotism" Mantle in Presidential
Politics
Posted Wednesday, July 2, 2008, at 1:46 PM ET
The 1988 race for the White House was the last campaign of the
Cold War. By the time Massachusetts Gov. Michael Dukakis
and Vice President George H.W. Bush emerged in midspring as
their parties' nominees, Mikhail Gorbachev had begun his
historic reforms, and the superpowers had signed a landmark
arms-reduction deal. Still, the Berlin Wall and the Soviet Union
remained intact, and the Democrats remained afraid of being
tarred as squishy-soft. So when the Republicans met in New
Orleans in August for their convention, with Dukakis far ahead
in the polls, they set out—in the manner of many previous GOP
campaigns—to paint their adversary as weak on defense and
suspect in his devotion to country.
Weeks earlier, the Democrats had decorated their convention
stage in soft colors— salmon, eggshell, and powder blue—for
more affecting TV visuals. Seizing on this departure from the
classic red-white-and-blue décor, the Republican keynote
speaker, Gov. Tom Kean of New Jersey, mocked the Democrats'
"pastel patriotism," insisting that it meant they would "weaken
America." Bush, for his part, attacked what he called Dukakis'
view of the United States as just "another pleasant country on the
U.N. roll call, somewhere between Albania and Zimbabwe." He
then led the assembled in the Pledge of Allegiance—a pointed
contrast to an ancient Greek oath that Dukakis had included in
his own nomination speech and an invidious reference to
Dukakis' veto of a mandatory Pledge of Allegiance bill many
years before.
Perhaps the harshest speech of the convention came on the first
night. In a prime-time address, a rising young star in the GOP
spoke about an old friend, a U.S. prisoner of war in Vietnam,
beaten by his captors for crafting a small American flag
"because he knew how important it was for us to be able to
pledge allegiance." Concluding his remarks, John S. McCain III,
first-term senator from Arizona, solemnly intoned the words
"duty, honor, country."
The attacks on Dukakis—which tapped into nativist fears about
his swarthy, beetle-browed looks, his ethnic last name, and his
Jewish wife—stand alongside the Willie Horton ads from that
year as prime exhibits in one of the sleaziest campaigns in
presidential history. And this year we've already heard echoes of
it, with the Republicans casting Barack Obama as unAmerican—an exotic foreigner raised partly in Indonesia with a
Muslim middle name, married to a woman who said that only
her husband's political achievements have made her "proud" of
her country, a cosmopolitan elitist too snooty to wear a flag pin
in his lapel or clasp his hand to his breast during the national
anthem.
If Obama's patriotism sometimes needs explaining—and he
explained it in Independence, Mo., this week—McCain's is
uncomplicated. A decorated veteran, he earns praise from
Obama as "a genuine war hero." Even his determination to see
the war in Iraq through to the end comes across as principled—
proof that his calls to put country first originate in the heart.
(And his attacks on Dukakis give pause to those who would
otherwise trust his pledge to run a clean campaign.) Many
Republicans have voiced hopes that the issue will save McCain's
foundering campaign—and this week's ginned-up controversy
over Wesley Clark's perfectly reasonable remarks about McCain
suggests they might.
Patriotism is justifiably a perennial election issue. Never fixed
by a single definition, it has always been subject to debate. And
presidential contests are referendums about national identity.
This year both candidates have just put their names to short
essays in Time explaining what love of country means to them.
McCain's described a familiar, traditional patriotism. He stressed
military service and other forms of sacrifice to "protect the ideals
that gave birth to our country: to stand against injustice and for
the rights of all and not just one's own interests." Though his
essay paid lip service to Americans' differences, it emphasized
"the duties, the loyalties, the inspirations and the habits of mind
that bind us together as Americans."
Obama's essay focused less on responsibilities than on rights. It
celebrated "the idea … that we can say what we think, write
what we think, without hearing a sudden knock on the door …
that we can participate in the political process without fear of
retribution." More than McCain's, his contribution dwelled on
the value of America's diversity—"We are a nation of strong and
varied convictions and beliefs. We argue and debate our
differences vigorously and often"—even as he suggested that
those differences exist within a context of shared underlying
values.
Reagan's call for an "unambivalent" national pride is one quality
that makes him a hero to McCain and others who see any
denigration of the United States (at least from the left) as antiAmericanism. This intolerance of self-criticism has often
prevented liberals from sharing in Reagan's patriotism. Instead,
liberals have typically hearkened to ideas like those of Adlai
Stevenson, the Democratic standard-bearer of the 1950s and a
beau ideal of many on the left.
Each essay, it so happens, falls within a tradition embodied by
its author's party. Since the end of World War II, the
conservative version of patriotism that the Republicans have
championed has rested upon a steadfast protectiveness of
American values in the face of enemies—proven through a
muscular, nationalistic military posture. Impatient with critical
perspectives, conservative patriotism advocates an unhesitant
participation in collective rituals like waving the flag, saying the
Pledge of Allegiance, and even public prayer. McCain, who is
fluent with words like valor and sacrifice, firmly belongs to this
tradition.
Stevenson assumed leadership of the Democratic Party at a time
when patriotism politics had turned ugly. Loyalty oaths were
proliferating, as were mandatory recitations of the Pledge of
Allegiance—newly tricked out with the phrase under God, to set
America apart from the godless Soviets. Stevenson inspired
liberals by bravely defying the culture of conformity. In a speech
to the American Legion during the 1952 campaign, he said that
"patriotism with us is not the hatred of Russia; it is the love of
this republic and of the ideal of liberty of man and mind." "True
patriotism," he insisted, was "based on tolerance and a large
measure of humility," on respecting dissenting speech in the
service of collective improvement.
Postwar liberalism has defined love of country differently. It
calls for candidly identifying what's wrong with America in
order to improve it. It tends to regard collective gestures like the
Pledge of Allegiance as hollow, tokenistic, and even potentially
coercive—and thus antithetical to the individualism that lets free
thought flourish. To conservative patriotism's semper fidelis,
liberal patriotism counters with e pluribus unum.
Before examining how these two patriotisms have played out in
presidential politics (which I'll do in Part 2 of this piece
tomorrow), it's worth looking at two speeches by two postwar
political titans—one representative of postwar liberalism, one of
postwar conservatism—that epitomize these worldviews.
No speech has better expressed the conservative patriotism than
Ronald Reagan's televised farewell from the Oval Office.
Reagan was elected in 1980 to vanquish what his predecessor
Jimmy Carter had called a "crisis of spirit." As president, he
bolstered the armed forces and talked tough to the Russians—
and spoke sentimentally about the flag and the pledge at every
opportunity. As he reviewed his two terms in January 1989, the
president boasted of having "rebuilt our defenses," faced down
the Soviet Union, and won the peace. Renewed strength, he
argued, had led to the "the resurgence of national pride that I
called the new patriotism, … one of the things I'm proudest of in
the past eight years." But Reagan also cautioned his audience
that relativism and self-criticism still endangered this revived
morale. "Younger parents aren't sure that an unambivalent
appreciation of America is the right thing to teach modern
children," he fretted, calling for a return to a time when "we
absorbed, almost in the air, a love of country and an appreciation
of its institutions"—suggesting, in passing, that those two things
were the same.
When Obama declared last fall, using Stevenson's phrase, that
"true patriotism" consists not of wearing lapel pins but rather of
"speaking out on issues [including those] that are of importance
to our national security," he joined a long line of Democrats who
have echoed the governor's noble words. (When Bush taunted
Dukakis—"What is it about the Pledge of Allegiance that upsets
him so much?"—Dukakis replied thoughtfully and admirably: "I
don't know what some people see when they look at that flag,
but I know what I see. I see a quarter of a billion faces, of all
ages and all colors and all shapes and all sizes … for all of our
diversity, we are one nation, one people, one community.")
The merit of Stevenson's patriotism is hard to deny. But for more
than a half-century, it has usually proven too high-minded, or
too subtle, to be readily grasped or widely appreciated amid the
fast pace and heavy pressure of a presidential race. As I'll try to
show in the second part of this essay tomorrow, it is Reagan's
patriotism—muscular, militaristic, uncritical—that has more
often carried the day.
From: David Greenberg
Subject: How the "Patriotism" Debate Might Actually Help Obama
Posted Thursday, July 3, 2008, at 11:09 AM ET
John McCain isn't a scoundrel, but in a presidential race in
which he now trails Barack Obama, patriotism is shaping up as
his last refuge. Given McCain's image as a man who has
sacrificed for country, and given Obama's still-inflammatory
flag-pin remarks and similar pseudo-controversies, the
Republicans' best bet for victory now seems to be to revive an
old Cold War (and post-9/11) pattern: running on what I called,
in the first part of this piece, a "Reaganite" patriotism—military
strength and an uncritical celebration of national symbols—
while forcing the Democrats to defend a "Stevensonian" version
that vainly stresses freedom of thought and conscience. This
week's pseudo-controversy over Wesley Clark's remarks about
McCain's experience in making national-security decisions
indicates that the old GOP playbook is already being dusted off.
It's hard to remember a time when the Republicans didn't own
the patriotism issue. You have to go back to the 1930s and '40s,
when Franklin Delano Roosevelt captured the flag on behalf of
fighting poverty and defeating fascism, to find the Democrats in
command. Back then it was the isolationists—mostly
Republicans—who suffered sidewise glances and charges of
faithlessness.
But the Cold War turned the tables. A nuclear Russia and a Red
China fueled charges that the Democrats, despite Harry
Truman's staunch anti-communism, were lax in defending the
American Way. The mood grew suspicious. "Un-American"
became the feared epithet.
In 1952, Dwight Eisenhower, who owed his presidential
candidacy to his battlefield heroics, never stooped to impugning
Adlai Stevenson's patriotism. But he didn't have to. Richard
Nixon, his running mate, derided "Adlai the appeaser ... who got
a Ph.D. from Dean Acheson's College of Cowardly Communist
Containment," while Ike smiled placidly. Stevenson, in his
speech to the American Legion, countered that "to strike the
freedom of the mind with the fist of patriotism is an old and ugly
subtlety." But the subtlety was all Stevenson's. Voters chose Ike
in a landslide, twice.
If the Republicans grabbed the patriotism issue in the 1950s, the
Democrats ceded it in the 1960s. As Vietnam and generational
change split the country, younger liberals came to regard flagwaving and pledge-recitation—like military service—as
emblems of enforced conformity. Teachers sued school systems
to abstain from saying the pledge. Radicals torched Old Glory to
protest an unjust war waged in America's name. Most liberals, to
be sure, abjured such gestures. But they defended their
countrymen's right to engage in them—rooting their own
patriotism in the right to dissent.
When Main Street Americans grew angry at the left's
irreverence, Nixon, returning in 1968, rode the backlash to the
White House. In November 1969, he applauded the "Great Silent
Majority" of Americans who backed his Vietnam policy; soon
after, he gave out flag lapel pins for his staff to wear—the better
to needle liberals who found such displays jingoistic. Calls to
support the troops and uphold the nation's honor permeated
Republican speeches. "America: Love it or leave it" bumper
stickers adorned cars and trucks. Liberals, bridling at Nixon's
exploitation of national symbols, increasingly found it hard to
join in acts of old-fashioned patriotism. Simply to speak of love
of country could sound divisive.
Claims of patriotism dominated Nixon's 1972 re-election bid.
Early on, his aide H.R. Haldeman accused Edmund Muskie, then
the Democratic front-runner, of "consciously aiding and abetting
the enemy" in Vietnam, even as the president insisted that he
wasn't doubting Muskie's loyalty. When the Democrats
ultimately nominated George McGovern on a "Come Home,
America" plank, the game was over. Though McGovern had
flown bombing raids in World War II and honorably served in
government, he shared the left's unease with brash nationalistic
displays. For the candidate and his aides, wrote campaign
chronicler Theodore H. White, " 'patriotism' was a code word for
intolerance, war, deception." Republicans exploited the
Democrats' squeamishness with Nixon's straight-up patriotism,
charging in their platform that McGovern was "bemused with
surrender," his plan for withdrawal "an act of betrayal." Nixon
crushed him.
Reagan soon burnished the patriotism issue to a high gloss. To
temper his warmonger image, Reagan had learned to utter
treacly words—"I always get a chill up and down my spine when
I say that Pledge of Allegiance"—that would have sounded
impossibly hokey coming from Nixon. But, like Nixon, he
grounded his patriotism in a foreign policy of standing up to
communism. Reagan's 1983 invasion of Grenada to depose a
left-wing government provided a perfect occasion to brandish
national pride—a mini-Vietnam that ended in victory. At a highspirited ceremony on the White House South Lawn, replete with
fluttering flags and the Marine Corps band, the president
welcomed home the medical students who'd been on the island
nation, declaring, "What you saw 10 days ago was called
patriotism."
Reagan's 1984 re-election campaign showcased his soft-sell
patriotism. During a summer when the nation's athletes
triumphed at the Los Angeles Olympics to chants of "U.S.A!
U.S.A!" (with no Soviet competition present), Madison Avenue's
top talent set out not to defend the president's policies but to
conjure up warm feelings about the country. Their "Morning
Again in America" ad stitched together sumptuous images of
Americana, from a tractor tilling a field to a sunlit San Francisco
Bay. The goal wasn't to demonize former Vice President Walter
Mondale, the Democratic nominee, but, as campaign aide
Richard Darman wrote, to "paint RR as the personification of all
that is right with, or heroized by, America. Leave Mondale in a
position where an attack on Reagan is tantamount to an attack on
America's idealized image of itself—where a vote against
Reagan is, in some subliminal sense, a vote against a mythic
'America.' "
Mondale avoided defilement because he never posed a strong
threat to Reagan's re-election; in 1988, Michael Dukakis wasn't
so lucky (as I recalled in Part 1 of this piece). But the Cold War's
end offered Democrats a reprieve. George H.W. Bush lambasted
Bill Clinton in 1992 for having visited Moscow as a student and
having protested the Vietnam War "on foreign soil," but the
imputations of disloyalty rang hollow. Communism had
collapsed, and voters cared more about the tanking economy.
Once elected, Clinton made strides toward defusing the
patriotism issue for his party, reminding self-proclaimed
"patriots" like Timothy McVeigh, the Oklahoma City bomber,
that "[y]ou can't say you love your country and hate your
government." Still, when the Republicans pushed a
constitutional amendment to ban flag-burning, Clinton's
triangulated response exposed a continuing unease: While
opposing the amendment, he touted a flag-burning law he had
signed as governor of Arkansas, offering the cryptic sentiment
that he wanted to "stop flag-burning before it starts."
The speed with which Sept. 11 revived the old Cold War
dynamics remains harrowing. Despite a brief hiatus when
patriotism knew no party, the airwaves were soon bristling with
accusations of disloyalty and angry feelings over flag displays.
The 2002 and 2004 Republican campaigns cynically fused
patriotism to a hawkish security policy and the righteous
exhibition of symbols. Not even John Kerry's wartime valor was
bulletproof, as Swift Boat Veterans for Truth demonstrated. That
Bush, who had spent his Vietnam years in the Air National
Guard, suffered far less obloquy confirmed that the GOP still
owned the patriotism issue.
Given this history, it's easy to imagine Obama getting the full
Dukakis treatment. Although McCain spoke out against the
Swift Boaters in 2004, his behavior in 1988 was far less
honorable. Surely, his surrogates will resurrect slighting
questions about Obama's failure to put his hand on his heart
during the national anthem, Jeremiah Wright's "God damn
America" remark, and all the other kindred trivia. Like Dukakis,
he'll be portrayed as exotic, alien; as with Kerry, his antiwar
posture will be assailed as surrender.
But most Americans are now much less worried about terrorism
than they were four years ago, and 2008 may turn out like 1992,
when economic distress and Bush fatigue neutered the usual
patriotism tricks. Unhappiness with the second George Bush and
pocketbook woes could also mean that McCain's vision of
patriotism isn't so much repudiated as admired respectfully from
a distance—like a World War II Army kit in the Smithsonian
Institution. Obama may reach the White House not because of
his view of patriotism but despite it.
There's a third possibility, too: that patriotism may, finally, help
the Democrats. Although Dukakis got only limited traction from
his son-of-immigrants narrative, Obama has leveraged his status
as the nation's first viable black presidential candidate to great
advantage. He has effectively equated the national improvement
that Stevensonian patriotism has always sought with his own
election to the White House. As Obama wrote in Time last week,
"this essential American ideal—that our destinies are not written
before we are born—has defined my life. And it is the source of
my profound love for this country: because with a mother from
Kansas and a father from Kenya, I know that stories like mine
could only happen in America." Even McCain has taken to
calling him "a great American success story."
In running—and winning—Obama seems to embody America's
admirable ability to overcome racism. Reagan's handlers framed
the 1984 race so that a vote for Mondale was a vote against a
mythic America. Obama's strategists have put in place a frame in
which voting against him means rejecting a vision of an America
where a black man can become president. Once a tough sell, this
idea is gaining power as the election draws nearer. Still, Obama
isn't taking any chances. In the last couple of months he has
begun sporting a familiar symbol in the superior corner of his
left lapel: a tiny American flag.
human nature
Animal-Rights Farm
Ape rights and the myth of animal equality.
By William Saletan
Tuesday, July 1, 2008, at 7:52 AM ET
Should apes be treated like people?
Under a resolution headed for passage in the Spanish parliament,
respecting the personal rights of "our non-human brothers" won't
just be a good idea. It'll be the law.
The resolution, approved last week by a parliamentary
committee with broad support, urges the government to
implement the agenda of the Great Ape Project, an organization
whose founding declaration says apes "may not be killed" or
"arbitrarily deprived of their liberty." No more routine
confinement. According to Reuters, the proposal would commit
the government to ending involuntary use of apes in circuses,
TV ads, and dangerous experiments.
Proponents hail the resolution as the first crack in the "species
barrier." Peter Singer, the philosopher who co-founded GAP,
puts it this way: "There is no sound moral reason why
possession of basic rights should be limited to members of a
particular species." If aliens or monkeys are shown to have
moral or intellectual abilities similar to ours, we should treat
them like people.
He's right. To borrow Martin Luther King's rule, you should be
judged by what's inside you, not by what's on the surface.
Can apes talk? Slate V investigates:
If the idea of treating chimps like people freaks you out, join the
club. Creationists have been fighting this battle for a long time.
They realized long ago that evolution threatened humanity's
special status. Maybe you thought all this evolution stuff was
just about the past. Surprise! Once you've admitted chimps are
your relatives, you have to think about treating them that way.
That's why, when the Spanish proposal won approval last week,
GAP's leader in Spain called it a victory for "our evolutionary
comrades."
Opponents view the resolution as egalitarian extremism. Spain's
conservative party frets that it would grant animals the same
rights as people. Spanish newspapers and citizens complain that
ape rights are distracting lawmakers from human problems.
Wesley Smith, my favorite anti-animal-rights blogger, sees the
resolution as the first step in a campaign to "elevate all mammals
to moral equality with humans." Ultimately, Smith warns,
"Animal rights activists believe a rat, is a pig, is a dog, is a boy."
You can certainly find that theme in some quarters. GAP calls
humans, chimps, bonobos, gorillas, and orangutans "members of
the community of equals," and Singer holds out the possibility
that GAP "may pave the way for the extension of rights to all
primates, or all mammals, or all animals." But the arguments
GAP has deployed in Spain don't advance the idea of equality
among animals. They destroy it.
GAP is scientifically honest. And science doesn't show mental
parity between great apes and human adults. What it shows, as
the group's president acknowledges, is that great apes
"experience an emotional and intellectual conscience similar to
that of human children." Accordingly, the Spanish proposal
doesn't treat apes like you or me. It treats them like "humans of
limited capacity, such as children or those who are mentally
incompetent and are afforded guardians or caretakers to
represent their interests."
And that's just the top rung of the inequality ladder. GAP's
mission statement says great apes are entitled to rights based on
their "morally significant characteristics." It says they
enjoy a rich emotional and cultural existence
in which they experience emotions such as
fear, anxiety and happiness. They share the
intellectual capacity to create and use tools,
learn and teach other languages. They
remember their past and plan for their future.
It is in recognition of these and other morally
significant qualities that the Great Ape Project
was founded.
Morally significant qualities. Morally significant characteristics.
These are appeals to discrimination, not universal equality. Most
animals don't have a rich cultural life. They can't make tools.
They don't teach languages. Singer even points out that
"chimpanzees, bonobos and gorillas have long-term
relationships, not only between mothers and children, but also
between unrelated apes." Special rights for animals in committed
relationships! It sounds like a Moral Majority for vegans.
Opening your mind to science-based animal rights doesn't
eliminate inequality. It just makes the inequality more scientific.
A rat can't match a pig, much less a boy. In fact, as a GAP board
member points out, "We are closer genetically to a chimp than a
mouse is to a rat."
George Orwell wrote the cruel finale to this tale 63 years ago in
Animal Farm: "All animals are equal. But some animals are
more equal than others." That wasn't how the egalitarian uprising
in the book was supposed to turn out. It wasn't how the animal
rights movement was supposed to turn out, either.
human nature
Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Orgy
Sexual hypocrisy and the Internet.
By William Saletan
Friday, June 27, 2008, at 8:06 AM ET
Which are your sexual morals: the ones you preach in public, or
the ones you practice in private?
Thanks to Internet search monitoring, we can now investigate
private morals. If we can't do it household by household, we can
do it community by community. This has a direct bearing on
obscenity law. It's turning hypocrisy into a verifiable legal issue.
A case scheduled for trial next week shows how. The defendant
is accused of purveying obscene material from a Florida Web
site. To be judged obscene, the material has to be found patently
offensive or prurient by "contemporary community standards."
According to Matt Richtel of the New York Times, the defense
attorney in the case, Lawrence Walters, will use Google Trends
to argue that the community's standards are lower than
advertised. Walters "plans to show that residents of Pensacola
are more likely to use Google to search for terms like 'orgy' than
for 'apple pie' or 'watermelon,'" Richtel reports. (Evidence here.)
The point is "to demonstrate that interest in the sexual subjects
exceeds that of more mainstream topics—and that by extension,
the sexual material distributed by his client is not outside the
norm."
It's a clever argument. But it assumes that morality is what
people do, not what they say. "Time and time again you'll have
jurors sitting on a jury panel who will condemn material that
they routinely consume in private," Walters tells the Times.
Thanks to Google, "we can show how people really think and
feel and act in their own homes."
The prosecutor in the case rejects this definition of morality.
According to Richtel, he thinks online searches are "not
necessarily an indication of, or proxy for, a community's values."
In the prosecutor's words, "How many times you do something
doesn't necessarily speak to standards and values."
That's a fair point, too. We're all hypocrites. We want our kids to
avoid the mistakes we've made and to become better people than
we are. We also want improvement from ourselves. Morality's
purpose is to prescribe, not describe. It aspires to something
better than our current behavior.
Human reality is complicated. There's no single you. There's the
you that searches Google for "orgy," and then there's the you
that condemns Eliot Spitzer. You don't want adultery and
prostitution overrunning your community, even if you like to
look at them online.
Does he make friends? Does he pick up the phone? From a
culture and policy standpoint, it's sensible to worry that one kind
of activity will lead to another. In some cases, that may be a
good argument for surveillance. But for prosecution?
Here's my advice to the courts: The Internet has fundamentally
altered the meaning of community. The guy in Pensacola visits
international Web sites and belongs to interstate online forums.
He lives in multiple communities and follows different standards
in each. Maybe he says things in forums that he'd never do in the
flesh. Maybe he looks at pictures of things he'd never talk about
in forums. Maybe he imagines things in his head that he'd never
look for in pictures.
Respect these differences. Don't equate fake child pornography
with the actual use of children. Don't condemn a judge for
"unacceptable behavior" because somebody peeked into his
family's file share and found a few dirty pictures. And don't
judge a porn site operator by the open-air standards of his
geographic community. That's not where he peddles his smut.
He peddles it online, where the standards, as we now know from
Google, are different.
jurisprudence
Telling Doctors What To Think
That's why the Florida case is more than a titillating gimmick.
It's an early attempt to think through human duality in the age of
the Internet. In the old days, there was a private you that lived in
your head, a semi-private you that lived in your house, and a
public you that lived in your community. You could commit
adultery in your fantasies, try bondage with your spouse in the
bedroom, and sing about purity in church. The Internet has
confused these distinctions. Now the private you can sneak
around the semi-private you and become semi-public. (I doubt
those folks in Pensacola have talked to their spouses about
orgies.) Your fantasies are no longer confined to your head.
They're visible, in the aggregate, on Google Trends.
Which is the real you? Two years ago, when Rep. Mark Foley
(also of Florida—what's with that state?) was forced out of
Congress for soliciting teenage boys online, I argued against
prosecuting cybersex as though it were "the real thing." Now I
think reality is a bit more complicated. The online world has its
own kind of reality, somewhere between private and public.
Typing "orgy" into a search engine is less than doing. But it's
more than thinking.
The various levels of activity—the various versions of you—are
connected. Picture the guy in Pensacola typing "orgy." What's
his next step? Does he click on one of the sites that come up?
Does he touch himself? Does he find a forum and start chatting?
South Dakota's unbelievable new abortion law.
By Emily Bazelon
Wednesday, July 2, 2008, at 6:43 PM ET
In 2005, South Dakota passed an unprecedented abortion law.
The statute purports to be about ensuring that patients give
informed consent. Planned Parenthood characterizes it
differently: as an intrusion on the doctor-patient relationship,
forcing doctors to give inaccurate medical facts and to be the
state's ideological mouthpiece. Now, following a ruling by the
U.S. Court of Appeals for the 8th Circuit, the law is about to go
into effect for the first time. And the question is how it will
change the experience of going to get an abortion—and whether
it will open a new front in the abortion wars by encouraging
other states to follow suit.
The South Dakota law requires doctors to give patients who
come for an abortion a written statement telling them that "the
abortion will terminate the life of a whole, separate, unique,
living human being," and that they have "an existing relationship
with that unborn human being" that is constitutionally protected.
(What does the constitutionally protected part mean? Who
knows.) In addition, doctors are ordered to describe "all known
medical risks of the procedure and statistically significant risk
factors," including "depression and related psychological
distress" and "increased risk of suicide ideation and suicide."
The idea behind the statute is that if you force women to
confront the implications of an abortion, they'll be less likely to
go through with it. That's what the "whole, separate, unique,
living human being" language is about. In Roe v. Wade, the
Supreme Court ruled that a fetus is not a person, in the legal
sense of the word, which is to say it doesn't have the same rights.
So South Dakota couldn't order doctors to tell women that to
have an abortion is to kill a person. But human being is a
different term that's up for grabs, the drafters of the legislation
decided.
This was the insight of a smart New Jersey lawyer named Harold
Cassidy, who has represented women who've accused abortion
providers of malpractice, and who helped draft South Dakota's
statute. Cassidy also helped persuade state lawmakers that
women might be scared out of having abortions if doctors were
forced to enumerate the procedure's medical risks. This is where
the idea of linking abortion to depression and increased risk of
suicide comes in. Never mind that the weight of the medical
evidence tilts heavily against the increased-suicide tie or that
there's more evidence of a link between depression and
unintended pregnancy—or simply giving birth—than between
depression and abortion, according to most of the literature.
If you care about doctors' freedom of speech, or their
responsibility to give accurate information to patients, the South
Dakota statute looks pretty alarming. And yet by a vote of seven
judges to four, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 8 th Circuit
managed to weave its way around these concerns last week.
After sitting on the case for more than a year, the court
instructed abortion clinics (actually, clinic, since there's only one
in South Dakota) to put the law into effect in mid-July.
In a majority opinion by Judge Raymond Gruender, the court
ruled only on the "human being" part of the statute—a challenge
to the suicide provision is still pending before a lower court.
(Planned Parenthood decided it could live with the depression
provision because the law doesn't claim that abortion increases
that risk.) Planned Parenthood argued that the state is legislating
morality because to call a fetus a "whole, separate, unique, living
human being" is an ideological statement, not a medical one.
The Supreme Court has told the states that it's not for them to
resolve when life begins—and it should certainly follow from
this that they can't force any such resolution on doctors. As the
8th Circuit dissent by Judge Diana Murphy points out, the
question "in some sense encompass[es] the whole philosophical
debate about abortion."
But none of this swayed the majority. They bought the state's
argument that the statute circumvents ideology by defining
"human being," elsewhere in the statute, as "an individual living
member of the species Homo sapiens, including the unborn
human being during the entire embryonic and fetal ages from
fertilization to full gestation." Presto, said the majority—with
that definition, the "truthfulness and relevance" of the provision
"generates little dispute." Yes, this logic is as tautological as it
sounds. The legislature basically defined "human being" to
include unborn human beings.
The idea that a fetus is whole and separate will probably be news
to a lot of women who have carried one. But what's more
distressing, because the majority's reasoning is so strained, is the
assertion that by defining a phrase one way, a state can erase its
ambiguity and the variety of perceptions people bring to it. It's
one thing to say—as the case law the majority relies on here
does—that a statutory definition binds judges and their
interpretation of language. It's another entirely to say that when
doctors tell women they are carrying a human being, that women
will think, Oh, right, that means only the long, convoluted thing
that the state says it does. Most patients won't think that, because
they won't necessarily define "human being" the way the statute
does. As Yale law professor Robert Post says in a 2007 article
(PDF) in the University of Illinois Law Review, "If South Dakota
were to enact a statute requiring physicians to inform abortion
patients that they were destroying the 'soul' of their unborn
progeny, and if it were explicitly to provide in the statute that
'soul' is defined as 'human DNA,' the evasion would be obvious."
Instead, South Dakota has co-opted human being and attached
its own meaning to it.
The 8th Circuit's decision to uphold the South Dakota law, even
though it compels doctors to say things they don't believe, is in
part the fault of Justice Anthony Kennedy. In his 2007 decision
banning a method of late-term abortion, Kennedy worried a lot
about women who regret having abortions. With paternalistic
abandon, he wrote about their "distress" in terms of their "lack of
information" about abortion. Kennedy was talking, in graphic
specifics, about lack of information on the way a so-called
partial-birth abortion unfolds. Whether or not he's right, these
details have nothing to do with philosophical musings about
whether the fetus is a human being. But that didn't stop the 8th
Circuit from quoting him at length in the very different context
of the South Dakota law.
The fraught claim that abortion harms women, which I've
written about before, was languishing in legal Nowheresville
until Kennedy unexpectedly raised it up and blessed it. Now that
notion, and the small minority of women who attest to it, are a
handy new tool for abortion opponents. The 8 th Circuit includes
six other states—Arkansas, Iowa, Minnesota, Missouri,
Nebraska, and North Dakota. Laws that compel doctors' speech,
as this one does, would now be legal in all those places, should
state legislators adopt them. And if states in other regions want
to try passing such laws, they'll have a great precedent to cite to
the other circuit courts.
In the meantime, Planned Parenthood's lawyers and the state's
lone abortion clinic in Sioux Falls have two more weeks to
figure out what its doctors can legally and ethically say to the
women they treat. "Our doctors are now being asked to say
things they do not believe are true," says Sarah Stoesz, the head
of Planned Parenthood in South Dakota, North Dakota, and
Minnesota. Whatever you think about abortion, how is that a
good thing?
cheating louse for humiliating her that she opposed efforts by
both Cook and her children's attorney to close the trial to the
media. So starting this morning, Sailor, age 10 today, and Jack,
age 13, whom Cook adopted, can tune in with the rest of us to
testimony from their daddy's 21-year-old ex-mistress as well as
the "fitness model" with whom he took up after ditching their
mommy, as well as 42 other helpful witnesses. They will
painstakingly explore all the ways in which he's a philandering,
porn-consuming, nudist bastard. It also emerged from today's
testimony that Jack had stumbled upon his dad's Internet porn
cache. That's the kind of Web savvy that should help him
Google the trial details tonight.
sidebar
What is it about the prospect of nasty public trials that is so
attractive to scorned women? Let's stipulate that Cook is a
cheating slime rat. He's already admitted it. For purposes of this
divorce, with most issues resolved by a prenuptial agreement,
there is really not much point in trotting out the busty young
things. Cook's adultery isn't really relevant to the custody
hearing or to the fight over some assets. Both Cook and an
attorney for the children urged the judge to close the court to the
media, but Brinkley insisted otherwise. Citing federal and state
laws that show a preference for open trials over closed ones, the
trial judge agreed to fling open the doors.
Return to article
Kennedy wrote, "[I]t is self-evident that a mother whom comes
to regret her choice to abort must struggle with grief more
anguished and sorrow more profound when she learns, only after
the event, what she once did not know: that she allowed a doctor
to pierce the skull and vacuum the fast-developing brain of her
unborn child, a child assuming the human form."
jurisprudence
Le Trainwreck
The Christie Brinkley divorce is a lesson in how not to cure a broken heart.
By Dahlia Lithwick
Wednesday, July 2, 2008, at 6:37 PM ET
Has anyone ever won their celebrity divorce, if not in a
courtroom, then at least in the court of public opinion? Not
Charlie Sheen or Denise Richards (porn, violence, hookers,
drugs). Their toddlers are in therapy. Not Heather Mills or Paul
McCartney (drugs, alcohol, violence, gold-digging). She got
crushed in a spectacularly public divorce. He's paying her $47.5
million, lost custody of their toddler, and will go down in history
as the Doormat Beatle. Not Gary Coleman (tantrums, isolation,
and "oops" pregnancies). Not Bill Murray (drug abuse, serial
adultery, spousal abuse, child neglect). Not anybody, as best as I
can tell.
So what is the impulse that drove Christie Brinkley to demand
that the courtroom be open to the media today, on the first day of
what looks to be the ugliest divorce of the year? Brinkley, 54,
filed for divorce from her husband, Peter Cook, 47, after he
cheated on her with an 18-year-old employee of his architecture
firm. Testimony included accounts of sex in his office and wads
of cash in the girl's fists. (There is no such thing as an original
midlife crisis.) Brinkley is evidently so set on humiliating the
Acting Supreme Court Justice Mark D. Cohen found that the
assertion by Theresa Mari, the children's attorney, that an open
trial would harm the children was "unsupported speculation,"
and he cited case law finding that the public trial "may provide a
basis for societal education." Today's valuable societal lesson?
How to spend $3,000 a month on Internet porn.
Thanks to Cohen's optimism, crowds of reporters were on hand
today to hear the trashing of Brinkley that followed the trashing
of Cook. It was, of course, "The porn-hound versus the shrew."
How original. Reporters caught every word uttered by Brinkley's
lawyer, Robert S. Cohen, describing her children's father as a
"self-obsessed sex addict who spent thousands of dollars on
Internet porn years before he began wooing a 17-year-old girl."
They soaked up every minute of the opening statement of Cook's
attorney, Norman Sheresky, which painted his client as "being
denied what is rightfully his by a compulsively needy wife
blinkered by her disgust, filth, and rage." He added: "For
goodness sake: She's on her fourth husband. … Your honor,
we're here because of the self-indulgent wrath of a woman
scorned."
Catch that, Sailor? Jack? Your daddy spent your college fund on
porn, and your mommy is a rageful shrew who fobbed off her
child care responsibilities on the help.
Brinkley's lawyer has promoted, time and again, the misguided
notion that courtrooms are magical centrifuges that spin away all
the garbage to extract some distillate called "the unfiltered
truth." He insists that "the only way to get at the truth is through
an open courtroom." And that if Cook is embarrassed by these
revelations, "it's his own fault." But of course there is more than
one unfiltered truth here, and Brinkley is already at the receiving
end of some that are not pleasant.
You may hear faint echoes here of last month's mudslinging in
the breakup of the Nevada governor's 22-year marriage. In that
case, Gov. Jim Gibbons' scorned wife filed a bizarre 31-page
motion demanding a public trial and the opening of all their
divorce records. Calling his client the "castaway wife" and
writing in the manner of a Harlequin romance novelist, Dawn
Gibbons' lawyer, Cal Dunlap, detailed her husband's infidelity
after he "succumbed to the wiles" of another woman. "Despite
his disingenuous, shallow, and transparent protestation that his
relationship with another man's wife is a mere friendship, his
infatuation and involvement with the other woman is the real,
concealed, and undisclosed reason for his voluntary departure
from the marriage and from the Mansion where he occasionally
resided." Despite the fact that Nevada is a no-fault state, and
nobody needed to allege any cheating of any sort, Dunlap
concluded (although probably not as a legal matter) that "lust is
the villain here." (Disclosure: My former boss represents Gov.
Gibbons in this divorce.) There is something about divorce
proceedings that turns grown men into horny teenagers as well
as grown women into tattletales.
I can understand the impulse that would lead a woman who has
been publicly spurned and spectacularly humiliated to demand a
public trial—to run every breast-enhanced, puffy-lipped teen
waitress and fitness instructor around the ring a few times.
Especially in these cases in which it's the spouse's bad behavior
that triggered all the publicity, the urge to turn that publicity
machine against him must be irresistible. Dunlap captured this
when he wrote that "by not candidly admitting his fawning
involvement with his frequent bar, lunch, dinner, and even
grocery store companion, he (the governor) has brought the
spotlight down upon himself and upon the reason for the
divorce."
Alexa Ray Joel—Brinkley's grown daughter from her second
marriage, to Billy Joel—defends Brinkley as "feeling
empowered and encouraged," as if she has somehow seized
control of the embarrassment by trying to stage-manage it. But
there's a reason the Brinkley-Cook divorce is covered in
entertainment news and the British tabloids and not in the A
section of the Wall Street Journal. And offering up "unfiltered
truth" has very little to do with it. This is not about the law; it's
about theater.
The court of public opinion doesn't put much stock in the rules
of evidence or witness credibility or the formula for calculating
child support. Its relentless focus is on what the parties are
wearing (crisp white blouse, beige skirt, snakeskin black belt)
and the awkwardness that broke out when Christie passed Peter
on the way to the ladies' room. Just like in fifth period Spanish.
If "winners" in a celebrity divorce are chosen based on which
party is prettier, nicer, and kinder to the environment, Brinkley
won this one years ago. So what's the point in hauling out the
hookers and the porn and the private detectives? That's just red
meat for the tabloids.
Brinkley is about to become another victim of the fiction that
you can use the tabloids more efficiently than they can use you.
Won't happen. Brinkley, Cook, and their two kids will get spit
out the other end of this trial, and the only real winners will be
the chesty adulteresses—each of whom will have her own reality
show/recording contract/clothing label by the end of the
summer. I have watched enough nasty custody battles to know
that if you really want your children to know the unfiltered truth,
you sit down with them (when they are 18 or 21) and tell it to
them. You don't run it through the double noise machine of a
four-week custody trial and the 24-hour tabloid press. Whatever
it is about divorce that sets the parties to behaving like children
(Gov. Gibbons apparently used his state-issued cell phone to
text-message his alleged girlfriend 860 times in a single month),
it would be good of them to get out of the way of the real
children—whose best interests are meant to be the polestar of
any custody fight. If raising children in the media spotlight isn't
its own form of child abuse, subjecting them to four weeks of
Daddy's dirty laundry surely is. If you can name me one
celebrity who won her celebrity divorce, I'll name you a kid who
lost one.
map the candidates
Different Continents
Obama is in Colorado talking about national service while McCain is still in
South America.
By E.J. Kalafarski and Chadwick Matlin
Wednesday, July 2, 2008, at 11:13 AM ET
medical examiner
The Sex Difference Evangelists
Empathy queens.
By Amanda Schaffer
Thursday, July 3, 2008, at 7:05 AM ET
From: Amanda Schaffer
Subject: Meet the Believers
Posted Tuesday, July 1, 2008, at 7:50 AM ET
If there's one question we never tire of, it's whether men and
women speak or feel or think in fundamentally different ways.
Do women talk more than men? Are their brains hard-wired for
empathy? Can innate differences explain men's and women's
career choices? This is today's iteration of Mars and Venus, and
it's everywhere.
imply that if a difference has innate roots, it's likely to be
relatively fixed. And that's not necessarily so. In crucial ways,
the mind is malleable. Ultimately, the evangelists aren't really
daring to be politically incorrect. They're peddling onesidedness, sprinkled with scientific hyperbole.
Amanda Schaffer and Emily Bazelon examine the science
behind claims about sex difference and the brain.
The preoccupation plays out in marketing to women and tips on
dating, like products designed to "attract women by GETTING
THEM TO TRUST YOU." It infiltrates magazine stories, TV,
and radio. Grounding the trend and giving it traction are a
handful of scientists and clinicians who have made themselves
over into sex-difference evangelists. Two women in particular
exemplify this move, and as self-described feminists, their work
is often accorded special credence. Louann Brizendine, a
psychiatrist at U.C.-San Francisco, hit the best-seller list in 2006
with The Female Brain, a book that could "change the
conversation at any social gathering," as New York Times
columnist David Brooks put it. Brizendine argues that
"outstanding verbal agility" and "a nearly psychic capacity to
read faces and tone of voice for emotions and states of mind" are
"hardwired into the brains of women." Canadian psychologist
Susan Pinker drove home similar claims this spring with The
Sexual Paradox, which argues that innate psychological
differences between men and women are vitally important and
too often underestimated. These writers cast themselves as
reluctant truth-tellers: "I have chosen to emphasize scientific
truth over political correctness," Brizendine writes.
But are she and Pinker, in fact, fearlessly revealing? Do they
show us a deep mental chasm between the sexes?
The bottom line from the science should really be this: Some
differences between the minds of men and women exist. But in
most areas, they are small and dwarfed by the variability within
each gender. To be fair, Brizendine and Pinker intermittently
acknowledge this point, and they translate complex material for
a wide audience, which necessarily involves simplification. They
get credit for trying.
But in the end they don't leave their readers with the correct, if
unsensational, impression, which is that men and women's minds
are highly similar.
Both authors push the science further than it really goes, often
brushing past uncertainties or making confused evidence appear
clear-cut. Even on the most hotly contested questions—like
whether women have better verbal skills, or are hard-wired for
empathy, or have cognitive differences that limit their
advancement in math and science—the case for large, innate
disparities is messy and, for the most part, underwhelming. This
is especially true when it comes to neural and hormonal claims,
which tend to be controversial. These writers offer canny caveats
about culture and its role in gender difference. But they tend to
From: Amanda Schaffer
Subject: Pick a Little, Talk a Little
Posted Tuesday, July 1, 2008, at 7:50 AM ET
In analyzing the sex-difference claims of authors Susan Pinker
and Louann Brizendine, let's start with language. Who hasn't
heard that women are naturally more verbal than men—better at
expressing themselves, better at reading and writing, chattier?
These clichés crop up in various forms. In her book, for instance,
Pinker emphasizes that girls speak earlier, outperform boys on
various measures of verbal skill when they're young, and are less
likely to be dyslexic. She notes that women have an advantage in
verbal fluency. And in an interview, she told me that "huge
differences in literacy" exist between college-age men and
women. Meanwhile, Brizendine casts women as virtual
talkaholics. The hardcover edition of her book asserts that "girls
speak faster on average—250 words per minute versus 125 for
typical males." It also claims that females use an average of
20,000 words per day compared to males' 7,000.
What is the scientific basis for these claims? Well-established
literature suggests that girls tend to acquire language earlier than
boys and are less likely to develop dyslexia (though the sex
difference in dyslexia is less striking than some older research
would suggest). But while adolescent girls may perform better
on some tests of verbal ability, the gender gap is not large,
according to meta-analyses assessed here. In the past couple of
years, scores on the critical reading section of the SAT
essentially show a dead heat for boys and girls: In 2007, they
averaged 504 and 502, respectively. The new writing test on the
SAT shows an advantage for girls, but it's small: In 2007, those
male and female averages were 489 and 500. Sex differences on
reading comprehension and vocabulary tests also appear to be
small or close to zero, when all ages are taken into account. To
some degree, differences in verbal ability in children or
adolescents may reflect different paces of development that even
out later on.
Some differences—for instance, on tests of verbal fluency—do
appear in adults. (A typical verbal fluency test might ask people
to list as many words as possible beginning, say, with the letter
B.) But the differences between average men and women are
small compared with the variation within each gender. For
instance, if we take an average measure of verbal fluency for
men, about 50 percent of men will score higher that that mark,
and about 60 percent of women will. Which means that you'd do
pretty badly if you tried to predict a person's gender from his or
her verbal fluency score. What's more, these tests may have little
to do with real-life communication. "When does any
conversation call upon you to produce as many words as you can
think of starting with B?" asks Deborah Cameron, a professor of
language and communication at Oxford and author of The Myth
of Mars and Venus. People may assume that "verbal fluency"
means that women are more articulate or can find the words to
express themselves better, she says, but that leap has not been
substantiated.
Meanwhile, Brizendine's claim that women talk faster than men
is unfounded, as linguist Mark Liberman has pointed out.
Brizendine told me she omitted the two-to-one speed ratio from
her paperback edition because she discovered that no primary
sources verified it. Similarly, her assertion that women utter
more words a day than men is bunk. Thanks in part to
Liberman's provocation, last year University of Arizona
psychologist Matthias Mehl conducted a new analysis of daily
word budgets. He and his colleagues sampled speech from male
and female college students, who wore recording devices that
turned on every 12½ minutes throughout the day. The findings,
published in Science, show that on average women use about
16,000 words per day. And so do men. (Brizendine says that this
study convinced her to drop the 20,000-to-7,000-words-per-day
claim. But her paperback still says that "on average girls speak
two to three times more words per day than boys"—an assertion
that is just as flimsy. Here's her explanation, and a critical
response from the scientist she relies on.)
What makes the claims of a stark male-female split sexy, of
course, is the appeal to neuroscience. Pinker, for instance,
highlights a study of brain cell density, which suggests that
female brains are more densely packed with neurons in an area
called the posterior temporal cortex, which is associated with
language. This "might explain the general female advantage in
language fluency and spelling," among other things, she writes.
Brizendine cites the same paper, asserting that in the "brain
centers for language and hearing … women have eleven percent
more neurons than men." But this paper looked at four men and
five women—hardly a sample size to inspire grand claims.
Neither Brizendine nor Pinker mentions this crucial caveat. And
even if a difference in neuron density for that area were to be
established, it's not at all clear what that would mean, if
anything, given the complex circuitry that language involves.
These writers also home in on the structure that connects the
brain's left and right hemispheres. Some research suggests that
part of this structure, which is called the corpus callosum, is
thicker in women than in men. This could mean that women
have a "faster superhighway for neural messages" (Pinker) and
therefore an advantage when it comes to language (as well as
emotional processing). But that claim is tricky to make, and the
significance of any purported size difference is deeply unclear.
Finally, Pinker argues that men "are simply less versatile when it
comes to language." At first she seems to mean that they are
more vulnerable to language-related problems like dyslexia, but
in the paragraphs that follow, she slips from dyslexia to general
measures like language fluency (and then back to dyslexia). So
"less versatile" becomes a broader comment on ability, too. She
suggests that men may rely more heavily on one brain
hemisphere—the left—while women are more likely to use both.
In particular, Pinker cites a 1995 study that asked men and
women to answer questions about words and nonsense words,
like whether they belonged to the same category or rhymed.
Using fMRI images of the subjects' brains, the researchers found
that men and women both relied on areas of the left hemisphere
when answering questions. But women also used areas of the
right hemisphere while men tended not to. According to Pinker,
this means that if a problem occurred in the left hemisphere,
"women would simply access the right hemisphere instead.
Under normal circumstances sex differences would be subtle,
but when things went wrong, sex differences would be extreme."
But since 1995 and the study that Pinker cites, a more complex
picture has emerged, with some researchers finding that women
are more likely to draw on both sides of the brain for certain
language tasks, and others finding no sex difference. Maybe
that's because of the types of tasks involved, but Pinker doesn't
really discuss the controversy. Also, even if, on average, men
and women used different neural strategies for playing certain
word games, that doesn't necessarily mean one sex will perform
better overall. This study, for instance, which asked subjects to
put real and nonsense verbs in the past tense, found that women
did tend to rely more on both brain hemispheres while men
tended to rely more asymmetrically on the left hemisphere. But
it made no difference in how quickly or accurately they
performed.
Subtle differences could turn out to matter for men and women
with specific clinical conditions. Pinker likes to say that the
extremes tell us something about the rest of us. But the relevance
is hard to see. (And, as it turns out, the connection between these
gender-related brain findings and dyslexia is not wellestablished, either, however logical the connection seems.) All
told, what's striking about the evidence on language is not so
much a profound gap between the sexes, but the large gaps in
our understanding of the brain.
From: Amanda Schaffer
Subject: Empathy Queens
Posted Wednesday, July 2, 2008, at 6:27 AM ET
In an over-the-top riff on womanly feeling in her book on sex
differences, psychiatrist Louann Brizendine introduces Sarah, an
icon of female empathy: "Maneuvering like an F-15, Sarah's
female brain is a high-performance emotion machine—geared to
tracking, moment by moment, the nonverbal signals of the
innermost feeling of others." In sussing out emotion, Sarah is
"just doing what the female brain is expert at," Brizendine
concludes.
Amanda Schaffer and Emily Bazelon discuss the science of
empathy.
(Watch yesterday's video here.)
This is a core tenet of sex-difference evangelism. In 2003,
British psychologist Simon Baron-Cohen made the case that
"The female brain is predominantly hard-wired for empathy."
Brizendine has run with that assertion, and author and
psychologist Susan Pinker has jumped on the F-15 bandwagon
as well, arguing that women have a powerful "empathy
advantage." Culture may modify or amplify it, but this edge,
these authors claim, is rooted in innate difference.
Take a closer look and you find that indeed some studies, which
ask men and women about empathy, find higher-on-average
scores for women (albeit with plenty of overlap between the
sexes). But other research complicates the picture. To claim that
any differences are innate is to descend into a rabbit hole of
partial, flickering findings on infants and twins, hormones, and
neural mechanisms. Brizendine and Pinker tend to downplay the
complications. This makes the case that women are innately
more empathetic than men seem stronger than it really is.
The simplest way to gather data on empathy is to get men and
women to fill out questionnaires. Baron-Cohen's asks
respondents whether they agree or disagree with statements like
"I can easily tell if someone else wants to enter a conversation";
"I really enjoy caring for other people"; "When I was a child, I
enjoyed cutting up worms to see what would happen." BaronCohen finds that women give themselves higher marks for
empathizing. Further evidence comes from work by psychologist
Alan Feingold, whose cross-cultural research Pinker cites. In the
1990s, Feingold reported that women in countries including the
United States, Canada, Poland, Russia, and Germany (but not
China) scored higher on average than men on questionnaires
designed to measure how tender-minded and nurturing people
are.
These studies get us only so far. Baron-Cohen calls the
empathizing brain type E, or "the female brain," and contrasts it
with systematizing brain type S, or "the male brain." But only 44
percent of women are type E—not even a majority. Which
makes the labeling seem odd. When I asked him about this,
Baron-Cohen admitted that he's thought twice about his male
brain/female brain terminology, but he didn't disavow it.
What's most striking about Feingold's work, for its part, are the
dates of the U.S. studies. When it comes to tender-mindedness,
the largest differences between males and females come from
work published between 1958 and 1962 and in 1968. The
smallest differences appear in the most recent research listed,
from 1985 and 1987. And the sex differences in the later studies
are indeed small—the ones from 1987 are comparable to the
difference in average height between 15- and 16-year-old girls.
Why did the gap narrow so dramatically? Feingold says that the
later studies tended to omit items that were found to be " 'biased'
against women." That might make comparisons among the
studies tricky, but it also might mean that the recent numbers are
more revealing. It's also worth noting that the male-female
difference shrank over the very years in which second-wave
feminism pushed for changes in traditional roles—and men
began to spend more time with their children. Tendermindedness, it would seem, is malleable.
Of course, what people say about themselves on questionnaires
tells a limited story in any case. Psychologist Nancy Eisenberg
made this point most dramatically in the 1980s, when she
demonstrated that the empathy gap, which appeared in studies
that relied on self-reporting, all but vanished when other
measures like physiological responses or changes in facial
expression were considered. Men and women differ in "how
empathetic they would like to appear to others (and, perhaps, to
themselves)," she wrote—and that's not the same thing as real
underlying sex differences in empathy.
In the years since, the picture has only gotten cloudier. Some
research finds associations between self-reporting and other
measures, and other research suggests divergence, Eisenberg
says. Other studies look at how well men and women discern
emotion in photographs of faces or eyes. Sometimes they find a
female advantage, and sometimes they don't, as Baron-Cohen
told me.
But reading Brizendine and Pinker, you'd never know how
muddled this literature is. And that's a problem, because the
mess is central to the story.
From: Amanda Schaffer
Subject: Mars, Venus, Babies, and Hormones
Posted Thursday, July 3, 2008, at 7:05 AM ET
According to sex-difference evangelist Louann Brizendine,
women are like emotion-seeking F-15's, deciphering and
responding to other people's feelings and needs. By contrast, it's
"only when men actually see tears that they realize, viscerally,
that something's wrong," she writes. Brizendine and Susan
Pinker not only argue that women are more empathetic than
men, a claim that is dicey to begin with. They also say that the
gap springs from innate difference.
Amanda Schaffer and Emily Bazelon discuss the science of
empathy.
To make that case, these authors look to studies of infants,
children, and twins. Pinker writes that girls not only "show more
empathy toward friends and family" but "remarkably,
demonstrate signs of these skills from early infancy, well before
any cultural expectations about women as nurturers can be
absorbed." Newborn girls "respond more to the cries of another
baby—and to human faces—than do boys," Brizendine says.
Pinker also argues that newborn girls show greater interest in
looking at faces. And she hangs her hat on twin research,
writing: "Studies of twins show that the ability to understand
social situations—which requires empathy—is largely inherited,
and that there are large differences between boys and girls that
are most noticeable when children are young."
What's at play here are leaps between early rudimentary
behavior and complex behavior later on. It's true, for instance,
that girls tend to make more eye contact and cry more easily in
response to another infant's cry, according to some research. But
why is it particularly clear that these measures are relevant to
empathy, which emerges later in development and involves a far
more sophisticated set of responses? If baby girls are, in fact,
more strongly drawn to some displays of faces than to objects, is
that because they have a categorical preference for people versus
objects, asks Harvard psychologist Elizabeth Spelke? Or because
they're responding to some other contrast between the two
presentations, like "their rate of motion or distribution or color or
contrast"? These data can be hard to interpret. In an interview,
even Simon Baron-Cohen, another doyen of sex-difference
claims, offered up some caution.
Caveats are also in order for the length of time infant girls gaze
at faces and what to conclude from that. In one of his more
controversial studies, Baron-Cohen found that 1-day-old girls
were more inclined to look at a human face, while 1-day-old
boys were more inclined to look at a mechanical mobile. But
that work has not been replicated. Brizendine cites psychologist
Erin McClure, but this reference is also problematic, as McClure
herself pointed out to me. Meanwhile, an older body of research
suggests that "male and female infants are equally interested in
people and objects," as Spelke puts it.
Pinker tops the slippery charts when she buttresses the case for
innate difference with twin research. She cites a study that looks
at twins and suggests a difference between boys' and girls' social
understandings—which includes, say, the ability to pick up on
body language or not to interrupt when other people are talking.
Contrary to her explicit claim of "large differences," when I
calculated the gap between average measures for boys and girls,
it turned out to be small—comparable, again, to the difference in
average height between 15- and 16-year-old girls. Also, while
the twin study Pinker likes does find that social cognition, or the
ability to infer what others are feeling, is largely inherited (as
Pinker correctly claims), its authors conclude that the disparity
they observe between boys and girls cannot be attributed to
genetic difference. Pinker, amazingly, fails to mention that the
authors on whom she's relying for proof of relevant genetic
difference disavow that explanation of their findings. This is
precisely the sort of selective reporting that makes her book
misleading.
To shore up their claims that sex difference is innate, Pinker and
Brizendine also fetishize hormones like testosterone and
oxytocin, which they say may underlie crucial sex differences in
empathy. For instance, they rely on Baron-Cohen's argument
that higher levels of prenatal testosterone diminish boys' drives
to empathize later on. His team is tracking a group of children
born around Cambridge, England, some from birth through early
childhood, and writes that, in general, fetal testosterone "predicts
how sociable a child will be," with higher levels of the hormone
linked to lower scores on social measures.
But the evidence for that should be qualified. Baron-Cohen finds
that at age 1, boys with higher levels of fetal testosterone appear
to make less eye contact with their parents (usually their
mothers). The ranges for boys and girls, however, overlapped
significantly. (In the course of 20 minutes, the boys looked at the
parent's face between 3.0 and 46.2 times, the girls between 3.8
and 55 times.) At age 4, children with higher testosterone tended
to have lower "quality of social relationships," according to
questionnaires their parents filled out. But that was only true
when data for boys and girls were pooled. No relationship
between fetal testosterone and the quality of social relationships
was found among boys as a separate group. And none was found
among girls, either.
For children between the ages of 6 and 8, the links between fetal
testosterone and two measures of empathy were somewhat more
convincing. Children with higher testosterone tended to score
lower on a questionnaire and on a test in which they tried to
discern emotion from pictures of eyes. And this association held
when boys were considered alone. But, confusingly, on the eyereading test, there was no overall difference in how well the
boys and the girls performed. This work has not been replicated,
either. Since Baron-Cohen's results come from a
nonrepresentative sample from one geographic area, his findings
should not be treated as the final word.
Then there is oxytocin, which Susan Pinker calls "the hormone
that greases the wheels of attachment" and "a feel-good,
nurturing drug that happens to be homegrown." Brizendine
describes it rhapsodically in her "cast of neuro-hormone
characters" as "fluffy, purring kitty; cuddly, nurturing, earth
mother; the good witch Glinda in The Wizard of Oz; finds
pleasure in helping and serving."
Here's what we actually know about oxytocin: The hormone is
important to childbirth and lactation. It may also contribute to
mother-child bonding and possibly to feelings of calm in breastfeeding mothers. Yet is it also linked to feelings of social
distress. One theory is that the body releases oxytocin to
promote social connection, and if that connection is positive, the
hormone may help to reduce stress. If it's negative, however,
oxytocin may actually make stress worse. In other words, the
hormone's effects are apparently paradoxical—it is not simply a
"feel-good" drug.
At the moment, research that includes a control group (and is
therefore more rigorous) doesn't tell us much about empathy and
gender. Pinker emphasizes two studies: One finds that subjects
who received intranasal puffs of the hormone were more trusting
of other players in an investment game; the other shows that
those who got oxytocin were better able to discern emotions in
photographs of faces. Crucially, though, both these studies were
conducted in men, as Pinker acknowledges. So far, for the most
part, women haven't been in the research pool, according to
social psychologist Jennifer Bartz of Mount Sinai. This is
starting to change, but the bottom line for now, she says, is that
"we can't say oxytocin makes women more empathetic."
of men and women responding to emotional stimuli. Pinker
knows this and says she does not suggest otherwise. "You can't
look at a brain scan and say therefore we know the cause," she
told me. But because she and Brizendine largely devote their
books to excavating innate difference, they should write that
caveat in red.
sidebar
Return to article
Pinker also writes that "the data reveal a handful of different
catalysts for people's choices—many with neurological or
hormonal roots, and others that reflect workplaces designed to fit
the male standard—that mesh to create the real gender gap."
Brizendine suggests that women "have been fighting to adapt to
a man's world—after all, women's brains are wired to be good at
changing."
sidebar
Return to article
Finally, Brizendine and Pinker lean on neuroimaging studies,
which compare male and female responses to stimuli like
pictures of sad and happy faces or other imagery. But this kind
of data is notoriously hard to interpret. Consider this metaanlysis by psychologist Tor Wager, who looked at 65 functional
MRI and PET studies of gender and emotion. Wager found some
differences in the brain activity patterns of men and women in
response, say, to films or pictures meant to elicit emotion. The
differences were subtle, however, compared to the similarities.
And the kicker is that these studies don't tell us whether
differences are innate. Brizendine moves seamlessly from
references to fMRI studies to phrases like "distinct female and
male brain operating systems." (She also jumps off the deep end
with a claim about male and female mirror neurons.) Pinker
suggests that fMRI studies can show how women's "neural
hardware" gives them an edge in discerning emotion. But our
brains change in response to how we use them—what we think,
see, feel, and practice doing over a lifetime. This is the plasticity
of the brain, demonstrated most colorfully in this famous study
of London cabbies. With its potential connection to a person's
response to the culture he or she lives in, plasticity could explain
much—or potentially all—of the difference between brain scans
Brizendine explains: "It has been my observation that, in a social
setting, girls speak two or three times more words per day than
boys." This observation is also "echoed," she says, by a study
that found "young girls speak earlier and by the age of 20
months have double or triple the number of words in their
vocabularies" compared with boys. But that study, by
psychologist Janet Hyde, looks at a different age group and a
different measure. "Brizendine is not careful about the scientific
data," Hyde told me. A larger vocabulary at an early age could
reflect an earlier maturation for girls. The evidence does not
suggest that adult women have double the vocabulary of adult
men, says Hyde. Rather, the data show that differences in adults
are small.
sidebar
Return to article
A part of the corpus callosum may be thicker in women. But it
also may not be, depending on how the comparison is done. (For
more on the tortuous distinctions that land scientists on either
side of this fence, see here.)
sidebar
that points to that," McClure told me. She also objected to
Brizendine's hyperbolic conclusions: "I've been misinterpreted to
imply that there are huge differences in facial processing
between males and females, and that's definitely not something
you can draw from this."
sidebar
Return to article
Return to article
She does note that "there has long been resistance to the idea that
… sex differences in the brain are meaningful" but doesn't
explain that there has been conflicting, messy evidence on
lateralization.
sidebar
The effect size, which relates the difference between male and
female means to standard deviations, is -0.175. This falls in the
"small" range, according to a standard classification discussed
here.
sidebar
Return to article
Return to article
Baron-Cohen told me that he thought infant eye contact might be
a precursor to empathy because clues found in peoples' faces,
especially in the area around the eyes, could help to decode
another person's emotions. But he also offered a qualification: "I
think it could be too simplistic to say that the more eye contact
you make the better your empathy. … If you stare at somebody
that's not necessarily very empathic." As for the crying, he
thought it might be evidence of girls' "higher sensitivity to
another person's emotions," but he was "not 100 percent
convinced that just because one baby starts another baby crying
that that's necessarily anything to do with empathy."
sidebar
Return to article
In claiming that newborn girls respond more to human faces,
Brizendine cites a meta-analysis by psychologist Erin McClure,
which finds that female infants and toddlers tend to gaze longer
than boys at faces showing emotional expressions. Brizendine
"cited my work for a statement that girls are compelled from an
early age to attend to faces, and there's just nothing in my study
"Mirroring" is about reading and experiencing another person's
emotions as if they were her own, Brizendine says, allowing a
woman to become "a human emotion detector." "Although most
of the studies on this topic have been done in primates," she
writes, "scientists speculate that there may be more mirror
neurons in the human female brain than in the human male
brain." Our old F-15 friend Sarah's brain, for instance, "will
begin stimulating its own circuits as if her husband's brain were
her own." The implication is that extra mirror neurons make
women like Sarah innately more empathetic than their hapless
husbands.
But megacaveats are in order here. For one thing, the role of
mirror neurons in humans is not well-established. Some very
smart people maintain that they are largely a nice metaphor or
myth. Beyond that, Brizendine offers virtually no evidence for
the claim that women have more mirror neurons than men do.
Since her book's publication, a small amount of work has
suggested some difference in mirror neuron activity in men and
women. But that work is preliminary. (Click here and scroll
down for details.)
medical examiner
Dr. R2-D2
The invasion of the surgeon robots.
By Kent Sepkowitz
Friday, June 27, 2008, at 12:57 PM ET
Remember how much fun the future used to be? Everyone trim
and twinkle-toed in their one-piece jumpsuits with plenty of
robots to do the work then mix the cocktails. And yet, despite
the decades of excitement, the promised robot epoch remains
mostly out of reach. Even the world's leading futurist, PixarDisney, in the new movie Wall-E, has placed the date of robot
domination 600 years from now.
There is one realm, however, in which robots really are joining
the gang: the operating room. It turns out that Americans love to
be operated upon by them. Last year, robots participated in
thousands of surgeries, and the years ahead promise even more
choices. Cancer surgery, heart surgery, brain surgery, you name
it—R2-D2 awaits your call. The robots even have their own
medical journal (OK, it's run by the humans who operate the
robots, but egad!).
The early buzz on the robot street was that all the health care
players had found a winner. Insurance companies were ecstatic
because robotic surgery resulted in shorter hospital stays (and
therefore larger insurance-company profits). Hospitals loved the
idea of looking ultramodern and futuristic. And robot makers,
hawking a product at about a million bucks a pop, were in
raptures.
What about patients? People often distrust newfangled doodads,
and yet rather than being spooked by the prospect of a piece of
metal drilling and sawing and sewing in their abdomen, they
generally have been eager to sign on. We don't yet let robots
wash the car or mow the lawn, but dissect out a cancerous
prostate? Sure, go ahead. And fix that heart valve while you're in
there.
Before calling the invasion of the robots a total success,
however, there's a big fact left to examine. How have patients
actually fared once they've left the hospital? Not how quickly
were they discharged or how little blood did they lose during the
procedure, but what course did their disease follow? The reason
for the surgery, after all, was to extend or improve a life.
The results are just now trickling in, and the answer is: maybe
not so good. A recent article in the esteemed Journal of Clinical
Oncology examined 2,702 Medicare beneficiaries who
underwent prostatectomy from a variety of techniques. The
authors compared outcomes from a laparoscopic approach that
frequently used robots with surgery using the traditional
configuration of surgeons and nurses stationed around the
operating table. Although the robots performed better on the
early returns—outcomes like length of hospital stay and
postoperative complications—their patients' cancers fared worse
in the long run. Specifically, the laparoscopic group was more
than three times as likely to require additional cancer therapy,
such as radiation or hormones, than those operated on by hand.
As an accompanying editorial suggested, perhaps there is value
in the human act of looking at the affected area of the body and
touching the surgical bed, of mulling and worrying. Sure, we
Homo sapiens are inarticulate, inexact, forgetful, and have bad
posture and unsettling cousins. But we also may have some gift
that isn't easily reproduced by robotic motion.
This study has important limitations—not all laparoscopic
surgeries involved a robot, and only Medicare patients were
examined. But a critical difference between this and other, more
optimistic studies is that this time the data came from an
objective source—boring Medicare claims—rather than from an
impassioned true believer reporting on the wonders of his or her
fancy-schmancy innovation. The medical literature is rife with
publication bias, the tendency to report only good news. After a
while, small, sunny reports pile up until one day someone
decides to look at the entire set, as in the article I just linked to.
This approach may be conducted as a formal meta-analysis with
strict rules and restrictions or as a friendlier-sounding literature
review. Such a summary promises a definitive bulk and heft that
the individual studies lack. Yet if each of the component parts
shares the same chirpy bias—robots are great!—then their sum
serves to amplify, not neutralize, the same initial misstep.
Weighed against all the cheering, the Medicare study may not
dim robo-lust, at least not until it's replicated. In the meantime,
it's worth pondering how far the enthusiasm for robot surgery
strays from patients' oft-stated desire for a caring personal
physician who holds their hands and remembers their kids'
names. Medical school curricula have been retrofitted to teach
young doctors how to show emotion, how to listen, how to be
empathic. I once had to watch a movie that instructed me on how
to nod my head thoughtfully. Compassion is supposed to be a
pretty big deal. But what chance does human warmth have
against the world's great silver hope?
And herein lies what's most unsettling: Everyone seems relieved
that the robots are winning. The ceaseless pounding of the
(automated) victory drum has worn us down, made us doubt our
own value. Science has long been a tense tug of war between
two caricatured groups. On one side stood the nerds with their
homemade rockets, plastic pencil pocket guards, and dopey
horn-rimmed glasses. On the other slouched the hippiedreamers, reading Kierkegaard and pondering the
imponderables. For the longest time, the dreamers were way,
way ahead.
But the advent of robot surgery signals a shift in the balance of
power. Now the nerds, who previously had been content sending
rockets to Mars, have seized control of that most sacred prize,
the human being. Our future suddenly is in their heartless hands.
moneybox
Super-vise Me
It's OK to feel guilty about eating fast food, but is it the government's job?
By Christopher Flavelle
Wednesday, July 2, 2008, at 6:28 AM ET
This month, restaurant inspectors from New York City's
Department of Health and Mental Hygiene, scourge of both
smokers and trans-fat lovers, will add a new violation to their
checklist: the failure to display, in large type and directly on the
menu board, the calorie counts of every item on the menu.
The city claims that the new law (PDF), which applies to
restaurants with 15 locations or more nationwide, will lead to
150,000 fewer New Yorkers becoming obese and 30,000 fewer
developing diabetes over the next five years. Other cities are
following the city's lead, from San Jose to Seattle. Public-health
officials have praised the plan, arguing that anything that might
reduce obesity is worth trying.
This is the latest salvo in a war that local governments are
fighting against Americans' diets; other examples include
Chicago's ban on foie gras (reversed by the city council this
year, with two aldermen citing the law as "an embarrassment")
and New York City's restrictions on "sous-vide" vacuum
cooking and its ban on trans-fats, which took full effect Tuesday.
The case for calorie labeling rests on several arguments, some
sturdier than others. High-calorie diets have been shown to
contribute to obesity, and fast-food restaurants often have higher
calories per meal than food prepared at home. "People eat about
half their calories outside the home," said Kelly Brownell,
director of the Rudd Center for Food Policy and Obesity at Yale.
"And when they do eat out, they tend to eat more, and what they
do eat has higher calories."
Second, New York cites studies showing that people do a poor
job of estimating the calorie count of the food they buy at
restaurants. According to Brownell, even dieticians grossly
underestimate the number of calories in dishes served at
restaurants.
But will telling people how many calories are in their meals
actually change what they order? To answer that question, New
York City commissioned a study last year in which researchers
interviewed customers leaving fast-food restaurants about their
purchases. Since Subway was the only restaurant that displayed
calorie counts on the menu board (rather than on its Web site or
tray liners), the researchers focused on Subway customers, to see
whether the calorie information had an impact.
Nearly one-third of those customers reported seeing the calorie
information, and more than one-third of those in turn reported an
impact on what they ordered—a result the researchers backed up
by looking at customers' receipts. The difference was significant:
Those who said they saw the calorie information bought meals
with 52 fewer calories, on average, than those who didn't.
Does this mean that menu labeling causes people to eat better?
Maybe. As the study's authors write: "Subway patrons might not
be representative of all chain restaurant patrons: Subway patrons
purchased fewer calories than did other chains' patrons." After
all, for years Subway has shoved Jared Fogle's shrunken waist
size in our faces, directly targeting people concerned about their
weight.
So, the survey's results may not be easily applied to other
restaurants. Yet the Department of Health does just that: Its
projections for reducing obesity and diabetes are based on the
premise that Subway customers are representative.
Christopher Flavelle asks diners in Times Square whether the
new menus are likely to change their eating habits:
Historically, the health benefits of food labeling are hard to pin
down. In 1994 Congress passed the Nutrition Labeling and
Education Act, which required companies to put a standardized
list of ingredients on most packaged food products. The NLEA
was a victory for advocates of consumer information, but its
ability to make those consumers buy healthier products seems to
be limited.
Researchers Jayachandran N. Variyam and John Cawley used
data from the annual National Health Interview Survey to see if
the NLEA had an impact on obesity rates. They divided people
into two groups: a test group, made of those who said they read
the nutrition labels, and a control group, those who said they
ignored them. The premise was that factors other than nutrition
labels would affect both groups equally, allowing the researchers
to judge the effectiveness of the labels by measuring the body
mass index of both groups, before and after the NLEA came into
effect.
Variyam and Cawley's study, published in 2006 by the National
Bureau of Economic Research, found that nutrition labeling did
reduce obesity but only among a single demographic: white,
non-Hispanic women. For all other demographics—Hispanic
and black women and men of every ethnic group—they found
no significant impact after nutrition labeling became required.
Will menu labeling be any more effective? Slate's New York
reporting (see video on previous page) indicated that most fastfood patrons said it wouldn't affect their meals. For some people,
the question is moot. Julia Patterson is the chairwoman of the
board of health in King County, Wash., where menu labeling
will go into effect on Jan. 1. Asked whether King County had
studied the link between menu labeling and obesity, Patterson
rejected the very premise.
"When we made the decision to warn people about the fact that
cigarettes can cause cancer on a pack of cigarettes," she said,
"nobody demanded that a study be done to determine whether or
not that information would have an impact on smoking habits of
Americans."
Actually, the example of cigarette labeling is cause for more
studies, not fewer. The Surgeon General began putting warning
labels on cigarette packs in 1965. Sixteen years later, the Federal
Trade Commission found that fewer than 3 percent of adults
even read the labels, leading Congress to pass the
Comprehensive Smoking Education Act in 1984, making the
warning labels more explicit. Meanwhile, ineffective warning
labels had been used for nearly two decades. That message isn't
lost on the people running New York City's menu-labeling
program. Cathy Nonas, director of physical activity and nutrition
programs for the city's health department, said the city will use
its earlier study as a base line, then commission a similar study
after the regulation goes into effect.
The restaurant industry isn't waiting for the numbers to come in.
"They have absolutely no scientific backup for any of their
claims," said Chuck Hunt, executive vice president of the New
York State Restaurant Association, which claims the menulabeling law violates the First Amendment and is suing to have
the law struck down. Hunt said more-prominent calorie
information won't change enough people's decisions to make a
difference. "I don't care if you stamp it on their foreheads, some
people are not going to pay attention to it."
Hunt may have a credibility issue when it comes to public-health
legislation: He's the same person who claimed, in 2002, that a
smoking ban in New York restaurants would cause business to
decline drastically—in fact, business went up.
The law may have the salutary effect of getting restaurants to
change their ways. Nonas uses the example of Starbucks, which
has reacted to the debate over menu labeling by switching its
default milk from whole to 2 percent. Margo Wootan, director of
nutrition policy for the Center for Science in the Public Interest,
said getting restaurants to change what they serve can be just as
important as getting customers to change what they order.
"Maybe McDonald's will rethink whether a large shake really
needs to have 1,200 calories," she said. "Could people be happy
with a 900-calorie shake?"
The calorie rule is an example of informing everyone in the
hopes that they will make healthier choices, which is hard to
oppose in principle. So, perhaps everyone wins. Yet the absence
of unbiased opponents of menu labeling means that lost in the
debate over Big Macs and cheesecake has been any serious
consideration of whether government agencies ought to be
responsible for influencing how many calories we eat.
This summer's outbreak of salmonella in tomatoes, which has
made more than 800 people sick nationwide, suggests that
government's culinary hyperfocus would be better trained
elsewhere. Regardless, it's a strange moment in the history of
American municipal government: Banning the sale of most
handguns—which undeniably kill thousands of people a year—
is prohibited, but it's OK to tell McDonald's how to run its
business, based on a plausible but scarcely proven theory of
human behavior.
moneybox
Why We Need Movie Reviewers
Despite popular belief, critically acclaimed movies actually sell better.
By Erik Lundegaard
Tuesday, July 1, 2008, at 7:07 PM ET
It's almost a given these days that movie critics are elitist, while
moviegoers are populist. When the highest-grossing films get
panned by critics, what good are critics? As publishers across the
country dump their reviewers, this is not exactly a rhetorical
question.
Believe it or not, though, critically acclaimed films generally do
better than critically panned films at the box office—if you
measure their performance in the right way.
Here are the highest-grossing movies from 2007, along with
each film's rating from Rotten Tomatoes, a Web site that
quantifies critical opinion. (In the Rotten Tomatoes vernacular,
films that garner positive reviews from at least 60 percent of
critics are considered "fresh," while those below 60 percent are
considered "rotten"):
You hardly need the Rotten Tomatoes rating. Four of the top
five films are sequels; the fifth a sci-fi flick based upon a 20year-old cartoon, which was itself based upon a toy. None is
exactly Citizen Kane. Or even Jaws.
But here's something else they have in common: They were the
only five films in 2007 to open in more than 4,000 theaters.
Beyond the cause-and-effect question—do people see what
studios make available and market, or do studios make available
and market only what people want to see?—the popularity of a
movie, via box office grosses, is to a great extent a self-fulfilling
prophecy. So is there a better way to judge a film's popularity?
Yes: Use a per-theater average. Fred Claus, for example, made
$18 million its opening weekend, which, out of 630 films
released in 2007, is the 43rd best opening weekend. Not bad.
Then you notice it opened in 3,603 theaters, giving it a pertheater average of $5,138. That ranks 246 th. Not good. Fred
Claus also got bad reviews: a 23 percent rating from Rotten
Tomatoes. Call it a coincidence if you like.
A film's per-theater average for its entire history is rarely
available to the public, but it is calculable. You simply add up
the total number of theaters in which a film is shown and divide
that number into its U.S. box office take.
I did this for the 237 films of 2007 with a theater high of 100.
After removing the three films that didn't have a Rotten
Tomatoes rating, I sorted by overall per-theater average. The top
five movies are the same, merely in jumbled order, with
Transformers now No. 1, pulling in $12,366 per theater.
But is this even an accurate measure of performance? Articles
about the movie industry tend to use "theaters" and "screens"
interchangeably, but some films, blockbusters certainly, play on
numerous screens in just one theater. Yet we rarely count those
screens. Spider-Man 3, for example, played in 27,819 theaters
but on 49,392 screens.
So what happens when we sort by overall per-screen average?
Some slight movement. Transformers is still No. 1 ($8,887 per
screen), but Spider-Man 3 and Pirates 3 drop out of the top five,
and I Am Legend and 300 take their places. Plus the art-house
movies move up. Paris, je t'aime, ranked 179th by U.S. domestic
box office, is, by per-screen average, 43rd, averaging $4,386 per
screen. Sweeney Todd, 49th for the year with $52 million, moves
into the top 20 in the new paradigm: $5,458 per screen. Both of
these films got good reviews.
Things get more interesting when you divide the 234 films into
their "fresh" and "rotten" ratings:
While there were fewer "fresh" films (i.e., movies that critics
liked) and they showed on fewer screens and took in less overall
box office, they tended to make almost $1,000 more per screen
than "rotten" movies (i.e., movies critics didn't like). So, on a
per-screen-basis, more people are following critics into theaters
than not.
Then I broke the numbers down further:
While the gross numbers can be depressing (we spent half a
billion dollars on the likes of Norbit, Good Luck Chuck, and
Bratz?), the averages are not. Critically acclaimed films average
about $2,000 more per screen than critically lambasted films.
How true is this with the tent-pole films? Let's find out. Divide
the movies by total screens and then sort within by Rotten
Tomatoes rankings:
The numbers are starkest with limited-release films (fewer than
2,000 screens). Art-house films that critics loved, such as Away
From Her and The Diving Bell and the Butterfly, averaged
$3,113 per screen, while arthouse films critics were iffy about,
such as Interview and Margot at the Wedding, didn't even do
half as well, averaging only $1,322 per screen. Some people are
paying attention.
Percentagewise, the critic effect is less pronounced for the
supposedly critic-proof blockbusters, but it's still there. On
average, the "fresh" blockbusters, such as Harry Potter and I Am
Legend outperform the "rotten" blockbusters, such as Wild Hogs
and Bee Movie, by more than $500 per screen. Almost any way
you slice it, if a majority of critics like a movie, chances are it
will do better at the box office than a similar film the majority of
critics don't like. Far from being elitist, movie critics are actually
a pretty good barometer of popular taste.
What does all of this mean? Not much and everything. I
certainly accept the fact that America's overall cultural tastes
have degraded. Serious films for adults, such as The Best Years
of Our Lives, The Bridge on the River Kwai, The Graduate, and
The Godfather, were all No. 1 box office hits for their respective
years. So was Saving Private Ryan as recently as 1998. Seems
an eternity ago. Now even our most critically acclaimed films
are cartoons: Persepolis, Ratatouille, and The Simpsons Movie.
If I were a publisher, though, I'd hire the best critic I could find
and have him or her write two reviews: a short one, to be printed
the day or week the movie opens and that gives away little of the
plot but tells readers whether it's good or bad (the service
aspect); and a longer, more in-depth review that discusses the
entire film, to be posted online (the critical aspect). Then I'd put
a message board beneath the in-depth review and sit back. Most
people don't want to hear about a movie before they've seen it
but would love to discuss it afterward. Boy, would they ever.
But the main point of all of this is something obvious yet littleheard in our bottom-line culture: Quality matters. Yes, it even
matters in the ledger books.
moneybox
Presidential Impotence
Why Obama or McCain won't be able to cure the ailing economy.
By Daniel Gross
Saturday, June 28, 2008, at 7:06 AM ET
As the presidential campaign kicks into gear, housing, energy,
and rising unemployment have thrust the economy front and
center. Whether they are talking about the need to drill off the
coast of South Beach (John McCain), or the necessity of
confiscating the profits of ExxonMobil (Barack Obama), each
candidate is unequivocally promising voters that come Jan. 20,
2009, should he have the high privilege of succeeding George
W. Bush, he will instantly reverse the decline of housing prices,
bring gasoline prices crashing back to earth, and generally kick
the economy back into gear.
If you believe that, I've got some subprime mortgages I'd like to
sell you. Does the president really have any effect on the shortterm direction and performance of the economy? The answer is
no, but with two important "buts."
not even an executive as muscular as California Gov. Arnold
Schwarzenegger could bend them to his will. The megatrends
that made the 1990s a long summer of economic love—the end
of the cold war, the deflationary influence of an emerging China,
the Internet—would have happened with or without Rubinomics.
And most of the factors now making life miserable—commodity
inflation, a housing bubble and a weak dollar engineered by the
Federal Reserve's promiscuous policies, the demand-driven
surge in oil—would likely have materialized had John Kerry
won in 2004 (sorry, MoveOn.org).
The maturation of the Federal Reserve into a powerful,
independent agency has further stolen the thunder from the
presidency in short-term economic affairs. By cutting interest
rates and offering banks access to liquidity, Federal Reserve
Chairman Benjamin Bernanke has done more to stimulate the
economy in the past year than President Bush or Congress.
There's a third reason the identity of the next president won't
matter all that much to the economy in 2009. The past 16 years
of experience—not to mention this year's campaign platforms—
prove that Democrats and Republicans diverge sharply on fiscal
and economic policy. But on some of the big-picture items that
matter most to short-term performance, a consensus has emerged
over the years. Modern Republicans have learned their lesson
from Herbert Hoover and have embraced the necessity for shortterm fiscal stimulus when the economy slows. "We're all
Keynesians now," as Richard Nixon said. Modern Democrats
have also learned their lesson from Hoover, who signed the
disastrous Smoot-Hawley Tariff into effect in 1930. Twentyfirst-century Democrats generally embrace the utility of free
trade, even during economic downturns.
Over the past 219 years, the U.S. economy has expanded under
all types of presidents, Democratic and Republican, activist and
somnolent. But there have certainly been some notable policies
that inflicted short-term damage, such as Thomas Jefferson's illconceived embargo on trade with Britain in 1807 and Ulysses S.
Grant's decision to place the United States back on the gold
standard, which contributed to a banking panic that in turn led to
a recession that lasted for nearly all of Grant's second term.
Between 1929 and 1933, as a stock-market crash and credit
crunch metastasized into the Depression, Herbert Hoover
adopted a hands-off approach that exiled his party from the
White House for a generation.
This isn't to say that the identity of the president in 2009 won't
matter. Presidents tend to have the most success enacting new
policies in the first year in office (the tax cuts of Reagan and
Bush II, the budget and NAFTA for Clinton). And Tom
Gallagher, head of policy research at ISI Group, notes that the
next president will appoint a Federal Reserve chairman early in
his term. But—and this is the first but—the macroeconomic
impacts of early-term policies are often evident only after
several years. Harvard economist Benjamin Friedman notes that
Nixon's imposition of wage and price controls in August 1971
helped smooth his re-election in 1972. "But these controls
became a substitute for serious anti-inflationary policy, and were
the beginning of a set of policies that led to really severe
inflation."
But today, while the president of the United States may be the
most powerful person in the world, "his influence on the shortterm macro-economy is generally overestimated by voters," says
Thomas E. Mann, senior fellow at the Brookings Institution.
Partisans might think the economy got off the mat the minute
Ronald Reagan was inaugurated in 1981 or when Bill Clinton
took the oath in January 1993. But the factors that influence the
business cycle are so myriad, powerful, and unpredictable that
So here's some straight talk about change we can believe in.
Most of the promises that Obama and McCain are making about
the economy will founder on the shoals of a Congress unwilling
to be a rubber stamp, organized industry opposition,
unanticipated events, budget realities, and changes in the
macroeconomic climate.
We shouldn't discount entirely the next president's powers. The
most troublesome economic data points aren't necessarily the
rising unemployment rate and plunging home prices. Rather,
they're the miserable consumer-confidence numbers, which have
hit a 16-year-low, and the high percentage of Americans who
believe the nation is on the wrong track. When consumers,
whose collective actions constitute more than two-thirds of U.S.
economic activity, are in the dumps, they're less likely to spend,
invest, and take risks.
But—and this is the second but—history has shown that
presidents do have the ability to affect the short-term national
mood about the economy. Think about the juxtaposition of
Hoover's cool response and Franklin Delano Roosevelt's
exhortations to fear nothing but fear itself. George H.W. Bush's
"Message: I care" didn't have a prayer in connecting with the
anxieties of middle-class Americans when confronted with a
sweet-talking Arkansas governor who oozed empathy.
Presidents can function as mood enhancers only when the
rhetoric is backed by action. "Whatever beneficial effects FDR
or Reagan had on the economy had more to do with their
policies than with their pleasant demeanors," says Richard
Scylla, a historian at New York University. FDR's inspiring
speeches and fireside chats in 1933 were accompanied by a
profusion of policy experiments, many of which worked. And
without the stimulus provided by the Reagan tax cuts, the
"Morning in America" theme of the Gipper's 1984 re-election
campaign would have fallen as flat as Gerald Ford's 1974
exhortations to "Whip Inflation Now."
moneybox
This Bid's for You
A Brazilian-Belgian company wants to buy American beer giant AnheuserBusch. What's the problem?
By Daniel Gross
Friday, June 27, 2008, at 3:01 PM ET
An international beer war is brewing. On June 11, InBev, the
behemoth formed by the 2004 merger of Brazilian brewer
AmBev and Belgium-based InterBrew, offered a hefty premium
to buy Anheuser-Busch, the dominant and iconic U.S. beer
maker. InBev, which is run by a Brazilian, Carlos Brito, is eager
to add Budweiser to its international portfolio of brands.
Anheuser-Busch's board and chief executive officer, August A.
Busch IV, who represents the sixth generation of his family to
run the brewer, dismissed the unwelcome offer as inadequate.
Bud partisans, especially in and around St. Louis, have reacted
with even more vigor. Both of Missouri's senators, Republican
Kit Bond and Democrat Claire McCaskill, oppose the deal.
McCaskill says it is "patriotic" to do so. In a letter to AnheuserBusch's board, she writes: "[D]o not hesitate to contact me to
discuss ways that I and community leaders can work with you to
improve the company without changing its ownership."*
Opposition to InBev's takeover is rooted in national and regional
pride and, perhaps more importantly, in overarching anxiety
about the role of America in the global economy. So far this
decade, two of America's big-three beer makers have been sold
to foreign buyers. Second-place Miller was sold in 2002 to
SABMiller, a company with roots in South Africa and
headquarters in London. Canada's Molson acquired third-place
Coors in 2005. (Combined, the big three have 78 percent of the
U.S. market, with Anheuser-Busch holding down about 50
percent.)
Officially, Anheuser-Busch's principal resistance is financial. On
Thursday, it said that InBev's $65-per-share price "does not
reflect the strength of Anheuser-Busch's global, iconic brands
Bud Light and Budweiser, the top two selling beer brands in the
world. … The proposal also undervalues the earnings growth
actions that the company had already planned, which have
significant potential for shareholder value creation; the
company's market position in the United States, the mostprofitable beer market in the world; and the high value of its
existing strategic investments."
This rhetoric, which could merely be a negotiating ploy to get
InBev to boost its offer, highlights the very reasons AnheuserBusch is in danger of being taken over. Yes, the company does
own iconic brands that have a global presence. But Bud is
different from global brands such as Coca-Cola or McDonald's,
which developed distinctly American consumer experiences that
didn't face much resistance when they entered foreign markets.
Today, they derive the vast majority of sales from abroad. But
beer isn't an American invention, and in virtually every market,
strong local brands proliferate. So while Anheuser-Busch sells
Bud in scores of foreign markets and has linked up with brewers
in Mexico, China, and India, the company has remained largely
dependent on the massive U.S. market, where it has about a 50
percent market share. In the first quarter of 2008, 83 percent of
the sales of Anheuser-Busch brands were in the United States.
Historically, that's been a blessing. Today, given aging boomers,
the rage against carbohydrates, and an exhausted consumer, it's a
curse. According to Beer Marketer's Insights, between 1997 and
2007, U.S. beer shipments have barely kept up with population
growth, rising just 9 percent. In the first quarter of 2008, the
volume of Anheuser-Busch's shipments to wholesalers grew by
0.4 percent from the first quarter of 2007, while "sales-toretailers for Anheuser-Busch produced brands, excluding
imports, declined 1.4 percent." (This state of affairs isn't unique
to Bud. InBev's first quarter results also had declining volumes.)
The problem for Anheuser-Busch's board and current
management is that stock investors want growth. And this year,
as in the last several years, virtually all the growth in the beer
market will take place outside the United States. In addition, the
weak dollar makes it a) more expensive for Anheuser-Busch to
buy growth by acquiring brewers in developing markets and b)
cheaper for foreign buyers to snap up U.S. trophy properties like
Anheuser-Busch.
What's going to happen? Investors responded to the offer, which
tops the stock's 2004 10-year high by 20 percent, by pushing
Anheuser-Busch's stock close to the bid. Warren Buffett, who
owns about 5 percent of the company, could easily end this by
stating a preference. But the bridge player is keeping his cards
close to his vest. When I (warning: egregious name-drop
coming) had lunch with Buffett yesterday (OK, there were about
20 other people around the table, but I did get to chat with the
Oracle of Omaha for a few minutes), he affirmed that he hasn't
picked a side in this battle between August Busch and Carlos
Brito. (It might be worth pointing out that Buffett has made lots
of money recently betting on the financial management skills of
Brazilians.) Still, you don't have to have Buffett's acumen to
believe that this offer is a good one.
Correction, June 30, 2008: The article originally referred to
Missouri Sen. Claire McCaskill as a "he." McCaskill is a
woman. (Return to the corrected sentence.)
moneybox
Wage Against the Machine
If Costco's worker generosity is so great, why doesn't Wal-Mart imitate it?
By Liza Featherstone
Friday, June 27, 2008, at 7:29 AM ET
Nearly everyone who's looked at Wal-Mart's practices as an
employer—its union busting, sex discrimination, low wages, and
minimal benefits—has concluded that it's America's retail bad
guy. By contrast, many who've examined the practices of WalMart's competitor Costco—including New York Times labor
reporter Steven Greenhouse in his recent book The Big Squeeze:
Tough Times for the American Worker—conclude that it's the
good guy. Costco CEO and founder Jim Sinegal repeatedly
insists to Greenhouse that treating employees well is "good
business."
That makes a pleasing sound bite, and assume for a moment that
Sinegal's assertion is true. Why, then, wouldn't Wal-Mart do
everything it could to make itself more like Costco? Now
assume that Sinegal's assertion is false. Why, then, does Costco
treat employees better if that's against the company's financial
interests?
It's not hard to make a case that Costco pays employees more.
The most relevant comparison is between Costco and Sam's
Club, Wal-Mart's membership warehouse, since both business
models rely on membership fees for a large percentage of
revenues. A Sam's Club employee starts at $10 and makes
$12.50 after four and a half years. A new Costco employee, at
$11 an hour, doesn't start out much better, but after four and a
half years she makes $19.50 an hour. In addition to this, she
receives something called an "extra check"—a bonus of more
than $2,000 every six months. A cashier at Costco, after five
years, makes about $40,000 a year. Health benefits are among
the best in the industry, with workers paying only about 12
percent of their premiums out-of-pocket while Wal-Mart
workers pay more than 40 percent.
Some proponents of corporate generosity argue that better-paid
workers are more productive. That may be the case here, since
Costco's revenues per employee are about five times as high as
Wal-Mart's. (No separate financials are available for Sam's
Club.) Then again, it's also the case that Costco sells more
expensive stuff—high-end French wine, triple-cream brie, and
Cartier watches, all of which presumably have high margins—
along with the cheap toilet tissue. Take a look at the two
retailers' summer offerings: While Wal-Mart sells a $199 swing
set, at Costco we find a "summer fortress play system" for
$1,499.99. A set of patio furniture at Wal-Mart was $199 in
early summer; a patio heater at Costco is the same price.
Costco's Web site promotes a $5,000 hot tub with a stereo. On
Wal-Mart's site last week, the most prominent item was a $48
bike—after all, its impoverished customers can't afford gas these
days.
Another theoretical benefit is that Costco employees, being
better paid, are less likely to leave the company. Again, some
data back that up: Greenhouse points to Costco's low turnover
rate, which is 20 percent and, among employees who stay at
least a year, 6 percent. Wal-Mart's is about 50 percent. But is this
a business advantage for Costco? While Greenhouse points to
the costs of training and hiring new employees, a widely leaked
2005 memo from Wal-Mart offers a different perspective. In it,
Wal-Mart's senior vice president of benefits argued that the
company's turnover rate was too low. After all, she explains,
long-term employees are more expensive and not necessarily
any more productive. Such reasoning—though sinister—may
actually help explain why Wal-Mart's profit margins are twice as
high as Costco's (3.36 percent compared with 1.75 percent).
In an interview, Costco CFO Richard Galanti told me that by
offering higher pay, Costco can hire "better-quality employees."
To Galanti, workers are a retailer's "ambassadors" to the public.
Costco may be able to attract people with more experience,
education, or a better "attitude" (e.g., a more obliging smile or
the realization that it's better not to chew gum or file your nails
on the job). All of that's probably true, though tough to
quantify—and tougher still to measure the effects of such worker
quality on Costco's business.
Even so, investors in recent years have rewarded Costco
significantly more than Wal-Mart, which may suggest that WalMart's public black eyes scare Wall Street to some degree.
Probably the worst publicity Wal-Mart has received for its
employment practices was in 2004 and 2005. During these two
years, developments in the sex-discrimination suit drew attention
to its plaintiffs' charges; numerous communities blocked WalMart from expanding stores; many news stories exposed child
labor, overtime abuses, and exploitation of undocumented
immigrants; labor and community groups were constantly
picketing the retailer; and two well-funded national
organizations formed with the express purpose of publicizing
Wal-Mart's crimes against its workforce. All of this may have
had some effect: From Jan. 1, 2004, to Jan. 1, 2006, Wal-Mart's
stock was down 9.7 percent. Costco's went up an impressive 37
percent during this time. (The S&P went up 14.5 percent.)
In the subsequent two years, the discrepancy has only deepened,
tending to confirm Galanti's argument that in the long term,
higher wages are "a great model." Indeed, analysts' consensus on
Costco's long-term growth expectations is better than their
consensus on Wal-Mart: 13.3 percent as opposed to 11.7
percent, respectively. That's intriguing because Wal-Mart is
more profitable and has demonstrated better earnings growth
(12.47 percent five-year earnings-per-share growth as opposed
to 9.8 percent for Costco). Employee relations may be part of the
picture, but Galanti points out there are many other reasons for
analysts' confidence in Costco. "Seventy percent of our earnings
come from membership fees," he says. "We'd really have to
screw up to lose that!" Costco may also be more recession-proof
than other discount retailers, because its customers are richer and
because it sells so much food relative to other goods. "Even in an
economic downturn," Galanti says, "people still have to eat."
So why does Costco bother being nice to workers, given that it is
so difficult to calculate a clear payoff for decency? One reason is
old-school: a union. About 11 percent of Costco's 127,000
employees are represented by the Teamsters Union, while not
one Wal-Mart employee is a union member. Not that Costco is a
Swedish paradise of labor-management cooperation. "We wish
they [the union] weren't there," Galanti admits, "because we
don't feel we need a third party to talk to our employees." Yet
the relationship shows that even a lackluster union like the
Teamsters can help make life better for employees.
Another factor is the personality of the CEO. In my interview
with Galanti, he mentioned Jim Sinegal every couple of minutes,
attributing the company's high wages to the CEO's personal
values. CFO Galanti acknowledged having at times argued with
his boss, urging him to curb Costco's generosity on health care.
(Sinegal eventually agreed with him, reluctantly, in 2003 but
insisted that care remain affordable to employees.)
Sinegal's kindliness is impressive, but he's also 72 years old and
thus won't be around forever. Perhaps he's created a corporate
culture strong enough to outlast him, but that's impossible to
predict. And until Costco boosters can make a concrete case that
the company's generosity—however welcome—has a duplicable
effect on the company's bottom line, it seems unlikely that a
crowd of Jim Sinegals is going to emerge in the nation's
executive suites.
movies
Superbad
Hancock's failed superhero satire.
By Dana Stevens
Wednesday, July 2, 2008, at 4:22 PM ET
In a summer when the broad deltoids of superheroes have been
weighted down with the freight of existential despair (the Hulk
is the new Hamlet; The Dark Knight the new Endgame) the
timing seems perfect for a cynical, corner-cutting mess of a
superhero like Will Smith's character in Hancock (Columbia
Pictures). Alas, the movie is also a corner-cutting mess. Things
get off to such a good start, too, with the drunken hero snoozing
on a park bench as carjacking criminals run rampant through
L.A. When a little boy awakens him with a request for help, the
surly Hancock, clad in a watch cap and grimy shorts, flies to the
scene of the crime and sloppily apprehends the bad guys,
oblivious of the collateral damage (multicar pileups, trashed
public property) he inflicts along the way.
Hancock's slipshod methods and crappy attitude have made him
an unpopular figure in the city. After he saves Ray Embrey
(Jason Bateman) from a train wreck, onlookers jeer at Hancock's
poor technique: Why couldn't he have prevented the collision
entirely by lifting Ray's car in the air and flying straight up? But
Ray, an idealistic PR executive, takes pity on Hancock and
invites him home to dinner with his wife, Mary (Charlize
Theron), and son, Aaron (Jae Head). Eventually Hancock agrees
to be coached in superhero etiquette by Ray, a branding expert.
Hancock's rebranding will involve a jail term, group therapy
sessions, and a skintight leather costume that he reluctantly dons
to stop a bank robbery in progress. Smith and Bateman are such
affable presences that even the mild laughs this premise offers
make for a jolly opening hour. But a major revelation about a
third character (along with a labored exegesis of Hancock's nearincomprehensible origin story) sends the movie into precisely
the poor-tormented-superhero territory it's supposed to be
spoofing. Hancock's satire functions on the notion that it would
be funny if saving the world from evil were just another job—
one you could be good or bad at, one that could inspire you or
leave you with midcareer burnout. As soon as the hero becomes
another wounded demigod brooding on rooftops, that premise—
and the movie—loses its sting.
Peter Berg may be best-known for the 2004 football drama
Friday Night Lights, but he has surprisingly sharp instincts as a
comic director. (His feature debut was the pitch-black 1998 cult
comedy Very Bad Things.) One precisely timed slapstick scene,
in which Smith and Theron exchange furtive blows behind
Bateman's back, points toward a promising new subgenre: the
comic-book movie as domestic farce. But only minutes after this
scene, the movie devolves into a blur of action set pieces and
superhero metaphysics (you know, that vaguely apocalyptic
blather about the convergence of good and evil forces in the
universe). The climax, a multipart showdown in the corridors of
a hospital, is unforgivably manipulative. What self-respecting
director still cuts away to shots of a heartbeat monitor flatlining? Hancock isn't the only underachiever on the premises—
the talented Berg settles for far less than he should. The movie's
final shot finds Hancock fully brand-optimized, complete with
costume and mascot, atop the requisite skyscraper. Maybe in the
sequel, he can rebrand himself as funny.
movies
The Dominatrix
Angelina Jolie crushes James McAvoy like a bug in Wanted.
By Dana Stevens
Friday, June 27, 2008, at 3:21 PM ET
When I first heard that Angelina Jolie and James McAvoy would
be paired up in an action movie this summer, I remember
scoffing about what an unsexy couple they'd make. I believe my
exact words were, "She'll crush him like a bug." "Sounds pretty
sexy to me," said my interlocutor, giving me an unsolicited yet
bracing glimpse into his fantasy life.
He was right. For those whose fantasies include being crushed
like bugs by Angelina Jolie (or beaten senseless by hulking
Russian thugs, or forced to use dead pigs for target practice by
Morgan Freeman), Wanted (Universal Pictures) is a
compendium of bedside erotica. I don't know when I've seen a
mainstream movie that so explicitly caters to the S&M niche.
And the chemistry of the central couple, which seemed destined
to bring the movie down, is instead the hottest thing in this
effects-laden but ultimately empty film.
McAvoy is the delicate-faced, slight-framed Scotsman who
seems born to play victims and pushovers. (In the last few years,
he's been Idi Amin's personal physician in The Last King of
Scotland, the sacrificial faun in The Lion, The Witch and the
Wardrobe, and the young swain unjustly accused of child rape in
Atonement.) And Jolie is, well, Angelina Jolie, the closest thing
we have to a real-life superhero. Just think about it: She seems to
be everywhere at once, never ages, travels the world crusading
for right, and can easily be pictured crouched atop a gargoyle on
the Chrysler Building. Perhaps the ultimate coup of Jolie stunt
casting was the role of Grendel's mother, the gorgeous shemonster of Robert Zemeckis' Beowulf. But Fox, the infallible
superassassin she plays here, comes in as a close second.
Wanted's plot is an overripe brew of elements from The Matrix,
Fight Club, and The Da Vinci Code. Centuries ago, it seems, a
guild of ancient weavers formed a secret society known as the
Fraternity, a band of killers with otherworldly gifts (they can
curve the trajectory of a bullet, for example, or heal their wounds
overnight in tubs filled with a special molten wax). A textile mill
in modern-day Chicago is the last outpost for the society, whose
members consult the Loom of Fate (no, seriously) for woven-incode tips on whom to kill next. None of this has anything to do
with Wesley Gibson (McAvoy), a timid accountant prone to
anxiety attacks, until he's spectacularly kidnapped by Fox (Jolie)
and forced to undergo Fraternity hazing—that is, training.
It's during these long training sequences that the movie's
semisecret BDSM subtext is at its clearest. "Not too tight, right?"
asks a Fraternity minion, tying the wimpy Wesley to a chair for
one of many brutal interrogations as Fox looks coolly on. "No,
that's … nice," replies our hero, pausing just long enough to get
a big laugh from the audience. Plenty of movies (most
disturbingly, the new breed of "extreme horror" movies like
Hostel and Saw) offer kicks by portraying the suffering of
others. But watching someone get his kicks from suffering—
especially when that someone is the male action hero with whom
the male target audience is presumably meant to identify—is a
perverse and refreshing turnabout.
When Wesley, in his words, "grows a pair" and becomes a fullfledged member of the Fraternity, bending bullets and decoding
fabric swatches with the best of them, Wanted gets less kinky
and a lot less interesting. Timur Bekmambetov, the Russian
director of the visually spectacular thrillers Night Watch and Day
Watch, loves to tease the audience with slo-mo, reverse motion,
close-up bullet-cam, and other hammy tricks. Some of these
impress by their sheer audacity: After a bad guy gets shot, for
example, we watch the bullet travel backwards, out of his skull
and back through space and time, into the gun barrel of the man
who shot him. Wanted is based on a series of comic books by
Mark Millar and J.G. Jones that are apparently so dark and
amoral as to make this movie's mayhem seem positively Amish.
Myself, I prefer action films in which the stunts, however
unlikely, adhere to at least some of the laws of physics. But if
the graphic-novel-style hyperviolence of Sin City or 300 is your
thing, go ahead and knock yourself out. Or let Angelina do it for
you … It feels so much nicer that way.
Obamamania
Nirbama
Today's Obamaism:
Editor's note: Baryogenesis, the word this Obamaism is based
on, refers to a cosmological theory for the genesis of matter in
the universe—specifically, why there are more subatomic
particles known as "baryons" than there are "anti-baryons,"
resulting in residual matter. While this is hardly a household
term, the analogy submitted by reader James Norman of Atlanta
was simply too good to pass up.
The latest addition to Slate's dictionary of Obamaisms.
By Chris Wilson
Wednesday, July 2, 2008, at 11:35 AM ET
Today's Obamaism:
Nirbama
(ner-BAH-muh).
Barackyogenesis (buh-RAK-ee-oh-JEN-uh-sis) n. An attempt
to explain why there were more Barackyons than antiBarackyons in the Democratic Party, a condition necessary for
the formation of heavier election matters.
Example: There must be some initial perturbation to explain the
Barackyogenesis problem. Many political scientists have
suggested that an imbalanced density of subatomic particles
known as "charm quarks" in the candidates led to the dominance
of Barackyons over anti-Barackyons.
n.
A state of bliss and peace gained by breaking the cycle of
reincarnation of Bushes and Clintons running for president.
Example: After seeing the political soul of George H.W. Bush
reappear in the form of his son George and that of Bill Clinton
re-emerge as his wife Hillary, many voters experienced feelings
of Nirbama when Barack Obama won the nomination.
Since Slate first launched its Encyclopedia Baracktannica in
February, more than 800 readers have written in with their own
Obamaisms, from "Barack Ness Monster" to "PostBaracalyptic." The best of these entries, along with Slate's
original Obama neologisms, are collected in a new book:
Obamamania! The English Language, Barackafied, available
now.
Since Slate first launched its Encyclopedia Baracktannica in
February, more than 800 readers have written in with their own
Obamaisms, from "Barack Ness Monster" to "PostBaracalyptic." The best of these entries, along with Slate's
original Obama neologisms, are collected in a new book:
Obamamania! The English Language, Barackafied, available
now.
In conjunction with the publication of the book, we will be
publishing a new Obamaism every morning and adding it to the
Obamamania widget above, which you can add to your
Facebook or MySpace profile or Web site.
.
In conjunction with the publication of the book, we will be
publishing a new Obamaism every morning and adding it to the
Obamamania widget above, which you can add to your
Facebook or MySpace profile or Web site.
Obamamania
.
By Chris Wilson
Monday, June 30, 2008, at 11:09 AM ET
Obamnipresent
The latest addition to Slate's dictionary of Obamaisms.
Today's Obamaism:
Obamamania
Barackyogenesis
The latest addition to Slate's dictionary of Obamaisms.
By Chris Wilson
Tuesday, July 1, 2008, at 10:11 AM ET
Obamnipresent (oh-BAHM-nuh-PREZ-uhnt) adj. Pertaining to
Barack Obama's ubiquity in discussions overheard in restaurants,
subways, bookstores, newsrooms, etc.
Example: After hearing an elderly woman mention the name
"Barack Obama" for the third time in as many minutes, even
Josh agreed that the candidate was Obamnipresent.
other magazines
Since Slate first launched its Encyclopedia Baracktannica in
February, more than 800 readers have written in with their own
Obamaisms, from "Barack Ness Monster" to "PostBaracalyptic." The best of these entries, along with Slate's
original Obama neologisms, are collected in a new book:
Obamamania! The English Language, Barackafied, available
now.
In conjunction with the publication of the book, we will be
publishing a new Obamaism every morning and adding it to the
Obamamania widget above, which you can add to your
Facebook or MySpace profile or Web site.
.
Obamamania
Baracktose Intolerant
The latest addition to Slate's dictionary of Obamaisms.
By Chris Wilson
Friday, June 27, 2008, at 11:49 AM ET
Today's Obamaism:
Baracktose intolerant (buh-RAK-tohs in-TOL-er-uhnt) adj. An
increasingly common medical condition in which the affected
person becomes violently sick in the stomach when exposed to
adulation and deification of Barack Obama.
Example: Though he was originally quite fond of Barack
Obama, the weekly meetings of the University Democrats made
Tom increasingly Baracktose intolerant.
Since Slate first launched its Encyclopedia Baracktannica in
February, more than 800 readers have written in with their own
Obamaisms, from "Barack Ness Monster" to "PostBaracalyptic." The best of these entries, along with Slate's
original Obama neologisms, are collected in a new book:
Obamamania! The English Language, Barackafied, available
June 24.
In conjunction with the publication of the book, we will be
publishing a new Obamaism every morning and adding it to the
Obamamania widget below, which you can add to your
Facebook or MySpace profile or Web site.
.
Pity the Oil Speculators
The Weekly Standard and Newsweek defend the much-maligned group.
By Morgan Smith
Tuesday, July 1, 2008, at 3:40 PM ET
Weekly Standard, July 7
A piece argues that "mustache-twirling speculators" aren't to
blame for the current oil crisis. The investors labeled with the
pejorative term speculators actually "play a salubrious role in the
market for oil." But since "how the dollar gets strong or weak is
understood even more poorly than what 'speculators' do, a crafty
politician can blame pretty much anyone he wants." … An
article considers which presidential candidate appeals more to
Catholic voters and concludes that "questions of support for the
war, the troops, and patriotism may well end up cutting in
McCain's favor, not Obama's." But in the end, Catholics are not
united as a block: "Conservative Catholics will continue to
attack Obama on abortion, embryo destruction, cloning, samesex marriage, and the judiciary—while liberal Catholics will
continue to attack McCain on the war, torture, immigration, and
climate change."
Newsweek, July 14
A piece in the "Big Thoughts" issue compares "exact coevals"
(they were born on the same date) Abraham Lincoln and Charles
Darwin to determine which man was more important. Though
they "were both revolutionaries, in the sense that both men
upended realities that prevailed when they were born," Lincoln
ultimately is more important to history because he was "sui
generis." While "there was a certain inevitability to Darwin's
theory," without Linclon's presidency, "there is no telling what
might have happened to the country." … An article reflects on
recent studies that indicate having children might negatively
affect people's happiness. One concluded that "no group of
parents—married, single, step or even empty nest—reported
significantly greater emotional well-being than people who
never had children." … An op-ed echoes the Weekly Standard's
defense of speculators, arguing that if politicians want to fault
someone for high commodities prices, "they should start with
themselves."
Vanity Fair, August 2008
A piece surveys the Bear Stearns meltdown to reveal that "more
than a few veteran Wall Streeters" think an SEC investigation
will "uncover evidence that Bear was the victim of … a
malicious attack brought by so-called short-sellers, the vultures
of Wall Street, who make bets that a firm's stock will go down."
… A lengthy Clinton campaign post-mortem suggests that chief
strategist Mark Penn "proved to be an old-fashioned sexist"
because he "did not appreciate the strength of her character as a
woman." According to the piece, "He and Bill Clinton insisted
that she not run as a woman. They ran her as tougher than any
man. They also put her out in front as her own attack dog, never
an appealing role for any candidate." … Christopher Hitchens
recounts his experience of being water-boarded. He writes, "The
'board' is the instrument, not the method. You are not being
boarded. You are being watered."
New York Review of Books, July 17
In an embed piece, Michael Massing delivers somber news
about Iraq: "The breakdown in the Army has advanced so far
that in a mere thirteen hours, I could see the rising
dissatisfaction, anger, and rebellion within it." He also observes
that the "most paradoxical" result of the Iraq invasion is "the
way it has boosted Iran's position in the region." By taking out
Saddam, "the United States removed from power Iran's mortal
enemy" and, perhaps more damaging, "[t]he electoral system the
Bush administration devised helped bring to power a Shiite
majority with long-standing cultural, religious, and economic
ties to Iran." … An essay examines the difficulties presented by
the historical study of humor. Laughter, "like sex and eating, [is]
an absolutely universal human phenomenon, and at the same
time something that is highly culturally and chronologically
specific."
The New Yorker, July 7-14
A piece by Seymour Hersh investigates the White House's latest
maneuverings toward war with Iran. The Bush administration's
"reliance on questionable operatives, and on plans involving
possible lethal action inside Iran, has created anger as well as
anxiety within the Special Operations and intelligence
communities." He also reports that at a meeting with the
Democratic congressional caucus, Secretary of Defense Robert
Gates said, according to a senator present, that a "preemptive
strike against Iran" would "create generations of jihadists, and
our grandchildren will be battling our enemies here in America."
(Gates' spokesperson "dispute[s] the senator's characterization.")
… An article explores China's exploding interest in classical
music. Though many in the music world hail China as the savior
of the genre, it "is hobbled by commercial and political
pressures. The creative climate, with its system of punishments
and rewards, still resembles that of the late-period Soviet
Union."
other magazines
No Child Left
New York Times Magazine on Europe's abysmal birth rates.
By Morgan Smith
Friday, June 27, 2008, at 4:44 PM ET
New York Times Magazine, June 29
The cover story investigates Europe's "baby bust." Contrary to
the analysis offered by social conservatives, who believe secular
lifestyles based on nontraditional gender roles are to blame,
sociologists attribute rapidly shrinking European populations to
a lack of support for working mothers. The theory plays out in
the fertility rates—countries with "greater gender equality have a
greater social commitment to day care and other institutional
support for working women," like the Netherlands and Norway,
which have more births than more traditional countries like Italy,
where "society prefers women to stay at home after they become
mothers, and the government reinforces this," even though fewer
Italian women work outside the home than their Scandinavian
counterparts. … A profile of 41-year-old Olympic swimming
hopeful Dara Torres observes that even in middle age the threetime world recorder holder "loves to win, but not as much as she
hates to lose." Torres, who employs a retinue of stretchers,
trainers, and a chiropractor to maintain her physique, will likely
become the oldest female swimmer ever to compete in the
Olympic Games.
Harper's, July 2008
An essay delivers a play-by-play of competition at the triennial
Magic Olympics, where champion-title hopefuls compete in two
fields: up-close, sleight-of-hand magic and stage magic. While
recounting his doomed performance, the author reveals, "There
are many ways to lose at the Magic Olympics. You can fail to
qualify, run out of time, get eighty-sixed on any number of
technicalities but nothing compares to the disgrace of being
redlighted in the middle of your act." … A piece profiles the
holder of the "World's First Perfect Pac-Man" title—the bemulleted Billy Mitchell, who "collected all available points—
every dot, every energizer, every ghost (while energized), every
bonus prize, for all 256 levels on his first man," thus scoring the
game's maximum 3,333,360 amount of points during a six-hour
game. Mitchell, who is in his early 40s, is of a generation of
"classic gamers," who "came of age in the early eighties" during
the height of the arcade craze and "thinks of his Pac-Man
prowess as a patriotic symbol, a matter of national pride not
unlike the space race."
Wired, July 2008
An article suggests that the "likely consequence" of growing
numbers of Chinese learning English without "enough quality
spoken practice" means that "more and more spoken English
will sound increasingly like Chinese." Already, nonnative
speakers far outnumber native speakers, and in the next decade,
native speakers will make up only 15 percent of those who use
the language. English is "on a path toward a global tongue—
what's coming to be known as Panglish." And, "[s]oon, when
Americans travel abroad, one of the languages they'll have to
learn may be their own." … A piece looks at Dark Knight
director Christopher Nolan's rejection of computer-generated
visual effects for the upcoming stunt-heavy Batman flick. It
notes, "While today's action heroes routinely come dressed in
shades of the giddy synthetic (à la Spider-Man and Iron Man),
movie fans have gorged on digital eye candy—and, perhaps
fearing retinal diabetes, now they're cutting back. … Still, gritty
naturalism is no small leap for the spandex genre. It's a mood
more identified with art noir and the prestige pic, the kind of
cinema built to attract Oscars, not mass audiences."
Economist, June 28
The cover story augurs the end of the Microsoft age. Now
stepping down from running the company he founded, Bill Gates
realized early on two now-obvious tenets about the industry: that
"computing could be a high-volume, low-margin business" and
that "making hardware and writing software could be stronger as
separate businesses." But the world's richest man is "less wellequipped for the collaborative and fragmented era of internet
computing," the piece contends. "Watching Microsoft in the
company of Google and Facebook is a bit like watching your
dad trying to be cool." … A piece on the Supreme Court's recent
handgun decision speculates on how it could affect Barack
Obama's chances in the election. If gun advocates feel that
because of the decision, their "weapons are safe, it could help
Barack Obama, since those gun-owners will feel safe to be
swayed by other things they might like about him, such as
universal health insurance." But if the decision makes them feel
like "big-city liberals want to grab their guns, that could hurt him
badly."
Must Read
A piece in The New Yorker details the shady dealings of the
third-richest man in the United States, Sheldon Adelson.
Must Skip
Newsweek's cover package on Cindy McCain reads like a
summary of already published pieces on the GOP candidate's
wife.
Best Politics Piece
An essay in the New Republic's cover package on China explains
how the one-child policy has created a Wild West of "hopeless,
volatile men."
Best Culture Piece
A Harper's piece profiles Pac-Man phenomenon Billy Mitchell.
Worst Fourth of July Issue
Time's "Patriotism" cover package is bromide-heavy. If you must
open it, skip the opening piece that features such banalities as:
"Our patriotism shapes our responsibilities as citizens, how we
navigate in the world and, ultimately, what it means to be an
American." Go straight to much better essay exploring the
differences between how liberals and conservations view loveof-country.
Correction, June 30, 2008: This article initially misspelled
Michael Kinsley's name as Michael Kinsey. (Return to the
corrected sentence.)
poem
Time, July 7
An article examines the phenomena of female suicide bombers,
revealing that they are "are uniquely effective in Iraq." Because
the "culture … forbids male police officers and checkpoint
guards to frisk women—yet also frowns on women joining the
security forces—many have easy passage to high-value targets
like police stations and markets."… An op-ed by Slate founder
Michael Kinsley* cautions that just because "the Saudis would
also like the price of oil to moderate … doesn't mean their
interests and ours are now aligned."… A piece highlights some
churches' institutional encouragement of "frequent sex" between
married couples. A few notes from a sex calendar passed out in a
workshop include: " 'Sun: Worship together'; 'Mon: Give your
wife a full body massage'; 'Tues: Quickie in any room besides
the bedroom.' " But one critic of Christian "sexhortations" says
they are just "another way of becoming the best Christian wife—
to have tons of orgasms so their husbands can go to church the
next day and tell people how they really made Jesus proud in the
sack."
"When in the Uterine Empyrean They
Told Me"
By Patrick Donnelly
Tuesday, July 1, 2008, at 7:46 AM ET
Listen to Patrick Donnelly read .
When in the uterine empyrean they told me
of love, they named it a sickness, fever, impediment
to enlightenment. Some swore it could make you wail
over hills of hell in a long black veil, defenestrate
yourself in a Second Empire gown, or stand
wringing-wet at the intersection with a cup and a sign
reading COMFORT ME WITH APPLES.
There were a few, humiliated and exalted, who rose
like comets in yellowy tiers, to sing in Provençal
of the Name, the Name, the same longing Name.
But others warned that whom He loves, He corrects,
of "friendship with benefits," balcony scenes, mad scenes
in all-white restaurants, of the turned back in bed.
But when they said I could remain behind
if I chose, like an unlit lamp,
sounding my brass and tinkling my cymbal,
"Senator Obama has serious concerns about
many provisions in this bill, especially the
provision on giving retroactive immunity to the
telephone companies. … [I]f the bill comes to the
Senate floor in its current form, he would support
a filibuster of it."
—Spokesman Bill Burton, Oct. 23, 2007
The act "is a ma
year's Protect A
grant retroactive
Senate to remo
seek full accoun
—Barack Obam
"Obama believes the D.C. handgun law is
constitutional."
—Unnamed Obama aide, Nov. 20, 2007.
Obama's camp has since said this is an
inaccurate description of his stance. And yet he
appears to have supported handgun bans in a
1996 questionnaire. (Obama denied that he filled
out the questionnaire, but his handwriting
appears on it.)
"It looks to me t
overshot the run
constitutional lim
local communiti
background che
that they're trac
crimes to find ou
—Obama, June
"Nobody is suffering more than the Palestinian
people."
—Barack Obama, March 11, 2007.
His campaign clarified: "[T]he Palestinian people
are suffering from the Hamas-led government's
refusal to renounce terrorism and join as a real
partner in the peace process."
"Israel's security
negotiable. The
contiguous and
to prosper. But
Palestinian peo
as a Jewish sta
defensible bord
capital of Israel,
—Barack Obam
His campaign la
final status issu
negotiated betw
At a meeting with an Iowa newspaper before the
primaries, Obama proposed a tax structure that
would lift the cap on income taxed for Social
Security, which currently stands at $102,000.
The proposal would raise an estimated $1.5
trillion over 10 years.
Last month in C
a plan that woul
exemption for in
$250,000 a yea
an estimated $6
Obama from ch
middle-class tax
I didn't think, I seized
the bloody flag of my attachments
and tore down the tunnel of what I couldn't know
was my millionth birth.
politics
Choose Your Own Running Mate
An interactive feature from Slate.
By Chris Wilson
Thursday, July 3, 2008, at 6:56 AM ET
Slate intern Tony Romm contributed to this feature. Interactive
by Chris Wilson and design by Jim Festante.
politics
Barack in the Middle
Keeping tabs on Obama's shifts toward the center.
By Christopher Beam
Wednesday, July 2, 2008, at 4:18 PM ET
When, within a week, Barack Obama voiced support for the
FISA "compromise" bill and the Supreme Court decision
striking down the Washington, D.C., handgun ban, the media
verdict came down: He's shifting toward the center.
More than a "clarification" but not quite a flip-flop, the
centripetal shift is a proud tradition among presidential nominees
(as is flat denial of any change in position). But Obama's
movement has been so fast that it's becoming hard to track.
Here's a quick rundown of Obama's recalibrations—or at least
statements he has made that sound like recalibrations. (Note: We
chose not to include outright flip-flops, like the public-funding
switcheroo.) We'll update the list as necessary.
Obama declined to sign a Senate measure
condemning MoveOn.org for its "General Betray
Us" ad, dismissing the resolution as a political
stunt. "The focus of the United States Senate
should be on ending this war, not on criticizing
newspaper advertisements," he said in a
statement on Sept. 20, 2007.
In his June 30 speech on patriotism, Obama
said, "All toopolitics
often, our politics still seems
trapped in these
threadbare
arguments, a
Thisold,
Means
War
fact most evident
during
recent
debates
Democrats
attack our
McCain's
war record.
McCain rejoices.
about the war
Iraq, when
those who opposed
By in
Christopher
Beam
administration
policyJune
were30,
tagged
byatsome
Monday,
2008,
7:16 as
PM ET
unpatriotic, and a general providing his best
counsel on how to move forward in Iraq was
accused of Top
betrayal."
McCain adviser Charlie Black was eviscerated last week for
suggesting that a terrorist attack would help John McCain win
the presidency. Please. If al-Qaida really wanted McCain in the
Oval Office, the terrorists would attack his military record.
"I think we should use the hammer of a potential
opt-out as leverage to ensure that we actually
get labor and environmental standards that are
enforced. And that is not what has been
happening so far."
—Feb. 26, 2008.
He also called NAFTA "devastating" and "a big
mistake."
"SometimesOn
during
campaigns
rhetoric
gets
Sunday's
Face thethe
Nation,
Obama
supporter retired Gen.
overheated Wesley
and amplified,"
he
told
Fortune
in "I don't think riding in a
Clark, remarkably, went there:
June.
fighter plane and getting shot down is a qualification to be
president." (Full context here.) So did liberal blogger John
Aravosis, writing that "[g]etting shot down, tortured, and then
doing propaganda for the enemy is not command experience."
On Monday, former Obama adviser Rand Beers argued that
McCain's isolation as a POW limited his insight on national
security issues.
The McCain camp could barely contain its joy at having the
senator's war record besmirched. "The American people will
Obama declined to answer questions about
A new Obama
adharshly
touts the
federal
judge
anyone
wholegislation,
demeans or attacks [McCain's]
whether he would have signed President
which "slashed
the rolls
by 80 percent."
service,"
spokesman
Brian Rogers said Sunday. Bright and early
Clinton's welfare-reform package. "I'm not going
on Monday, the campaign launched a "McCain Truth Squad"
to relitigate what happened back in the '90s,"
dedicated to defending the senator's record. (Well, relaunched,
Obama said on July 17, 2007. "I'm talking about
technically—his campaign unveiled a similar effort in South
what's going to be happening going forward."
Carolina in January.) On a conference call, Sen. John Warner, RBack in 1997, when President Clinton signed the
Va., declared himself "utterly shocked" by Clark's comment.
bill, Obama suggested he would not.
Barack Obama indirectly denounced Clark during a speech on
patriotism, and his campaign later issued a statement saying
Obama "rejects" the remarks. But Rogers was unmoved: "We've
.
learned we need to wait and see what Sen. Obama actually does,
rather than take him at his word."
What's left? Obama still hasn't edged rightward on the issues of
Iraq (he still says he'll start pulling troops out right away), global
As Obama and his surrogates should know, any chance McCain
warming (he still wants cap and trade), health care (he wants a
has to talk about his military service is a net positive for the
national system "similar to the plan available to members of
Arizona senator, especially if it's in the context of an "attack." So
Congress"), or immigration (he still supports a pathway to
far in the campaign, Obama has been hogging all the umbrage.
citizenship). And you can see why. These issues are the
He started a site to refute e-mail smears; he took offense when a
foundations of his candidacy. Scrap them, and you've got
Republican congressman referred to him as "that boy"; he cries
Democrat X.
foul every time someone uses his middle name. Now McCain
gets to show that Obama's not the only one being attacked
Still, don't be surprised if the line changes slightly on Iraq.
unfairly.
Changing circumstances on the ground could force Obama's
hand rightward. Check back for updates.
But the best part about McCain's defense? It doubles as offense.
Over the weekend, the campaign unveiled a new slogan, "Putting
Anything we missed? Let us know.
Country First." The message: John McCain serves his country
first and himself second, while Barack Obama does the opposite.
(If that sounds familiar, recall Obama's charge that Hillary
Clinton would "say and do anything to get elected.") The
"McCain Truth Squad" fits the new theme snugly: 1) It suggests
Democrats are desperate enough to attack McCain for serving
his country, and 2) contrasts McCain's military service with
Obama's lack thereof. If the TV commercial isn't in the can
already, I bet it'll be on YouTube by the end of the week.
McCain's camp has experience fielding potshots at his military
career. Back in April, Sen. Jay Rockefeller, D-W.Va., essentially
denounced McCain for being a fighter pilot: "What happened
when they [the missiles] get to the ground? He doesn't know.
You have to care about the lives of people. McCain never gets
into those issues." McCain took public offense; Rockefeller
apologized. Earlier this month, Gore Vidal questioned McCain's
war record in a New York Times Magazine interview: "Who
started this rumor that he was a war hero? Where does that come
from, aside from himself? About his suffering in the prison war
camp?" The McCain camp declined to respond, presumably
noting the "only a crank argues with a crank" rule.
Obama's camp is in a bind. On the one hand, Clark's point—that
being a prisoner of war has little bearing on one's ability to be
commander in chief of the United States—is defensible. It would
be political suicide, though, for Obama to say so. The best
strategy would be a full-out denunciation of attacks on McCain's
record—but only if his supporters actually cut it out. When John
McCain called for North Carolina Republicans to pull an ad
linking Obama to the Rev. Jeremiah Wright, the state GOP went
ahead and aired it. Democrats denounced the apparent wink-andnod. Here's Obama's chance to look like a strong leader by
keeping his surrogates in check—and to stop them from
pursuing a loser issue.
reading list
Independent Reading
The best books and Web sites about the birth of America.
By Jacob Weisberg
Saturday, June 28, 2008, at 7:04 AM ET
Several years ago, I went to a Fourth of July barbecue in the
Hudson Valley, N.Y. After we'd had a few beers, the host led his
guests up to a nearby Revolutionary War redoubt, where he
proceeded to read aloud from the Declaration of Independence.
My wife found this hokey and embarrassing, but I loved it. If
evangelicals are going insist on putting the Christ back into
Christmas, we secular humanists can take the trouble to bring
Jefferson to our Independence Day celebrations.
Thanks to the Internet, it's possible to get a feel for the drafting
of the Declaration as never before. A good place to start is at the
Library of Congress Web site, where you can view the lone
surviving fragment of Jefferson's first draft and examine the
holograph manuscript of what's known as the rough draft, with
its strangely moving cross-outs, insertions, and pasted-on flap.
USHistory.org is the best site for tracking the changes made by
John Adams and Benjamin Franklin and for comparing the
language of the various versions. Who says you can't edit by
committee? "That all Men are created equal and independent;
that from that equal Creation they derive Rights inherent and
unalienable"—that was reasonably well said. "That they are
endowed by their creator with inherent & inalienable rights" is
slightly more elegant. "That they are endowed by their Creator
with certain inalienable rights"—now that really nails it. For a
singing version, order the delightful musical 1776 from Netflix
and force your children to watch it with you.
The most dazzling revisionist account of Jefferson's handiwork
remains Garry Wills' Inventing America, which argues that
Jefferson was mainly influenced by Scottish Enlightenment
thinkers like David Hume and Adam Smith, rather than by John
Locke, as I learned in high school. Wills goes to great lengths to
prove that Jefferson hadn't even read Locke's Two Treatises of
Government by that summer in Philadelphia. Pauline Maier's
American Scripture revises the story in a different direction,
away from the conception of the flame-haired founding father as
solitary genius. In drafting the Declaration, Maier argues,
Jefferson drew on dozens of local expressions of similar
sentiment. The ideas expressed in the Declaration, she contends,
were in the Colonial air.
The worst bit of congressional editing was the deletion, at the
insistence of the Southern delegates, of Jefferson's furious
denunciation of the British slave trade. The contradiction of
owning 200 or so slaves while naming King George a pirate and
a prostitute for allowing them to be owned seems not to have
occurred to Jefferson at the time. Thanks to DNA testing and
Web-based genealogy tools, the dimensions of this paradox
continue to unfold. Annette Gordon-Reed's book Thomas
Jefferson and Sally Hemings: An American Controversy was
largely responsible for initiating a general historical consensus
that Jefferson did father several children with his wife's halfsister, who was a slave. In her forthcoming book, The Hemingses
of Monticello (you can pre-order it on Amazon), Gordon-Reed
draws on Jefferson's passion for record-keeping to tell the story
of the black branch of the family over the course of a century, up
to the sale of Monticello in 1831. The darker-skinned
descendants still aren't welcome at Jefferson family picnics. You
can follow the filings in the paternity suit on the Monticello Web
site.
Among revisionist historians, my favorite is David Hackett
Fischer, who is both a masterful storyteller and a brilliant
debunker of patriotic myth. Fischer's wonderful book Paul
Revere's Ride demolishes the hoary fable of Longfellow's poem.
In Washington's Crossing, Fischer deconstructs Emanuel
Leutze's heroic painting and gives us in its place a textured
narrative of Washington's military leadership. My favorite of
Fischer's books, however, is Albion's Seed, which demonstrates
that our treasured American customs are merely transplanted
British folkways. The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance
notwithstanding, the true facts about American history seem a
lot more exciting these days than the legend.
A version of this article also appears in the Washington Post's
"Outlook" section.
recycled
How To Plan a Fireworks Show
Those big fireworks displays don't choreograph themselves.
By Daniel Engber
Wednesday, July 2, 2008, at 2:22 PM ET
Millions of Americans will celebrate July 4 by watching a
fireworks show. How do they choreograph those midair
pyrotechnics?
With a pen and paper or on the computer. First, the sponsor of a
fireworks show will tell the pyrotechnics company what music
they want to use for their display. (Sometimes they let the
company decide.) The choreographer then listens to the music
several times through to get an idea of which shells to use. Felix
Grucci, who does the choreography for one of America's most
prominent fireworks companies, will play the piece six or seven
times at high volume before he starts writing out his ideas.
music. If he's using a fireworks choreography software package,
he doesn't have to look up (or memorize) all of the height and
timing information for each shell. Instead, he can drag items
from a digital catalog directly into an online script.
A firing script also has to specify where the shells are fired from
and at what angle. A big fireworks show will make use of
mortars at several locations, and each location might have guns
pointing in different directions. This lets the choreographer fill
up the sky with effects from left to right as well as up and down.
"Angling" also helps to keep things from getting too smoky in
one particular area. If too many shells go off in the same spot, a
haze may start to obscure the fireworks and make bright-red
bursts look a little pink.
More advanced notations for fireworks choreography have been
proposed over the years. The pyrotechnics expert Takeo Shimizu
used a musical score to represent his designs: Each stave
corresponded to a different firing location, and each note
represented a particular kind of shell fired at a particular time. In
his classic work on fireworks and fireworks choreography,
Shimizu argues for simple arrangements of color and form:
"Mixing red and yellow stars sometimes succeeds," he says, "but
red and green looks dirty." He also pointed out that some
effects—like tight, round bursts—build tension in the viewer,
while others—like the willow effect—tend to release it.
Explainer thanks M. Philip Butler of Fireworks by Grucci and
Dorothy Drewes of American Fireworks News.
slate v
Summary Judgment for July 4
A daily video from Slate V.
Some pieces of music demand certain fireworks effects at
various moments in the song. If a choreographer were putting
something together for the Phil Collins song "Two Hearts," he'd
probably ask for a couple of shells that burst into heart shapes.
Thursday, July 3, 2008, at 10:46 AM ET
slate v
Fireworks by Grucci uses special forms that break the display
into one-minute intervals. The form specifies exactly which type
of shell should be fired at each moment. To time this properly,
the choreographer has to know how long it takes for each shell
to open up after it's fired. For example, if he wanted two hearts
to appear just when Phil Collins mentions hearts, he'd have to
mark them on the form about five seconds before the words
come in the song.
Calories on the Menu
A daily video from Slate V.
Wednesday, July 2, 2008, at 11:33 AM ET
slate v
Sex Differences: The Science
A daily video from Slate V.
In general, the bigger the shell, the longer it will take to burst
and the higher it will go. By inserting the size, firing time, and
type of each shell into a firing script, a choreographer can lay out
a series of effects that unfold at different heights in time to the
Tuesday, July 1, 2008, at 10:45 AM ET
slate v
Dear Prudence: Outsourced Pregnancy
arguments to reach the right conclusion. In fact, horse racing is
the only major sport that should ban steroids from competition.
A daily video from Slate V.
Monday, June 30, 2008, at 11:07 AM ET
Before we get to that, let's look at the two standard arguments
against horse-juicing: first, that it provides an unfair advantage
to certain horses and owners; second, that it endangers the
animals.
slate v
Worst Weekend Weather
A daily video from Slate V.
Friday, June 27, 2008, at 1:22 PM ET
sports nut
Hi-Ho, Steroids, Away!
Why it matters that racehorses are on the juice.
By Daniel Engber
Friday, June 27, 2008, at 3:10 PM ET
The great horse-doping scandal of 2008 began last month when
trainer Rick Dutrow admitted to giving his Thoroughbreds—
including Kentucky Derby and Preakness winner Big Brown—
monthly injections of Winstrol, an anabolic steroid. "I don't
know what it does," he explained. "I just like using it." Two days
ago, the New York Times reported that Dutrow also enjoys using
clenbuterol—a bronchial dilator that's been shown to induce
muscle growth in cattle.
Did Dutrow's injections help Big Brown win the Derby? (Racing
without the drug on June 8, the horse made a stunning last-place
finish in the Belmont.) Could anabolic steroids have pushed the
filly Eight Belles to break both her ankles in Churchill Downs?
And what about Barbaro's shattered leg?
Mustering obligatory outrage, Congress called a hearing last
week to investigate charges of fraud and animal cruelty. Dutrow
called in sick for the hearing, but his Brian McNamee moment
had already set off a binge of self-criticism in racing circles. The
Jockey Club recommended a ban on all anabolic steroids; Big
Brown's owners unilaterally volunteered to make their stable
steroid-free; and racing officials proclaimed that horse-juicing
would be eliminated in a matter of months. Witnesses on Capitol
Hill spoke of "leveling the playing the field" and protecting the
horses from unscrupulous trainers.
This posturing makes no sense. There's nothing unfair about
horse-juicing, and it's not clear that anabolic steroids are harmful
to the animals. As with almost every discussion of doping in
professional sports, the case for prohibition is based on an
unthinking, puritanical zeal for "natural performance" and bogus
readings of the medical literature. But in this case, the
lawmakers and industry officials happened to use the wrong
There's certainly a strong incentive to guarantee the fairness of
Thoroughbred racing: $15 billion is wagered on the sport every
year. It's clear, though, that anabolic steroids aren't skewing the
odds. Every trainer has access to the drugs, and there's no rule
against using them. Among the 38 states with horse racing, 28
have no regulations at all concerning anabolic steroids. (That
includes the three states that host Triple Crown races.) The
remaining 10 states have a partial ban that makes an exception
for four drugs—including Winstrol. And in the states with more
stringent rules, the prohibitions apply only on race day, not
during the months of training that come before. In other words,
there's nothing on the books to stop a guy like Dutrow from
juicing his horses on a regular basis. Indeed, "most all" trainers
use anabolic steroids to help Thoroughbreds recover from their
workouts, according to senior track veterinarian Larry Bramlage.
If everyone has access to steroids, then how is it cheating to use
them?
Plenty of "performance-enhancing" technologies are embraced
in horse racing, including many that clearly cause harm to the
animals. It's not cheating, for example, to make your horse go
faster by whipping its shoulder with a riding crop or to inject it
with furosemide, a drug that prevents bleeding in the lungs and
may improve racing times. Breeders cross and recross lines to
produce animals of freakish proportions, with broad, powerful
upper bodies and spindly knees and ankles. A colt that isn't
developing properly may undergo a surgical procedure to
straighten its legs. There's nothing natural about any of this, but
there's nothing "unfair" about it, either.
What about the health problems associated with anabolic
steroids? Rick Arthur, the equine medical director of the
California Horse Racing Board, argues that they "change the
horse both physically and mentally." When the state passed its
partial ban in January 2007, Arthur proclaimed that "anabolic
steroids allow horses to train harder. Perhaps, too hard. …
[E]liminating [them] could very well have a favorable long-term
impact on the longevity of horses' racing careers." (PDF)
On the surface, it might seem like more animals are dying in
competition than ever before. A sudden (but temporary) spike in
the yearly death totals for California racehorses prompted
Arthur's concern. Two weeks ago, the Associated Press
published a survey that connected the deaths of Barbaro and
Eight Belles to a series of shocking numbers about the sport:
Thoroughbred racetracks have reported more than 5,000 deaths
since 2003, or about three every day.
But the data on catastrophic injuries are spotty at best. The AP
report gives only absolute totals; it doesn't tell us how the injury
rate has changed over the years. It's altogether possible that the
rate has remained stable for decades, or even decreased over
time. According to the Jockey Club, Thoroughbreds have been
running fewer races per year, on average, than in past decades.
(The numbers reached a peak in 1960.) It's not clear how, or if,
that relates to the number of race-related deaths.
Meanwhile, tests run on Eight Belles after her collapse showed
no traces of "performance-enhancing" drugs in her bloodstream.
Overall, there's no hard evidence linking anabolic-steroid use
with catastrophic injury in racehorses. According to C. Wayne
McIlwraith, the past president of the American College of
Veterinary Surgeons and the American Association of Equine
Practitioners, the drugs might even help prevent injury by
strengthening the tendons and ligaments. (They do have some
side effects, including a sort of equine 'roid rage: A juiced-up
and angry stallion might be quicker to bite, strike, or kick, and
will repeatedly defecate over the feces of another stallion.) So,
why the rush to ban them all? "Perception is reality," says
McIlwraith. "If people perceive the drugs as harmful, then the
horses shouldn't get them."
Horse-juicing isn't unfair, and we have no proof that it's harmful
to the animals. The drugs are no less "natural" than baroque
breeding schedules and surgical interventions. And we don't
have to worry about the social influence of drug-use among
celebrity horses—no ponies are going to start shooting up
because they saw Big Brown on television.
But horse racing should ban the practice anyway.
We may not have any studies linking anabolic steroids with
catastrophic injuries, but the absence of evidence is not, as they
say, the evidence of absence. At the very least, we know these
drugs have significant side effects. And before doctors can
safely prescribe them—to humans or horses—we'll need more
data from controlled clinical trials.
Of course you could make the same argument about the entire
sport of horse racing. A football player knows he may be gravely
injured—or even killed—in the course of competition; a
Thoroughbred does not. In the United States, one or two horses
die for every 1,000 races. No one asks the animals if it's worth
the risk.
technology
Tag, You're It
Embracing the Internet might salvage the SEC chairman's legacy.
By Chadwick Matlin
Friday, June 27, 2008, at 1:07 PM ET
The Securities and Exchange Commission has not had a good
year. Bear Stearns' bailout, an evaporating pool of credit, and
investigations from Congress have all compounded to put SEC
Chairman Christopher Cox on the hot seat. Cox presumably has
but a few months left in his tenure, and this lame duck will not
be remembered as one of the SEC's finest stewards. But there's
one initiative on the horizon that may actually make a
difference: a transparency effort called XBRL that could drag
Wall Street into today's Internet age.
It's a mouthful, but XBRL stands for eXtensible Business
Reporting Language. It's a programming language that
essentially functions as a dictionary of terms that helps organize
financial data. Just as scientists classify new organisms under
certain taxonomies, XBRL allows accountants to classify
financial metrics under agreed-upon categories. So, for example,
when a company reports a particular figure for annual revenues,
XBRL tags it in such a way that any computer can almost
immediately find and categorize that figure as "annual
revenues."
That doesn't mean they should never be used. A baseball player
who wants to juice up can weigh the potential risks and benefits
of an experimental treatment. Is he willing to endure the acne,
shrunken testicles, and other side effects of nandrolone in
exchange for boosted statistics and a higher salary? Is the tradeoff worth the possibility of more serious, long-term damage?
For the last several years, about 70 companies have been
voluntarily filing their reports using XBRL as part of an SEC
pilot program. In May, the agency mandated that companies
with a "public float" (that is, shares available on the open
market) of more than $5 billion (approximately the 500 largest
companies) have to file their 2008 annual returns using XBRL.
The rest of the publicly held companies will fall in line over the
next two years.
If horses could talk, they might make a similar calculation.
Would Big Brown take Winstrol if it might help him win the
Triple Crown and retire to the farm as a pampered, well-paid
stud? But a horse can't weigh those pros and cons, and he can't
give informed consent. Until we're absolutely certain that
anabolic steroids don't cause injury, we shouldn't be making that
decision for them.
Before we cover how XBRL is going to make corporate
America more Web-friendly, take a moment to appreciate the
quaint way things are done currently. All publicly traded
companies are required to file quarterly and annual financial
reports to the SEC. Accountants tabulate metrics like revenues
and gross margins and then file them in something called the
EDGAR database. Basically, EDGAR is a reservoir of dull,
numbers-heavy documents that are digital replicas of the paperheavy reports destroying the environment.
EDGAR's reports are all stored in HTML and TXT document
formats, so while they're digital, they aren't easily manipulated.
If investors, journalists, or institutional researchers want to start
comparing stats between different competitors or contrast this
quarter's Netflix filing with last year's annual report, they have to
transfer the numbers into a spreadsheet by hand. This is an
unwieldy and labor-intensive process—which means that unless
you're a monetary masochist, there's little reason for you to
comb through EDGAR's innards.
The SEC thinks XBRL is a better way. Here's how it should
work: Netflix and Blockbuster both report their net incomes in
annual and quarterly reports. As of now, they do that in a table
on their EDGAR-filed quarterly return. Once they start filing
under XBRL, their income numbers will be tagged
"NetIncomeLoss." Because all net income numbers are tagged
uniformly, a computer can automatically pluck the numbers off
the report and place them together into a database. Imagine the
XBRL filing as a Rubik's Cube that you can actually pick up,
analyze, and rotate to try and crack the puzzle. The EDGAR
filing is merely a photograph of the 3-by-3 cube—in order to
shift the squares, you have to build your own cube based on the
photo of the original.
All of this means that financial analysis is about to get crowdsourced. Currently, institutional investors are the primary source
of transcribed EDGAR data. Companies like Thomson Reuters,
FactSet, and Standard & Poors lease out the data to Web sites,
investment banks, and money managers. Once XBRL takes root
in the financial community, anyone will be able to access and
manipulate the data (through a techy process called "parsing").
The bankers' analytical tools are no longer going to be the
exclusive property of Wall Street; they'll be the product of the
masses on the Web.
A similar transformation has taken place in the political world.
This year's primary gantlet was memorable not only for the high
drama of the race but also for the technological innovations that
accompanied long election nights. Magic walls, exit-poll
aggregators, and delegate calculators filled TV and computer
screens, made possible by a technology related to XBRL (called
XML, or extensible markup language). We could be nearing an
era when an industry's quarterly reports can be ranked and
organized instantaneously according to the average investor's
whims.
At least one site is already preparing for the new XBRL age.
Wikinvest, a startup out of San Francisco, applies the Wikipedia
crowd-sourced model to business coverage. Users can edit
nearly anything on the site: tweak text about a company's
financial past, add annotations to a company's stock graph, or
input data to something called WikiData. Currently, WikiData
relies on users to transcribe data from EDGAR reports and
provide links back to the files to prove the numbers. This,
obviously, is not ideal. The creators of Wikinvest say that once
XBRL goes universal, the data will automatically port into the
site. When those data are combined with the site's graphical and
editorial content, Wikinvest believes it will offer users a
contextual experience that only the bigwigs currently get.
This should make fiscal middlemen sweat. Financial journalists
will soon be competing with the masses to find the juiciest
contextual stats in the reports, just as their political brethren did
during the primary season. Institutional investors' database
transcriptions will no longer be needed if their clients spend the
time to build their own parser. That means a loss of revenue for
many of the data intermediaries as their business model becomes
wholly focused on providing smart analysis, not raw data.
The institutional investors I talked to seemed to welcome that
change; XBRL allows them to redirect resources from
transcription to analysis. That shift is an advantageous one,
according to Suresh Kavan, president of the investment and
advisory group at Thomson Reuters. Kavan told me that
transcription revenue is so small, "I wouldn't even call it a
pimple; it's smaller than that. It's maybe a small, pink dot on the
underside of my foot."
When I asked Kavan whether he felt threatened by opening up
financial data to the masses, he was quick to shoot the question
down. "I love the idea," he said, and he added that smart
financial companies are preparing for a new financial landscape
in which analysis on the Internet was just as integral to making
financial decisions as reports from professional analysts.
But Kavan was adamant that XBRL and the added presence of
financial tools on the Web aren't a risk to institutional investors.
The folks at Reuters Thomson are paid professionals with years
of experience and access to sources of information bloggers
could only dream of. He made an analogy to the news industry,
where he suggested that the public trusts information created by
trained professionals more than the thoughts scribbled by
amateurs on the Internet. Logically, he's right. But practically,
the current state of the newspaper and newsmagazine industries
shows that institutional investors' wallets may have reason to be
anxious.
The stronger argument is that XBRL is not a fundamental
change for highly active traders. Real movement in the markets
occurs as companies hint at the kind of profits or losses expected
this quarter (as seen in Lehman Brothers' recent dive). That's
well before quarterly reports are filed, so XBRL won't provide
any added insight until after the markets have made much or all
of their moves. The technology is better suited for casual traders
looking for more information about the historical performance of
a company.
It's this last point that justifies Kavan's confidence. High-profile
clients aren't going to turn their backs on institutional investors
for the blogosphere anytime soon. But for average independent
investors who already rely on the Internet for much of their data,
XBRL could provide some fancy new tools to play with. It's
possible that XBRL is a win for nearly everyone. For that, Chris
Cox and the SEC should be applauded. Even a lame duck can
sometimes lay a golden egg.
television
Summer TV
Celebrity Circus, Celebrity Family Feud, Wipeout, Monkids—the mind reels …
By Troy Patterson
Wednesday, July 2, 2008, at 6:18 PM ET
There is nothing duller than whining on about the death of
civilization every time some astoundingly crass program squirts
out of the television industry and into your living room. To write
words to this effect is hyperbolic and hackneyed; as a matter of
general principle, such sophomoric talk has no place in a serious
discussion of popular culture. But then mindless July rolls
around, with its languor and loose inhibitions and sun-struck
lunacy, and in the light of summer television, civilization does
not seem to have a pulse. It looks quite dead indeed. Smells
dead, too—the corpse stinking like the street gutter outside a
Chinatown fish market after a nine-day heat wave.
Each network adds its own signature undertones to this aroma,
and at NBC, you get your first extended whiff of what Ben
Silverman's fun factory will be spewing. Other TV execs give
the populace circuses in the metaphorical sense of Juvenal's lines
about panem and circenses, but Silverman, the competitive type,
has shown them up. A year into his tenure as the co-chairman of
NBC Entertainment—where, perhaps partly because of the
writers' strike, American Gladiators is the only success he can
take credit for—Silverman is giving the populace actual
circuses. With celebrities. Which is all there is to know about the
competition show Celebrity Circus (Wednesdays at 8 p.m. ET).
Contestants include Stacey Dash, who played Dionne in
Clueless; Christopher Knight, who played Peter on The Brady
Bunch; and Rachel Hunter, the model who played house with
Rod Stewart for eight years. The show feels baroque and flashily
mundane at once. The tight-rope acts and aerial tricks, the fetishfreak costumes and drag-show makeup, the presence of Jackass'
Wee Man—all of these combine to give it the feel of a Cirque de
Soleil performance reconceived for the second-fanciest mall in
your town.
If this sounds too exotic for your taste, then it's time for
Celebrity Family Feud (NBC, Tuesdays at 8 p.m. ET). Al
Roker—once merely a corpulent weatherman, now a tubby all-
purpose personality—hosts, losing none of his meager dignity in
the process. The climax of last night's show saw the Pastores
(the actual family of character actor Vincent Pastore, Big Pussy
on The Sopranos) matched off against the Giffords. "You
already know my husband, Frank," said Kathy Lee to Al, "and
our son Cody. ..."
Al asked them to name something you'd hate to see fall on the
floor during an operation. Hmmm ... Well, survey says there's
the scalpel (41), body parts (32), the patient (8), and also "the
doctor himself," (12) as Cody put it. Then what? The Pastores
had an idea: "Blood." "Blood!" "Blood." "BLOOD." Al to the
audience: "There will be blood!" Yes, that will pass for wit on a
show where the Giffords got to that last round by defeating Dog
the Bounty Hunter and his bitch and their brood. In the other
semifinal, the Pastores sneaked past the cast of E!'s The Girls
Next Door—Hugh Hefner's harem, in other words. "No
pouting," Roker vainly instructed the bimbos when they lost.
"No pouting."
Celebrity Family Feud is up against ABC's Wipeout (8 p.m. ET),
which is like American Gladiators, except totally jaded where
the NBC show is blindly jingoistic. In the course of attempting
masochistic physical challenges, its contestants fall down very
often, and we watch these plunges in sadistic slow-motion
replay, with the whole Telestrator treatment and everything. The
sideline reporter makes the cutest little wince whenever a
contestant falls off "the Dreadmill" and into a pit of foam and
flour. Meanwhile, back in front of a cheap green screen, the
hosts snark nonstop about the contestants' athleticism and sweat
stains and haircuts and, good post-postmodern wiseasses that
they are, also about the slo-mo replays. Wipeout dresses up the
usual network idiocy with cable-style snark (think Best Week
Ever) and an exuberant lack of decency that's pure Internet—a
TMZ-esque disregard for mercy, an anonymous blog
commentor's sense of self-restraint. "It's a summer show," as one
host said, "but it's definitely more interested in the fall."
Wipeout leads into I Survived a Japanese Game Show!, which
is self-evidently awesome in its depiction of two teams of
Americans doing goofy stuff in a Tokyo TV studio. Last night, I
Survived a Japanese Game Show! in turn led into the specialedition newsmagazine Primetime: The Outsiders, a program
that exists to prove that ABC News is winning this season's hot
race to the bottom of the barrel. In teasing a segment about an
obese invalid, they employed slo-mo so that we could really
appreciate the way the man jiggled around. The main story was a
triumphantly vacuous exploration of the subculture of people
who keep monkeys at home. Not as pets, mind you, but in lieu of
children—perpetual 2-year-olds with tails, "monkids." So, the
segment had monkeys in dresses and on playground swing sets,
where they bit children. Somehow, they got some hot chicks on
motorcycles into the story, too. Naturally, the primary subject
had her little capuchin daughter on her shoulder throughout the
interview. The reporter was David Muir. His shirt and trouser
had a sleazy sheen to them, as if he'd stepped out of a Tom Ford
ad. His best question about that particular monkey was, "What
would she do with this lollipop?" "She" being the monkey, of
course, and Muir's producers knowing that—on summer nights
from now until the end of days—it's better to show than to tell.
television
The Apprentice
My day at reality-TV school.
By Troy Patterson
Friday, June 27, 2008, at 12:11 PM ET
One of the great stock scenes of 20th-century child-rearing—a
cliché since, let's say, the first season of American Bandstand—
sees Mom lecturing Junior that it's a nice summer day outside
and that it's such a shame he's indoors watching television. But
these are different times, and a new breed of American mother
walks among us, sometimes even upright. She is the RealityTelevision Stage Mom, and some nice summer day very soon, I
imagine she'll be able to drop off Junior at a place very much
like the New York Reality TV School so that he can go indoors
and prepare to be watched on television. Imagine the parting
scene at curbsides: her firm phrases of encouragement, the moist
peck planted on the center of the lad's tender forehead, the final
words warmly hectoring Junior to bear in mind all that he'd
learned in those many hours of studying Puck on the third season
of The Real World, frame by gnarly frame.
The NYRTVS is the brainchild of Robert Galinsky, a 43-yearold acting coach and improv comedian. Of his two IMDb acting
credits, the more amusing to read is "Fanatic Hassidic Jew" in
something called Brooklyn Babylon (2001). Galinsky claims to
have coached 50 Cent for a recent audition. I must talk about this
with Fiddy.
According to the crude text on the NYRTVS Web site, the
school's mission is to pioneer "the development of reality TV
training in order for professionals and beginners to take their
place as exciting, confident and vibrant real people/entertainers
on any reality TV show." It seems gratuitous to follow that quote
with a "sic," so I will merely add that the school boasts of having
"worked with personalities" who have debased themselves on
shows including The Bachelor, Big Brother, and The Apprentice.
Last Saturday in Manhattan, about 20 aspiring followers in those
footsteps—real people and some entertainers, too—participated
in Galinsky's one-day intensive course. It cost $139, with a $20
discount for early registration. It amounted to a three-hour lesson
in cultivating narcissism—being one's self as noisily as possible.
It was not quite as imbecilic as I'd hoped.
We entered a room at a Chelsea theater workshop, murmured
among ourselves over up-tempo pop songs, and, just after noon,
formed a circle. Two cameramen circled the circle, encouraging
our camera consciousness and stroking our vanity, and the
Panopticon element was heightened by the presence of a handful
of journalists, including a woman from Swedish radio with a
microphone in her hand and pants low on her hips. We met
Galinsky and the other instructors, Robert Russell and Jorge
Bendersky. Russell works on the casting side of the business and
has spent the past 27 years helping to assemble all the game
shows, reality programs, and dating trash that you love to hate
yourself for watching. His head was shaved bare, and his chin
was sternly goateed. "I feed off personality for a living," Russell
said. "I'm like a vulture that way." He said this at the end of day,
I should note, during a well-padded Q-and-A session that
Galinsky insisted on calling a "press conference."
Jorge, meanwhile, is a standout contestant on the current season
of Groomer Has It, which airs on Animal Planet and is to
poodle-appropriate barber scissors as Project Runway is to
pinking shears. His T-shirt boasted that he hearted Argentina,
and his accent matched. "I'm like the love child of Fran Drescher
and Ricky Ricardo," Jorge passionately lisped, continuing, "I
was born without an indoor voice." Later, in a private
conversation, he would underline the importance of developing
quality sound bites.
And the pupils? We were mostly in our 30s and 40s—struggling
actors, aspiring reality-show hosts, and not a few of those
women who, having correctly been told all their lives that they're
pretty, take that praise as a license to spend perfectly good
money on mediocre head shots. There was a woman who
introduced herself as a recovering alcoholic, and we applauded
her years of sobriety. Then she explained that she suffers from
alcohol-related brain damage, and we didn't know what to say.
She, of course, showed a lot of potential. There was a performer
named Queen Esther, but she bailed early, not long after the
introductory stretching exercise—an acting-class staple—and the
enforced three-minute dance party to which it inexorably led. In
parting, Queen Esther explained that she just won a singing
contest and was headed uptown to perform at Jazzmobile's
Summerfest. We wished her "good luck" when we should have
said, "Break a leg." If Galinsky noticed this faux pas, he let it
pass, preferring to note that Her Majesty had, in heralding this
appearance, increased her "IMI"—i.e., her "Individual
Marketing Index."
Galinsky is fond of acronyms and such. For instance, our only
handout listed his "8 Commandments" of reality TV—"with an
all new 9th Bonus Commandment!"—and its fifth item was,
"Thou Shall Groom Hairy 'PITTS,' " which stands for "personal
issues to tease." The commandment went on: "As a reality star I
will always groom my PITTS and allow them to be accessible—
they are relationship, family, work related." What he's struggling
to say here is that in an audition tape and on a reality show itself,
it's crucial to develop themes that audiences can hold onto. Like
much of Galinsky's advice, this would seem obvious to any
reality-TV glutton who exhibits the slightest traces of
thoughtfulness. The brilliance of Galinksy's business plan is that
only a few people have been able to watch that much television
without losing their minds, and most of them are too busy
writing for Television Without Pity to start up a competing class.
He's alone in giving reality-TV wannabes the "emotional
preparation" to be themselves.
After cruising hastily through the Commandments ("2. Thou
Shall Never Say 'I AM AN ACTOR' ... [E]verything I do must
be candid, genuine and not an act"), we participated in an
exercise called On the Grill With Phil. Phil—a Galinsky
associate wearing plaid pants, a trim mustache, and a
cartoonishly abrasive personality—recited text from actual want
ads and Craigslist postings announcing reality-show auditions,
and we jumped before a camera to blare out our qualifications
for the respective shows. One of only two married students, I
stepped forward in response to a call for ABC's Wife Swap;
being self-conscious in the wrong way, I was lousy. The
strongest real person there was a male extrovert from the outer
boroughs, a guy boasting an easygoing smarminess and a résumé
featuring an appearance on NBC's Deal or No Deal and a related
Web series. During a break, he told me, sotto voce, that he's an
actor and feels himself most comfortable with "sitcoms,
commercials, hosting, and reality." He wore a horribly
flamboyant jacket modeled on Old Glory, a garment that
simultaneously desecrated the flag and defiled the retina. The
casting expert complimented him highly on its assertiveness.
The afternoon began winding down with a "networking" mixer.
It might have been easier to network had the food consisted of
hors d'oeuvres, say, as opposed to Greek salad, but we managed.
A fellow student shared that she and her husband co-own a filmproduction company, and that she was developing a movie about
reality TV, and that the casting guy had been particularly
inspiring in his blunt viciousness. The brain-damaged lady,
sprightly still, distributed her press kit. Galinksy, in closing, said
he hoped that he'd given us some tools with which we could
express our core selves with "confidence and purity": "That's
pretty much a good recipe for life." Indeed, the New York
Reality TV School encourages its students to ask, "Who am
I?"—but if you've enrolled, you already know the answer: I'm a
star.
the breakfast table
The Supreme Court Breakfast Table
Should there be a shooting range next to the Supreme Court gift shop?
By Walter Dellinger, Jack Goldsmith, Dahlia Lithwick, and Cliff
Sloan
Friday, June 27, 2008, at 5:40 PM ET
From: Dahlia Lithwick
To: Walter Dellinger, Jack Goldsmith, and Cliff Sloan
Subject: Come Together
Posted Saturday, June 21, 2008, at 11:31 AM ET
Dear Walter, Jack, and Cliff:
Waaaack! It's June??
I mean, um, welcome to Slate's seventh annual Supreme Court
Breakfast Table, celebrating the final week of the court's 2007
term. Walter—if I may brag on your behalf—your final entry in
last year's exchange snagged an "Exemplary Legal Writing"
award from the Green Bag this year. (No pressure.) Jack and
Cliff, welcome! Jack, your book won the same award. (No
pressure.)
We are so excited to have you with us for breakfast this year,
Jack and Cliff. There may not be quite as many thrills and spills
as we saw at the end of last term, but there are several important
cases due to come down in the next few days—virtually all of
which Walter appears to have argued. Perhaps the most
important case of the term, Boumediene v. Bush, has already
been decided, finding that the right of habeas corpus was not
properly stripped from the detainees at Guantanamo Bay. I
suggested last week that the language of the dissenters—who
were weirdly confused about whether the courts or the detainees
are more worthy of contempt—was both overheated and
dangerous. This weekend Justice Antonin Scalia appeared on
Charlie Rose and essentially restated his dissent: "Something
like 30 of the people that the military have released from
Guantanamo have returned to the battlefield and killed
Americans and others. Do you expect that number to be reduced
when judges are making the decision who know less than the
military?" He reiterated that "the result of that answer is more
people, more Americans will be killed. I think that's almost for
sure."
Is he right, Jack? And if he is, should that be the end of the
constitutional discussion? Does it matter at all that most of the
remaining detainees at Gitmo are probably not the rabid,
frothing killers he describes? Or that some may have become
rabid, frothing killers as a result of their treatment at
Guantanamo?
One of the things I'd like to hear from you, gentlemen, is
whether you've been surprised by the almost total absence of the
sharply polarized 5-4 decisions we were reading this time last
year. Instead, this term (with the glaring exception of the habeas
case) has seen scads of unanimous, or near-unanimous, decisions
and strange-bedfellow opinions that defy the usual
liberal/conservative labels and reflect a new pragmatic
minimalism at the center of the court.
So, what's up with that? Are the liberals caving or poised for
triumph? Is the generational split on the importance of precedent
between the younger and older conservatives becoming a real
rift? Has John Roberts finally steered the court to a bipartisan
new Age of Constitutional Aquarius? Or were this term's cases
just not the sorts of cases that keep ideologues up at night?
Let me say again just how delighted I am to be ushering in the
last week of the term with you all. Welcome to Slate.
Cheers,
Dahlia
From: Cliff Sloan
To: Walter Dellinger, Jack Goldsmith, and Dahlia Lithwick
Subject: Not Your Typical Term
Posted Monday, June 23, 2008, at 9:33 AM ET
Good morning, everybody. It's a pleasure to belly up to the table
with you.
Dahlia, I want to pick up on your question about the voting
patterns on the court this year. With the huge caveat that we'll
see what happens with the pending decisions on gun control, the
death penalty for child rapists, and punitive damages, many
people are buzzing about the fact that the court this term has not
fallen into a predictable 5-4, liberal/conservative + swing-voteon-either-side pattern. On cases ranging from voter identification
and lethal injection to child pornography, international treaty
protections for criminal defendants, and employer
communications about unions, the Supreme Court has decided
cases by votes of 7 to 2 and 6 to 3, rather than the bare majority
5-4 cases that have dominated public perception in recent years.
Although the court's blockbuster Guantanamo case was decided
along familiar lines on a 5-4 vote (Justice Anthony Kennedy
plus the four "liberals"), that exception seemed to prove the rule
this term. "Swing" voter Kennedy has been on the losing side in
four of six 5-4 decisions so far, for example, and only one other
5-4 decision has seen all four "liberals" together on the same
side of the case.
As you point out, Dahlia, commentators have offered a range of
intriguing theories for this development, including the idea that
justices like John Paul Stevens and Stephen Breyer are
sometimes voting with the "conservatives" to shape and steer the
outcome in more moderate directions and the notion that Chief
Justice Roberts is successfully crafting a winning center. But I
think lying in plain sight is a far more obvious explanation: I
think it much more likely that the unexpected voting patterns
this term result from the fact that the justices actually approach
the cases as legal cases, rather than political platforms, and that
the nuances of each case actually matter. In this view, the
Supreme Court actually functions like a court, as it should,
rather than as a predictable political player.
To take just one example, in the voter identification case,
Stevens' plurality opinion upholding the Indiana law requiring
government-issued photo ID to vote repeatedly emphasizes the
absence of facts in the record about identifiable harm from the
law. Stevens believes deeply in the crucible of litigation and in
the importance of the actual record of a case. This perspective
has informed his views in opinions hailed by liberals, as in his
dissent in Bush v. Gore, and reviled by liberals, as in his opinion
for the court in the Paula Jones case. It should not be surprising
to find that a case with a weak factual record failed to persuade
him. Nor does it take sophisticated detective work or attribution
of hidden political motives to understand the basis for his
position.
I know Justice Stevens well from having clerked for him. Most
fundamentally, his votes and opinions this term vividly illustrate
the danger of pigeonholing him. It is worth remembering that,
before he began to be lionized as the "leader of the liberal
block," he was commonly termed a "maverick." And, as his
record this term confirms, the most accurate label for him
actually is the description that was used when he was nominated
to the court almost 33 years ago—a "judge's judge."
Whatever one thinks of the outcome in particular cases this year,
I think it's a breath of fresh air to see not only Justice Stevens,
but the Supreme Court as a whole departing from rigid
predictability. It's especially interesting to observe this
development in the last year of President Bush's tenure, a tenure
that began with what seemed to be the astonishingly weak
decision in Bush v. Gore. I find it refreshing to see the court
defying ideological type and confounding pundits.
What do you think? Is this too simplistic an explanation for the
way the court has shuffled the deck this term?
Best,
Cliff
From: Dahlia Lithwick
To: Walter Dellinger, Jack Goldsmith, and Cliff Sloan
Subject: Blowin' in the Wind
Posted Monday, June 23, 2008, at 1:01 PM ET
Dear Walter and Cliff and Jack:
It's almost impossible to explain what happens at the Supreme
Court when the press corps discovers that this last Monday of
the term—a day ripe with the promise of guns and oil slicks and
capital punishment—swirls down the tubes in the span of 20
minutes of boring decisions. Three opinions were handed down
this morning—Sprint Communications v. APCC Services,
Greenlaw v. United States, and Rothgery v. Gillespie County—
each of which we will read as fast as we can. So disappointing
were these results that half the press corps promptly took off the
rest of the day to get pedicures. And there's this poor guy I know
named Walter Dellinger, who now has three cases that he has
argued all coming down later this week ... what does that feel
like, Walter?
Nevertheless, and through the fog of despair at the utter
lameness of this morning's catch, I would be remiss not to point
out this glorious bright spot: Chief Justice Roberts, dissenting in
Sprint Communications, reminds us this morning what happens
when you put a hip guy into a square job. The case is an insanely
technical dispute over whether a group of "aggregators," who
have been assigned the legal claims of pay-phone operators that
are suing long-distance carriers, have standing to bring suit in
federal court. I know, I know—tell me when your heart starts up
again. In any event, the chief justice, dissenting from Justice
Stephen Breyer's majority opinion finding that there is standing,
writes as follows:
The absence of any right to the substantive
recovery means that respondents cannot
benefit from the judgment they seek and thus
lack Article III standing. "When you got
nothing, you got nothing to lose." Bob Dylan,
"Like A Rolling Stone," on Highway 61
Revisited (Columbia Records, 1965).
Smell like a reader contest to you??? Yup. So while we
Breakfasters toil away on today's opinions, we invite readers to
submit entries for Dylan lyrics that sum up any case or dissent
from the 2007 Supreme Court term. We'll post our favorites.
Send mail to Dylan-tante@hotmail.com. I guess in anticipation
of the D.C. guns case, I'll offer up this line from "Knockin' on
Heaven's Door":
Mama, put my guns in the ground
I can't shoot them anymore.
Later,
Dahlia
From: Walter Dellinger
To: Jack Goldsmith, Dahlia Lithwick, and Cliff Sloan
Subject: A New Era of Good Feelings?
Updated Tuesday, June 24, 2008, at 11:10 AM ET
Dear Dahlia, Jack, and Cliff:
First, Dahlia, to answer your question about what it's like to have
three cases I argued still undecided—well, it seems kind of odd.
The statistical chances against none of the three being
announced today were pretty long. There is always a whole lot
to do on a day when a case you've argued is announced, and it
blows up your schedule when it happens. I'm not sure what you
do when two or three are all announced at once. I guess I am
about to find out.
Today we were supposed to write about the "landmark" cases to
be announced this morning. I didn't know it was possible to find
three such uneventful cases left at this time of the year. Thank
goodness for the chief's Bob Dylan quote. Is it true that I am
barred from entering your contest? That's a shame since I believe
that few, if any, people who follow the court know as many
lyrics by Bob Dylan (or other rock-'n'-roll greats for that matter)
as I do. I would have been a serious contender for the prize.
What? There's no prize? Well, nevermind.
In the absence of important cases, I would retreat to Big Themes
of the term. But here I am skeptical of all of the analyses
explaining why the court has "moved" in the direction of greater
moderation and consensus, less ideological divide, and fewer 5-4
cases. There has been a good bit of imaginative speculation
about the causes of this new Era of Good Feelings at the Marble
Palace. But I don't buy the underlying premise that the court has
"moved." I just think there are simply fewer cases on the court's
plate this term that lend themselves to divisive 5-4 splits. It's the
docket that's different, not the justices.
Evidence cited for a shift or movement on the court includes 1)
some instances of "liberal" justices—John Paul Stevens and
Stephen Breyer—joining in "conservative" results; 2) some
instances of "conservative" justices—the chief justice and
Justice Alito—joining in "liberal" results; and 3) the fact that the
resulting decline in 5-4 cases has been accompanied by a rise in
the number of "let's all agree to agree" 9-0 cases.
But, as Cliff convincingly notes this morning, Justice John Paul
Stevens' vote to decline to invalidate the Indiana voter ID law in
Crawford v. Marion County Election Board, and his and Justice
Breyer's votes sustaining Kentucky's lethal injection process in
Baze v. Rees, may well be explained by their lawyerly view that
there was simply not a sufficient basis in the record to invalidate
either state's "illiberal" procedures. Whether or not one agrees
with their conclusions, there is no reason to think either justice
would have written or voted differently had the same case
appeared a year ago.
As for the chief justice and Justice Samuel Alito joining in
decisions favoring victims of discrimination—see, for example,
CBOCS West v. Humphries, which recognized a right to sue for
retaliation for bringing a discrimination claim and was decided
7-2—these outcomes were determined by precedent, not politics,
most recently by the decision of the court in Jackson v.
Birmingham Board of Education, which held that a high-school
coach dismissed for complaining about discrimination against
girls' sports could sue for reinstatement under Title IX. The
opinions in CBOCS West make clear that a majority of this court
would have held against the retaliation claim if the court hadn't
already heard Jackson. It is also clear that Coach Jackson (for
whom I argued in the Supreme Court) would have been tossed
out of court if his case had come before the court this term. And
had that happened, every coach, teacher, and guidance counselor
would have learned to keep their mouths shut when the girls'
teams were denied heated gyms, real backboards, and buses to
the away games like the boys have.
Is it a sign of some new moderation that the court is actually
respecting stare decisis? I don't think so. The employment
discrimination cases involve statutory interpretation, and such
cases have always been accorded the highest and strongest
version of respect for prior precedent. If you are a new chief
justice or an associate justice, why in the world would you want
to eviscerate the doctrine of stare decisis in interpreting statutes?
To do that would mean that when the next wave of federal laws
(which could be the work of a dramatically new federal
government) come before your court, your own decisions putting
an interpretative gloss on those laws would not be the least bit
binding on subsequent courts.
To say the Supreme Court has "moved" this term would imply
that cases decided in the last couple of terms would have come
out differently—in vote or tone if not result—had they been
argued and decided this term. But I see no evidence that this is
so. My assumption is that the federal partial-birth abortion case,
the school desegregation cases from Louisville, Ky., and Seattle,
and the campaign finance cases surely would have had the same
5-4 splits and produced the same degree of rancor if they had
been argued and decided this term. In every one of those cases,
the court decided more sweepingly than was necessary to resolve
the particular issue before the court. When the next wave of
abortion cases comes before this court, and when it first
confronts the Establishment Clause cases that were nowhere to
be seen this year, this term's glimmer of consensus and
minimalism may be long gone.
Jack and Cliff, in celebration of this slow news day, Dahlia and I
just went on the first-ever Supreme Court Breakfast Table
Alternative Activity Road Trip, in which we traveled to the
Brookings panel launching Ben Wittes' new book, Law and the
Long War, to hear Jack, Seth Waxman, and Stuart Taylor discuss
the issues Ben raises. Jack, both you and Seth have played heroic
roles in these extraordinary times of clashing concerns of liberty
and security, and all four of you were terrific today. Boumediene
is undoubtedly a case of historic importance, and we should all
discuss it tomorrow. Jack, you were head of the Office of Legal
Counsel at a most critical period. Your thoughts are the ones we
most look forward to.
Best,
Walter
From: Jack Goldsmith
To: Walter Dellinger, Dahlia Lithwick, and Cliff Sloan
Subject: Boumediene: A Huge Deal or a Gentle Nudge?
Posted Tuesday, June 24, 2008, at 11:07 AM ET
Greetings everyone. Sorry to be late.
I agree with Walter that the number of 5-4 votes on the court this
year probably doesn't indicate a trend toward a new moderate
center. Seven hotly contested cases (that is why they are last)
have not yet been announced. If most of these traditionally
splintered late decisions are 5-4, the court won't be far from its
average of 5-4 votes for the last 10 years (22 percent). (The
outlier was last term, when more than one-third of the decisions
were decided by 5-4.) But even if there is more consensus this
term, I am skeptical of Cliff's suggestion that the reason is that
the court is approaching cases legally rather than politically.
Why would the court be political in the last few years but care
more about law this year? The appearance of consensus and
surprising votes is likely—as Walter suggests—a function of the
accidental lineup of cases.
And now to the enigmatic Boumediene decision, which gave
Gitmo detainees a constitutional right to challenge the legality of
their detention in federal court. Here is one indication of the
decision's oddness: Chief Justice Roberts' dissent, which Justice
Scalia joins, disparages the decision's "modest practical results"
and notes that it provides a hollow victory to the detainees, and
Justice Scalia's dissent, which Chief Justice Roberts joins,
predicts the decision will result in the release of dangerous
terrorists and "almost certainly cause more Americans to be
killed." Either could be right.
On my own first reading of the case, I was drawn to Justice
Scalia's view. The majority opinion by Justice Kennedy (for
whom I clerked in the 1990 term) is extraordinary in its claims
of judicial power during war. The court for the first time confers
constitutional habeas corpus rights on alleged enemy prisoners
captured and detained outside the United States during war.
These rights are much more generous than anything
contemplated by the international laws of war. More amazingly,
for the first time during a war, the court invalidated a military
measure—a statute that stripped habeas corpus in lieu of
detention review by a military tribunal and the D.C. Circuit—
that had the support of both Congress and the president. The
decision only extends judicial review of military detentions to
Gitmo, but the court hints that its writ might go wherever the
military goes, depending on the circumstances. And the court
suggests that alleged terrorists may get unprecedented access to
lawyers, witnesses, and classified information and adds that
"more may be required."
Read for all it says and implies, this decision could place an
extraordinary burden on the commander in chief and our
soldiers. It might require release of detainees at Gitmo for whom
the military lacks the quality and quantity of evidence that a new
and more demanding standard requires. We are not facing up to
the implications of this possibility if we assume, as Dahlia did
last week, that the remaining prisoners at Gitmo are not terribly
dangerous. The government made mistakes in its Gitmo
detentions during the last seven years and has released many less
dangerous or innocent prisoners. But the most careful study of
the Gitmo population—Chapter 3 in Ben Wittes' great new book,
Law and the Long War—concludes that a substantial number of
the remaining prisoners are committed and very dangerous
terrorist threats to the United States. (Wittes has estimated
elsewhere that this figure is about 100.) And the potential
implications of the court's ruling are not limited to release of
prisoners from Gitmo. The fact that it could also place greater
burdens of evidence-gathering on soldiers on the battlefield and
at the margins means that terrorists we capture in the future will
not be detained or will be released prematurely. We should not
avert our eyes from the fact that higher standards of judicial
review designed to minimize false positives in military
detentions will likely produce false negatives that mean more
Americans will be killed than would otherwise be the case.
After reading Boumediene a few times, however, I doubt that
Justice Scalia's worst-case scenario will come to pass. Because
at the end of Justice Kennedy's opaque opinion, no doubt in
response to the fierce dissents, he walks away from its more
burdensome implications. He notes that "accommodations can
be made to reduce the burden habeas corpus proceedings will
place on the military." He acknowledges (citing a progovernment state secrets case) the government's "legitimate
interest in protecting sources and methods of intelligence
gathering." He insists that "the law must accord the Executive
substantial authority to apprehend and detain those who pose a
real danger to our security." And he states (again citing a
famously pro-government precedent) that "in considering both
the procedural and substantive standards used to impose
detention to prevent acts of terrorism, proper deference must be
accorded to the political branches."
I don't think this prospective deference to the political branches
in a case that affords them little deference is posturing. I think
Justice Kennedy means it. His opinion is mostly directed to the
political branches' attempt to deny the court a seat at the table in
reviewing counterterrorism policy. But he also seems to realize
that, as Justice O'Connor said in a 2005 speech at West Point
concerning the court's role in terrorism cases, "The court is only
one branch of government, and it cannot, and should not, give
broad answers to the difficult policy questions that face our
nation today." These difficult policy questions often require
trade-offs between liberty and security that the politically
unaccountable court, for all its assertions of relevance, is
uncomfortable making. Uncomfortable and ill-equipped. For as
Justice Kennedy says in one of the most revealing passages in
his opinion, "Unlike the President and some designated members
of Congress, neither the members of this Court nor most federal
judges begin the day with briefings that may describe new and
serious threats to our Nation and its people." When this
admission is combined with Kennedy's prospective pledges of
deference and his insistence that the habeas remedy is flexible
and depends on the nature of the threat, the opinion seems much
less threatening to the executive branch.
In truth, Boumediene could turn out to be a huge deal or not a
big deal at all; the court leaves open almost all possibilities
except the elimination of some form of habeas review over
Gitmo detentions. I think the decision will, over time, come to
look like the court's other terrorism decisions—Hamdi (the 2004
case that upheld the president's power to detain a U.S. citizen
enemy combatant but imposed modest due process constraints)
and Hamdan (the 2006 case that invalidated the president's
military commissions but invited Congress to reconstitute them,
which it did). Both of these cases were originally viewed as
stinging defeats for the president that undermined his war-onterrorism policies. Over time, they came to be seen as gentle
nudges by the court to the president and Congress to work
together, leading to improvements in the quality of our
counterterrorism policies from the baseline of 2001.
But not enough improvement. Congress still has not done
anything since its September 2001 Authorization To Use
Military Force to clarify who precisely in this novel war can be
detained under traditional noncriminal military detention
powers. Nor has it yet said anything about standards of proof,
access to evidence and lawyers, the relationship between
detention and trial, and many other issues that a comprehensive
detention regime should address. All Congress has done about
detention is to strip habeas corpus and establish direct judicial
review over the military detainee review procedures to ensure
their compliance with the military's procedures and "the
Constitution and laws of the United States," a standard that
provides no concrete guidance whatsoever to courts. Chief
Justice Roberts' excellent dissent argued that the court should
have first allowed the lower courts to consider the meaning of
this statutory standard and the possibility that it was an adequate
substitute for habeas before deciding the constitutional question.
I agree, but the truth is that Congress provided no real guidance
on these issues in the statute.
Despite its extravagant rhetoric and reasoning, in Boumediene
the Supreme Court has once again left open the door for the
political branches to take the lead together in making the
difficult tradeoffs required to craft a long-term detention policy.
Whether and when they will do so remains to be seen. The issue
has already become entangled in election-year politics, with the
White House and Republican members of Congress threatening
to push comprehensive legislation that will put the Democrats
and their presidential candidate on the spot, and many
Democrats insisting that any such legislation should await the
election.
Any thoughts, Cliff, Dahlia, or Walter, on whether this
legislation is a good idea, whether it should happen before or
after the election, and what it should look like? I have views, but
I'm out of time and space.
Jack
From: Dahlia Lithwick
To: Walter Dellinger, Jack Goldsmith, and Cliff Sloan
Subject: Are They Really Just "False Positives"?
Updated Tuesday, June 24, 2008, at 11:09 PM ET
Jack: Thanks so much for your thoughts on the Guantanamo
case. As Walter observed last night, your actual experience here
is worth exponentially more than so much of the rhythmic
drumming we've been hearing on the subject. And I completely
agree with your conclusion that this case is not as consequential,
for good or for bad, as some court-watchers have suggested.
This decision—like Hamdan—is a sort of jump-start for
democracy. It will likely lead the executive branch and Congress
to further refine their terror policies. Checks! Balances! It
works!
of being penned up like baby veal. I believe that what I did say
was that among the 270 men still held at Guantanamo, there
were "people who were grabbed as teens and others who claim
actual innocence." Whether they ever were dangerous, or
whether—after six years of abusive confinement—they have
become so, I have no idea. It's all come down to a smackdown of
the expert reports.
I suppose that I can see your citation of Ben Wittes' Chapter 3—
or his estimate that of the 270 prisoners at Guantanamo, about
100 are too dangerous to let go—and raise you the incredibly
disturbing new McClatchy report last week on released detainees
who had been captured "on the basis of flimsy or fabricated
evidence, old personal scores or bounty payments." (That same
McClatchy report confirms that prisoner abuse and mistreatment
were rampant at Gitmo, and the new report from Physicians for
Human Rights arrives at the same conclusion.) I will then cite
the Seton Hall study showing that just 45 percent of 516
Guantanamo detainees committed hostile acts against the United
States or its allies, and only 8 percent were al-Qaida fighters.
You will no doubt counter with the study from West Point's
Combating Terrorism Center, which (using the same raw data)
found that 73 percent of the prisoners posed a "demonstrated
threat." Do we really think this is a matter best settled by dueling
expert reports?
Using the report of your choosing, let's agree there are incredibly
dangerous people still at Gitmo, but also that there are very
probably some who are not—or who are dangerous now but
were not when they were captured—a state for which the United
States bears at least some moral responsibility. And then let's get
to the hard part. You write that "higher standards of judicial
review designed to minimize false positives in military
detentions will likely produce false negatives that mean more
Americans will be killed than would otherwise be the case." Do
we protect the rights of these false positives or not? I always
thought that was a pretty fundamental legal principle, although
sometimes we call them "innocents" rather than "false positives."
It is the willingness to sacrifice both these nondangerous
prisoners and those fundamental principles that frustrates liberals
most.
I imagine Walter and Cliff have more to add, unless Walter is
carbo-loading in anticipation of tomorrow's SCOTUS dump.
Again, Jack, thanks for your thoughts.
Best,
Dahlia
If I may take issue with you on one point, it's your
characterization of my characterization of the remaining
prisoners at Gitmo as "not terribly dangerous." I don't think I
said that. Never having met any of them, I would not presume to
judge their dangerousness, especially after more than six years
From: Jack Goldsmith
To: Walter Dellinger, Dahlia Lithwick, and Cliff Sloan
Subject: The Proper Error Rate Is Never Zero
Posted Tuesday, June 24, 2008, at 6:36 PM ET
Dear Dahlia, Cliff, and Walter:
I think Dahlia and I have hit on the hardest and most important
policy question in the design of a detention system for dangerous
terrorists: how the system should strike the balance between the
erroneous detention of the innocent and the erroneous release of
dangerous terrorists. The bad guys do not wear uniforms or dog
tags, so the chance of mistakes is higher than in a traditional war
and so, too, is the cost of those mistakes, which is potentially
indefinite detention. On the other hand, the average terrorist
today is much more dangerous than the average soldier in World
War II or the average criminal. So mistakes in either direction
are really bad.
In analyzing Justice Scalia's claim that Americans would die
because of the Boumediene decision, I said that "higher
standards of judicial review designed to minimize false positives
in military detentions will likely produce false negatives that
mean more Americans will be killed than would otherwise be
the case." My point was that we shouldn't flinch from
recognizing (as I probably incorrectly took you to be doing) that
higher standards for detention that better protect innocent
detainees will at some point likely result in the deaths of the
innocent attacked by terrorists erroneously released.
You respond that it is a "fundamental legal principle" that we
"protect the rights of 'false positives'—i.e., the innocent." I
agree. But this "fundamental" principle is not an absolute one.
We might be able to design a procedural system that would
guarantee no mistaken detentions (I doubt it), but that system
would come at the very high cost of allowing many mistaken
releases of dangerous terrorists. Every system of detention faces
this quandary. The criminal law system's "beyond a reasonable
doubt" standard is commonly said to be premised on the idea
that it is better for 10 people to go free than for one innocent to
be convicted. This means that the criminal system tolerates the
conviction of innocents (as many DNA cases have shown), and
we build many layers of legal doctrine to privilege the finality of
those convictions over the ability of innocent convicts to
vindicate themselves. We do that because at some level, we
recognize that the proper error rate, even for criminal justice, is
not zero.
If our criminal law system is not and is not designed to be
perfect, then we should not expect our military detention system
to be, either. This is why I disagree with you that recognizing the
possibility of mistaken detentions in this system constitutes a
"willingness to sacrifice both those nondangerous prisoners and
those fundamental principles that frustrate liberals most." Even
liberals, I assume, would not want to design a system that
ensured no mistaken detentions, for that system would be more
demanding than our criminal law system and would involve the
release of many very dangerous people. Am I right about this?
If I am right, then the hard question is where and how to draw
the line: What kind of risks in both directions are we willing to
assume, and which procedural system best gets us to that point?
I think we both agree that the system in place before
Boumediene was not up to the task, though I suspect we disagree
on how to strike the balance going forward. One point I was
trying to make in my last post is that while courts undoubtedly
have a role to play in monitoring and legitimizing the military
detention system, the political branches are best positioned to
decide the hard liberty and security trade-offs that the system
tries to guarantee. They are best positioned because they have
more information about the risks of terrorism, weighed against
the risk of being too aggressive against terrorism, and because
they face the electorate if they get that trade-off wrong. Whether
the political branches—in particular Congress—have the
political desire to exercise their duties and assume these
responsibilities is another question altogether.
This might be my last post as tomorrow's decisions will move us
on to terrain beyond my expertise. Thanks for letting me join in!
Jack
From: Walter Dellinger
To: Jack Goldsmith, Dahlia Lithwick, and Cliff Sloan
Subject: It's Huge
Posted Tuesday, June 24, 2008, at 11:06 PM ET
Dear Dahlia, Jack, and Cliff:
Jack's posting on Boumediene is a very insightful and balanced
account of that decision and its potential consequences. He does
not shrink from acknowledging the potential danger to the
security of Americans that many of those detained at
Guantanamo pose. Although he applauds Chief Justice Roberts'
dissent and finds the majority's rhetoric "extravagant," he
reassuringly concludes (in contrast to the somewhat hysterical
reaction to the decision from many on the right) that the
Supreme Court "has once again left open the door for the
political branches" to make the "difficult tradeoffs" involved in
crafting a long-term detention policy.
On three points I would differ from or expand upon Jack's
thoughts. First, I do not agree that Boumediene "could turn out to
be a huge deal or not a big deal at all." It's huge. Second, the
court was very likely influenced in reaching this decision by the
fact that the current administration has repeatedly, recklessly,
and needlessly undermined the basis for Congress and the court
to trust the executive branch to act lawfully. And third, both the
rights of the detainee and the security against malefactors among
them might be better off, had the administration not provided a
process that was far too little, far too late. The enduring mystery
will be why the administration refused to engage Congress
(which itself is not without blame) early on with a timely
resolution that would have protected both liberty and security
and been sustained by the court.
partially or entirely in secret, avoiding
disclosure of information that would
compromise intelligence sources or reveal
vulnerabilities in our defenses. And they can
be expeditious.
We noted, however, a point that seemed obvious: The White
House's announced intention to preclude any form of judicial
review would be fatal to the plan.
… [I]t cannot be constitutional to exclude the
courts altogether. The attempt to do so might
in fact come back to haunt the government,
because any federal judge might assert the
inherent constitutional power of the courts.
The president and Congress would be well
advised to provide for judicial review by a
single designated federal appeals court, a
special panel of judges established for the
purpose or by the Supreme Court itself. Secret
evidence alleged to be material to a conviction
could be reviewed in camera by the judges or
the justices. Independent review outside the
executive branch is essential if the nation is to
be assured that such military commissions are
fairly designed to ascertain guilt and are
limited to the extraordinary circumstances that
alone can justify their use.
Jack's reason for thinking that Boumediene could turn out to be
"not a big deal at all" is that the court leaves open "almost all
possibilities except the elimination of some form of habeas
review over Gitmo detentions." But "some form of habeas
review" is huge. Boumediene, like the cases that preceded it, is
profoundly important not because of the sweep of the rights it
guarantees to detainees; those rights may indeed turn out to be
modest and judicial involvement quite deferential. It's huge
because of the extravagant claims of authority rejected. The
detainee line of cases may have only "imposed modest due
process restraints," but the line between some due process and
none is at the heart of liberty.
The court's concerns for due process could not have been allayed
by the administration's early invocation of the disturbing notion
that procedures for determining guilt or innocence could be
truncated because terrorists attacking the United States deserve
no better. That sentiment may well be true: The problem is that
we can't know in advance whether the person being held in
detention is indeed such a person. More broadly, the court's
willingness to trust the executive branch to determine fairly
whether particular detentions are justified was severely
undermined by the administration's violation of countless laws,
which it implausibly justified by utterly unconvincing (and
intended to be secret) torture memos and by implausibly
defended violations of provisions of the Foreign Intelligence
Survelliance Law and other enactments.
Remember that the administration's first plan for dealing with
detainees, announced by White House counsel Alberto
Gonzales, was to set up military commissions with no judicial
review. My Duke University colleague Chris Schroeder and I
defended the plan to use military commissions against attack
from some civil libertarians. Writing on Dec. 6, 2001, we argued
in the pages of the Washington Post that
Military trials commissioned by the president
have occurred since the beginning of the
republic. In time of war, they represent an
effective means of dealing with hostile
combatants—especially those captured on
foreign soil—free of evidentiary rules
designed to serve the social goals of ordinary
times. Military commissions can function
I quote this not (or at least, not exclusively) as an "I told you so."
The point we made seemed rather obvious, both then and now. If
asked to do so by the president, Congress would have passed—
and the court would have sustained—a sensible system of
commission trials with some procedural safeguards and with
perhaps some provision for continued detention of some
individuals who could not be criminally convicted but who
manifestly were a threat to U.S. security. Perhaps any judicial
review could have been postponed until after the completion of
commission trials—if trials had proceeded.
But people were simply detained year after year. Torture was
used. A nation's reputation in the world was tarnished. Trust was
destroyed. And the presidency itself was weakened.
Bringing "some due process" to bear on all this is huge.
Regards,
Walter
From: Cliff Sloan
To: Walter Dellinger, Jack Goldsmith, and Dahlia Lithwick
Subject: This "Adequate" Substitute for Habeas ...
Posted Tuesday, June 24, 2008, at 11:30 PM ET
Dear Walter and Dahlia and Jack:
Jack and Dahlia—you're both correctly focused on the hard and
important question of the procedures that should govern going
forward in the detainee cases, a question not resolved by the
Supreme Court decision (although you might not know that from
some of the overheated commentary on the case). But I think it's
also important to dwell a bit more on the procedures that were at
issue before the Supreme Court—particularly in light of Chief
Justice Roberts' dissent arguing that these procedures should
have been given a chance to work—a point that, while I do not
agree with it, I find considerably more substantial than the tablethumping in Justice Scalia's dissent. It's especially important to
understand what was at stake here in light of denunciations like
Sen. McCain's castigation of Boumediene as "one of the worst
decisions in history."
The debate over the "adequacy of a substitute for habeas" and
the nature of legal procedures can sound dry and technical. I
think it's worth remembering two important points, both of
which help to humanize the question of the adequacy of
procedures.
The first is that principles like representation by counsel really
do matter in allowing innocent people who have been locked up
to show their innocence. Nowhere was this point demonstrated
more vividly than in Seth Waxman's rebuttal in his Supreme
Court argument on behalf of the detainees. It is quite simply one
of the best rebuttals I have ever heard in any court, and it bears
quoting at length. Recall that these are the last words the justices
heard in the Guantanamo argument, and think about the impact
they must have made on a justice like, say, Anthony Kennedy:
WAXMAN: ... Mr. Kurnaz ... was a petitioner
in this court, but he has since been released by
the government because of the fact that he had
what the CSRTs [the military tribunals] won't
give him, which is a lawyer. He was told, two
years after he was detained—he's a German
permanent resident—he was told at his CSRT,
as many of these individuals were not, that he
was being held because he associated with a
known terrorist. And he was told the name.
He was told that he associated with somebody
called Selcook Bilgen who, the government
contended, was ... a terrorist, who was—had
blown himself up while Mr. Kurnaz was in
detention ... and in a suicide bombing; and all
that Mr. Kurnaz could say at his CSRT where
he had no lawyer and had no access to
information was, 'I never had any reason to
suspect he was a terrorist.'
Well, when the government, in the habeas
proceedings [which the government believed
should not have been allowed], filed its factual
return in Judge Green's court, it filed as its
factual return the CSRT record.
His counsel saw that accusation. Within 24
hours, his counsel had affidavits not only from
the German prosecutor but from the
supposedly deceased Mr. Bilgen, who is a
resident of Dresden never involved in
terrorism and fully getting on with his life.
That's what—and that evidence would not
have been allowed in under DTA review [the
procedure at issue in the Supreme Court case].
It wouldn't have been in the CSRT, and it
won't come in under DTA review.
And that's why it is inadequate.
CHIEF JUSTICE ROBERTS: Thank you,
Mr. Waxman.
As Waxman dramatically showed in this rebuttal, a right such as
the right to counsel is not merely an addition or subtraction in a
zero-sum game in a battle between liberty and security; it can
also be an indispensable engine in the search for truth, which
presumably benefits both liberty and security.
The second important point to remember is that some senior
military officials with actual responsibility for the military
tribunals were appalled by the tribunals. For example, last
summer, Lt. Col. Stephen E. Abraham, who had been a member
of one of the military's hearing panels, testified to Congress:
"Not only I, but the other members of the panel said, 'This is
garbage.' " Abraham further explained, "What I expected and
what occurred were two entirely different things. ... What I
expected was a fundamentally fair process." His complaints
about the process were brushed aside, he said, because "a quick
result was preferred over a probing inquiry."
In fairness, not all military officials shared this view. But the
accounts of Abraham and other senior military insiders provide a
searing context for the objection that the procedures should have
been given more of a chance to work.
Jack, you emphasize the role that the political branches must
play in fashioning appropriate procedures, and I generally agree
with that emphasis. But I also think it's important to realize, as
the Supreme Court has emphasized, that those imprisoned at
Guantanamo have been there for years, some taken from their
families far from any battlefield in Afghanistan (as Kennedy
explained, "from places as far away from there as Bosnia and
Gambia"). When we further remember that the detainees have
not been given the opportunity that was provided to Mr. Kurnaz
in Waxman's rebuttal example and that, instead, they've been
given only a weak and limited process that military officials
themselves denounced, I think that—one way or another—we
need to move quickly to finally provide the detainees with fair
procedures in which to address their imprisonment.
Best,
Cliff
From: Jack Goldsmith
To: Walter Dellinger, Dahlia Lithwick, and Cliff Sloan
Subject: Objects in the Rearview Mirror May Appear Larger Than They Are
Posted Wednesday, June 25, 2008, at 10:34 AM ET
Dear Walter, Dahlia, and Cliff,
I have a few brief things to say in response to Walter's and
Cliff's great posts on Boumediene before this morning's
decisions take over everyone's attention.
Walter might be right about Boumediene being huge. But I still
think that—as with similar claims made about Hamdi, Rasul,
and Hamdan at this very Breakfast Table and elsewhere in 2004
and 2006—it won't be nearly as huge as it seems in the week
after it was announced. The question is what Boumediene adds
to the system of military tribunals and direct federal court review
that was in place long before Boumediene. Not much, probably,
especially since that system, as interpreted by the D.C. Circuit, is
looking pretty robust. The Supreme Court declined to say that
this system violated due process, declined to say much about
what the additional habeas remedy looked like, and said it would
defer to the political branches in figuring this latter issue out. I
agree that "the line between some due process and none is at the
heart of liberty." But the detainees were getting a lot of due
process before Boumediene—much more than any alleged alien
enemy combatants have ever received in this country.
Walter recounts the administration's early aggressive claims
against judicial review, and again I agree (as I argued in my
book The Terror Presidency) that those claims were selfdefeating. But those claims were rejected years ago, and (largely
because of judicial nudges) Congress has now put in place a
system of statutory judicial review. Boumediene had nothing to
do with any of this. I also doubt that Boumediene will bring due
process to bear on many other aspects of the administration's
counterterrorism policies that Walter and the world dislike, for
the court extended the constitutional habeas remedy for alien
enemy combatants only to Gitmo.
And also consider the largely unnoticed case of Munaf v. Geren,
issued the same day as Boumediene. There, a unanimous court
held that two American citizens transferred by U.S. military
forces in Iraq to Iraqi officials for criminal trial could invoke the
statutory writ of habeas corpus but quickly added that the writ
gave them no relief. They reached this conclusion even though
the petitioners claimed they would be tortured by Iraqi officials.
The court said such allegations must "be addressed by the
political branches, not the judiciary," adding that the "Judiciary
is not suited to second-guess" the executive's determination that
the petitioners would not be tortured, because doing so "would
require federal courts to pass judgment on foreign justice
systems and undermine the Government's ability to speak with
one voice in this area."
I would make similar points in response to Cliff's contention that
the detainees have been given "only a weak and limited process"
and that "one way or another, we need to move quickly to finally
provide the detainees with fair procedures in which to address
their imprisonment." I agree, and have argued in several places,
that despite the unprecedented procedural rights given to the
detainees at Gitmo, we need a better framework for indefinite
noncriminal detention in this novel war. I just think that—as we
learned after the decisions in 2004 and 2006—the idea that a
quick or effective detention framework can or will come from
courts alone, or even courts primarily, is misplaced. In the end it
can come only from Congress, and in the end I expect that
Boumediene will be seen mainly as the event that finally got
Congress to act.
Good luck in your three cases, Walter (though I must confess
that I am rooting for the other side in the gun case).
Jack
From: Dahlia Lithwick
To: Walter Dellinger, Jack Goldsmith, and Cliff Sloan
Subject: Making the Tough Moral Choices, So You Don't Have To ...
Posted Wednesday, June 25, 2008, at 4:01 PM ET
Dear Walter, Jack, Cliff:
There is a lot to digest from this morning, but we'll try to tackle
today's big decisions in some fashion, starting with
congratulations to Walter for the result in Exxon. I wanted to
begin with some thoughts about the 5-4 decision in today's other
big case, Kennedy v. Louisiana, which struck down the death
penalty for child rapists as cruel and unusual under the Eighth
Amendment. The interesting things about this opinion are the
majority's claims and the dissenters' counterclaims on the ways
judicial pronouncements about cruel unusualness act as a oneway ratchet to narrow the death penalty. Eric Posner has already
posted on this topic in Slate's legal blog, "Convictions." I
wonder what you think about the argument that trends really
only get to go in a single direction—away from the death
penalty—under current Eighth Amendment jurisprudence?
Before I hop onto the fast train to Crazyville—which is where
the counting of trends and countertrends in capital-punishment
states invariably leads me—I want to point to one other aspect of
Justice Anthony Kennedy's majority opinion, which I have read
only once and quickly. Kennedy opens with the sick-making
narrative about the crime in question: Then-8-year-old L.H. is so
badly raped that she requires emergency surgery. Kennedy
initially focuses on L.H.'s conflicting accounts of who raped her,
although that has almost nothing to do with the constitutional
problem at hand. He describes the child's videotaped interview
with a psychologist, which has obviously left an impression on
him: The child spoke "haltingly and with long pauses and
frequent movement" and expresses "reservations about the
questions being asked." He describes how the girl went from
blaming some neighborhood boys for the rape, to eventually
naming her stepfather as rapist. Then he launches into many
pages of analysis of the "evolving standards of decency" and the
Eighth Amendment.
But Kennedy returns to the need for the court to exercise its
"own judgment" about the "moral grounds" for barring the death
penalty for child rapists. And it's here that Kennedy truly
channels Kennedy. Although ostensibly making a policy
decision about expanding the death penalty to noncapital crimes,
he is very focused on "the victim's fright, the sense of betrayal,
and the nature of her injuries." Kennedy is bothered by the
"long-term commitment" required of child witnesses in capital
rape cases and laments that because of the case against her
rapist, L.H. was forced to "come to terms with the brutality of
her experience," during "the formative years of her
adolescence." (She was 13 when she testified against her
stepfather at trial.) Further, Kennedy is wary of the ways in
which "the death penalty involves the child victim in its
enforcement" and complains that this is "forcing a moral choice
on the child, who is not of mature age to make that choice."
Kennedy goes on to worry about the reliability of child
testimony. And he's afraid that children might be less willing to
report rape if their rapist is someone they know and the death
penalty were on the table. Finally, he notes that making child
rape a capital crime increases the rapist's incentive to kill his
victim. Much of this is uncontroversial and was, in fact, urged
on the court by one amicus brief filed by sex abuse and social
workers and another filed by criminal defense lawyers worried
about the reliability of child testimony. But having reread both
briefs, I don't see where Kennedy is getting his too-agonizing-amoral-choice-for-children point. Both briefs oppose extending
capital punishment to rape cases but not because kids should not
be forced to make complex moral choices. We let children make
those choices every day.
Testifying in a rape case is traumatic, yes. Testifying in a capital
rape case would be more so, I imagine. But my stomach goes a
little funny reading Kennedy on the inappropriateness of forcing
"a moral choice on the child," who is "not of mature age to make
that choice." The child has no say in whether the state seeks the
death penalty. Any child who reports rape is potentially
involving himself in a painful, long-term criminal prosecution,
possibly of a loved one. That moral dilemma has absolutely
nothing to do with this case. Perhaps it's because Kennedy's talk
of moral choices smacks of that same paternalism that animated
his decision in last year's partial-birth abortion case—when he
fought to protect poor, pregnant teenagers from making choices
they'd come to regret—but when the justice starts rooting his
constitutional decision-making in the principle of "I'll make the
tough moral choices so you don't have to," I get a little freaked
out.
So do the dissenters, apparently. Justice Samuel Alito reserves
most of his dissent to make the one-way-ratchet point,
suggesting that in light of the court's recent Eighth Amendment
jurisprudence, a state would have to be nuts to try to expand the
reach of the death penalty. Then he calls Kennedy out for
privileging his views about the fitness of children for testimony
in a capital rape trial over parsing the Eighth Amendment's
protections for the rights of the accused. I don't want to suggest
that I am unhappy with the result in Kennedy. I happen to agree
with the majority that "in most cases justice is not better served
by terminating the life of the perpetrator rather than confining
him" and that Louisiana did not demonstrate a growing national
consensus that nonlethal child rape should be punished by death.
But when Kennedy arrives at the correct decision by way of a pit
stop at Substitute Moral Judgments for the Weak and Infirm, I
can't quite bring myself to celebrate.
Am I overreacting, gentlemen?
Dahlia
From: Dahlia Lithwick
To: Walter Dellinger, Jack Goldsmith, and Cliff Sloan
Subject: Whoops! Exxon Just Earned Another $2.5 Billion as I Wrote This!
Posted Wednesday, June 25, 2008, at 6:58 PM ET
Dear Walter, Cliff, and Jack:
Anyone want to revisit their comments from earlier in the week
about truly strange new bedfellows at the high court? The
compromise between the justices who wanted to give huge
punitive damages to victims of the 1989 Exxon Valdez oil spill in
Alaska, and those who wanted to give none, is that everyone
agrees to cap the damages with a formula that is almost
completely arbitrary. I'm looking at the Exxon decision now, in
which the court sliced and diced a punitive damages award
against oil behemoth Exxon from $2.5 billion to the amount of
compensatory damages awarded $507.5 million. That's an 80
percent reduction.
Anybody who may have mistakenly believed that the high court
was somehow conforming its decisions to public opinion this
term can now rest assured that with gas at $4 a gallon and oil
company profits at record highs, handing a monstrous win to
Exxon might not be a popular move. By handing the more than
32,000 plaintiffs (of whom 20 percent are dead after 16 years of
litigation) $15,000 each, as compared with the $75,000 they'd
have collected had the $2.5 billion judgment been upheld, while
Exxon earns an estimated $2.5 billion in net profits just about
every three weeks, this court is pretty much assured of being
labeled "pro-business." In fact, in the time it's taken me to write
this one paragraph, I think Exxon just earned the money it will
have to pay out to the plaintiff who sat next to me at oral
argument.
The interesting part of this decision is that seeking vastly
different results, everyone agreed to disagree. They split 4-4 on
the question of derivative liability in maritime law—whether a
ship's owner may be held liable for punitive damages based on
the misconduct of its allegedly drunk employee. But then they
voted 5-3 to cap the punitive damages award at the same amount
as the compensatory damages. And no, the court isn't going to
make unemployed cannery workers, Native Alaskans, and
fishermen any happier with Justice David Souter's meandering
legal excursion through the dusty facts of 19 th-century maritime
cases, cheerful references to the Code of Hammurabi, or the
rollicking tour through median ratios. (0.66:1 versus 1.60:1—oh,
my, how to choose?)
Walter, this was a monster win for you. One might even say it's
huge. But how huge? What's the precedential value of all this
going forward? Is the cap in punitive damages the law of the
land or just of the seas? Will this be the new benchmark for state
court damage awards? And for Walter and Cliff and Jack,
another question: Is this an "activist" decision? Why? Why not?
Yours,
Dahlia
From: Cliff Sloan
To: Walter Dellinger, Dahlia Lithwick, and Jack Goldsmith
Subject: A Skeptical New Mood About the Death Penalty?
Posted Wednesday, June 25, 2008, at 9:07 PM ET
Dahlia, Jack, and Walter
Today's death-penalty decision is interesting on many levels.
Beyond the significance of the holding in the child-rapist case
itself—that the state's taking of a life requires a crime involving
the loss of a life—I wonder if there are also hints in the decision
that other members of the five-justice majority have any
inclination to pick up on Justice Stevens' call earlier this term to
re-examine the death penalty itself. Justice Kennedy's majority
opinion includes striking comments indicating possible
skepticism about the entirety of capital punishment
jurisprudence. In a remarkable statement, he says that the court's
extensive body of death-penalty case law "is still in search of a
unifying principle." That's a pretty bold statement about the
whole project. And consider this statement by Kennedy today:
"When the law punishes by death, it risks its own sudden descent
into brutality, transgressing the constitutional commitment to
decency and restraint."
In Stevens' remarkable concurrence in the lethal-injection case
earlier this term, he explained that, after more than 30 years
applying the death penalty (and co-authoring the decision that
restored it in 1976), he now finds the death penalty
unconstitutional. Stevens pointedly argued that "[t]he time for a
dispassionate, impartial consideration of the enormous costs that
death penalty litigation imposes on our society with the benefits
that it produces has surely arrived." Does Kennedy's opinion
contain subtle signals that others on the court may be inclined to
have just such a discussion?
I recognize that this may well be over-reading the faint tea
leaves. There certainly is evidence for a different view—that the
court will continue applying the death penalty but limiting it to
narrow circumstances. Kennedy's opinion also explains, for
example, that, precisely because of its unique risks and dangers,
the death penalty must be restricted in its application—and, of
course, restricted is very different from prohibited:
The rule of evolving standards of decency with
specific marks on the way to full progress and
mature judgment means that resort to the
penalty must be reserved for the worst of
crimes and limited in its instances of
application. In most cases ["most"—not all],
justice is not better served by terminating the
life of the perpetrator rather than confining
him and preserving the possibility that he and
the system will find ways to allow him to
understand the enormity of his offense.
Posted Thursday, June 26, 2008, at 11:25 AM ET
Dear Dahlia, Cliff, and Jack,
Still, as even that passage suggests, it seems to me that there
may be something notably new and skeptical in the court's tone
on the death penalty in general.
Dahlia, I think you're right that Justice Kennedy's emphasis on
the difficulty of the child victim as a witness is a bit jarring in
the opinion—most notably, because nothing actually turns on it.
He ends up concluding, for the court, that the death penalty must
be reserved "in cases of crimes against individuals, for crimes
that take the life of the victim." The decision does not, in fact,
rest on anything particular to child victims or the difficulties
they face. I suppose that his discussion could be viewed as part
of the response to the argument that child rape is uniquely
different from other nondeath crimes and more deserving of
capital punishment. But the simplicity of the court's core
principle—that, at least in "crimes against individuals," the state
cannot take a life if there has not been a loss of life—does not
depend on the many difficulties of child-witness testimony.
I also want to note one new bizarre consequence of the court's
nose-counting of jurisdictions in establishing trends for
"evolving standards of decency." The majority labored to argue
that it previously was not clear under Supreme Court
jurisprudence that the death penalty was unconstitutional for
child rape. In most contexts, the majority would be explaining
that today's decision fits comfortably within existing
precedents—the court has not allowed a death penalty for a
crime that did not involve death for decades, and it has, in the
meantime, struck down capital sentences when the offense did
not involve death. But if the court had gone with that
conventional approach, it would have had difficulty with its
argument about the scarcity of jurisdictions imposing the death
penalty for child rape. As various states argued to the court,
many states probably have viewed the death penalty for
nondeath cases as off-limits. Understanding what other states
and the federal government do with the same offense, or the
same type of offender, clearly is relevant to the court's inquiry.
But, as this new wrinkle illustrates, the court may well be
making far too much of it (your Crazyville point, Dahlia),
particularly because, in the end, the court relies on its own
judgment of proportionality.
Best,
Cliff
From: Walter Dellinger
To: Jack Goldsmith, Dahlia Lithwick, and Cliff Sloan
Subject: The Purpose of Punitive Damages
Before responding to Dahlia's question about whether the Exxon
Valdez decision will have a significant impact on punitive
damages generally, I can't resist putting her comments about the
case in context, expressly noting as a caution to readers that I
argued the case for Exxon in the Supreme Court. This case raised
the question of whether punitive damages should be paid, and if
so, in what amount, for one and only one aspect of the tragic
Valdez oil spill—economic losses to a class of individuals,
principally those engaged in commercial fishing. The court held
yesterday that the award of punitive damages for that
commercial-fishing class should be limited to $500 million—an
amount equal to the compensation previously paid to members
of the class for economic losses. As Justice Souter notes in his
majority opinion, the company years ago separately paid more
than $3 billion for environmental damages, fines and penalties,
cleanup costs, and compensation. The punitive damages for the
commercial-fishing class members at issue before the court were
to be in addition to those previously paid amounts.
One fundamental point that your comments seem to overlook is
the public purpose of punitive damages. Like others, you note
that the amount of punitive damages in this case are relatively
small, if considered in light of what the average award would be
for each member of the large class. But as Justice Souter notes,
the court has long held that "punitive damages by definition are
not intended to compensate the injured party, but rather to
punish the tortfeasor … and to deter him and others. …" It's the
total amount that serves that purpose, whether it's awarded to
one person or thousands.
You also mention the net worth of the defendant in this case.
The court understands, however, that the total wealth of the
company is less relevant than what kind of profits the wrongful
acts would have engendered. And that is the factor that leads the
court to conclude that an amount equal to compensatories is the
limit in this case—the absence of either malice or a desire to
increase profits from the wrongful acts in question. Justice
Souter writes that "in cases like this one, without intentional or
malicious conduct, and without behavior driven primarily by
desire for gain," there is no basis for exceeding the 1:1
presumption for cases with "substantial" compensatories (which
surely includes this case).
Will this case, you ask, have an influence beyond the area of
maritime law and become something more like the "law of the
land" as well as the sea? I think it will. The court's prior punitive
damages cases have involved the court in its customary role of
enforcing constitutional limits on the outer boundaries of what
state courts (and legislatures) have done in awarding punitive
damages. The justices in those cases are somewhat like umpires
setting the outer boundaries within which punitive damages
determinations are made by the states.
But maritime law governing the Valdez oil spill is different. It's
federal law—and, here, judges made federal law. That means the
justices are less like umpires and more like players—they get to
suit up and play the game the way state court judges do. Here the
court gets to decide what the right answer ought to be, not just
where the constitutional outer boundaries are located.
So while the court's approach is not binding on states, it did
present a unique opportunity for the court to lead by example
and demonstrate for judges around the country how they ought
to go about limiting punitive damages awards. And the justices'
message was that state courts ought to be placing some serious,
predictable limits on punitive damage awards. In particular, the
court strongly suggested that states should adopt a limit of 1:1—
an award equal to the compensatory damages—in cases where
there was no malicious intent to harm and where the wrongful
conduct was not driven by a desire to maximize profits. The
opinion suggested that if state courts don't so limit punitive
damage awards, the court may impose a 1:1 limit (at least in
non-malicious, non-intentional harm cases) as a constitutional
matter. Whether a majority of the justices would impose such
limits as a matter of constitutional due process is yet to be
resolved. But what the Supreme Court justices believe state
courts should do comes though clearly.
Well, it's on to the final day and the Second Amendment case,
Heller. An imaginary conservative friend of mine has a simple
reason for believing the District of Columbia will lose: "Having
ruled last Thursday in Boumediene that all the terrorists can get
out on habeas and roam free in the streets, the least the court
could do today is let everybody arm themselves with a
handgun." We'll know by the time this is posted.
Regards,
Walter
From: Dahlia Lithwick
To: Walter Dellinger, Jack Goldsmith, and Cliff Sloan
Subject: Today's Decision "Will Almost Certainly Cause More Americans To Be
Killed"?
Posted Thursday, June 26, 2008, at 11:32 AM ET
and the trigger-lock requirement violate the individual right to
bear arms as protected under the Second Amendment. But I must
first pass along this rather brilliant observation from professor
Stephen Wermiel from American University, who wonders why
none of the dissenters cautioned the majority that today's
decision "will almost certainly cause more Americans to be
killed." (Boumediene, Scalia, J. dissenting.)
Looking forward to your thoughts.
Best,
Dahlia
From: Cliff Sloan
To: Walter Dellinger, Jack Goldsmith, and Dahlia Lithwick
Subject: Deactivating the Language of Judicial Activism
Updated Thursday, June 26, 2008, at 3:49 PM ET
Dahlia, I love your question about whether the punitive-damages
decision is "activist." It tees up one of my hobbyhorses—that
there is no more meaningless term in constitutional or political
dialogue right now than the claim of judicial activism. Today's
pair of decisions in the gun-control case (striking down the
District of Columbia's gun ban) and the "millionaire
amendment" to the campaign-finance law (striking down
Congress' relaxation of campaign-finance limits for opponents to
self-funded candidates) further prove that point. In both
decisions, the "conservatives" in the five-member majority
struck down the handiwork of the political branches on complex
social problems. And, in both cases, the four "liberals"
vigorously dissented and would have deferred to the political
branches' resolution of these vexing social issues.
As satisfying as it can sometimes be to put the shoe on the other
foot, I don't think it advances the conversation one whit to call
either of today's decisions "activist" or to use that label in
yesterday's punitive damages case. It's pejorative and a
distraction. It substitutes for a serious consideration of the
issues—of whether, in a particular case, a legal limit, set by the
Constitution, statute, or common law, has been exceeded. When
somebody says, "activist," it often simply means, "I don't agree
with that decision." That's what it means, at any rate, when it's
not being used merely to score cheap political points. I think it
would be much healthier, in politics as well as law, to ditch the
label and focus on the underlying questions.
Dear Jack and Walter and Cliff:
I am reading the decision in Heller as fast as I can and will post
my thoughts as soon as possible. The headline is that the court
decided 5-4 (no mushy plurality here) that the D.C. handgun ban
In the punitive-damages case, if the "activist" question was
whether the Supreme Court played a legitimate judicial role in
setting the punitive-damages rule, the answer, for me, is a double
yes. Yes because, as Walter points out, in federal maritime law,
federal judges necessarily have a broad role to play in shaping
the rules. And another yes because, even when the punitivedamages question does not involve federal maritime law, the
punitive-damages issue, as Walter again points out, is strictly a
question of punishment, not compensation. It's certainly an
appropriate role for federal courts to consider the outer
constitutional limits on state punishment. One can have a
legitimate discussion about whether Justice Souter's new rule is
the correct one and whether, as Justice Breyer argued, $2.5
billion was a more appropriate punishment for Exxon's conduct
even though the damage Exxon caused, as the case came to the
Supreme Court, was only one-fifth of that amount. But that's a
far different discussion from throwing the "activist" label
around.
The same is true of the gun case and the millionaire amendment
case. I happen to disagree with the court's conclusion in both
these cases, and I think the dissents have the better of the
arguments. But I don't think there's anything inappropriately
"activist" in the court's determinations today that the political
branches exceeded constitutional bounds. Justice Scalia's
opinion in parsing the peculiarly written Second Amendment
certainly is not a frivolous interpretation. I do think his
interpretation can legitimately be faulted for giving short shrift
to the "prefatory clause" and, as Justice Stevens emphasizes, for
strangely not even addressing it until after he's already reached a
conclusion on the "operative clause." But the project of
construing constitutional language and enforcing constitutional
provisions is exactly what courts should be doing, and we
shouldn't disparage it as some "activist" frolic, even if there's a
lively debate about the correct constitutional interpretation.
The millionaire amendment case is along the same lines.
Congress carefully worked out a scheme to try to avoid the onesided consequences of self-financing, and Congress' handiwork
in this difficult area (lifting certain limitations for the opponent
of the self-financed candidate) does not strike me as unfair or
oppressive. But the regulation of political campaigns clearly
raises important First Amendment questions, and it does not
advance the ball to try to paint Justice Alito's opinion as
"activist," even if one disagrees with his conclusions. Better to
focus on any perceived flaws in his analysis.
Let's retire the label of "activist" once and for all, and have at it
on the issues.
Yours,
Cliff
From: Dahlia Lithwick
To: Walter Dellinger, Jack Goldsmith, and Cliff Sloan
Subject: Was It Ever Miller Time?
Posted Thursday, June 26, 2008, at 3:47 PM ET
Dear Walter, Jack, and Cliff:
So this is what a lobotomy feels like. Reading the Heller
decision, it's as if I have been transported to some alternate
universe in which United States v. Miller never happened at all.
Miller was, I believed, a unanimous announcement in 1939 that
"in the absence of any evidence tending to show that possession
or use of a 'shotgun having a barrel of less than eighteen inches
in length' at this time has some reasonable relationship to the
preservation or efficiency of a well regulated militia, we cannot
say that the Second Amendment guarantees the right to keep and
bear such an instrument." Until quite recently every court in the
country believed—maybe wrongly—that this established a
collective-rights rule for the Second Amendment. What is
seriously causing me to doubt my sanity today is the almost
universal media claim that the court just looked at this question
for the first time since 1791.
Click on the video below to see the reaction of D.C. officials to
the ruling:
See, for example, this CBS story: "The court had not
conclusively interpreted the Second Amendment since its
ratification in 1791." CNN reports that "[t]he Supreme Court had
avoided the question since the Bill of Rights was ratified in
1791." WHSV clears it all up by explaining that "[i]t is the first
time since the amendment was ratified in 1791 that the essence
of the meaning of the Second Amendment has been clearly
defined." Miller was just a sort of screen-saver. Heller is about
the essence of the meaning.
Look, I am totally willing to plead Canadian on the gun
question. Don't like guns. Wildly prefer the hockey stick. But I
reckon that reasonable people can differ about the costs and
benefits of guns and also about how to interpret the Second
Amendment. I am in no way surprised to see that Justice
Antonin Scalia reads Miller to say that the case is only about
government regulation of short-barreled shotguns and not about
whether those guns have any "relationship to the preservation or
efficiency of a well regulated militia." If you are going to read
the whole Second Amendment with your thumb over the militia
clause, you pretty much have to read Miller that way as well.
Am I wrong to say that Scalia doesn't accord the historical
understanding of Miller even the tiniest bit of respect? "Miller
did not hold that and cannot possibly be read to have held that,"
he proclaims. (Scalia calls the defendants in Miller "crooks," just
so you get the idea that they deserved to lose simply for being
bad guys.) But what really raises the hackles on my dander is
when the mainstream media agree to announce that Miller either
didn't say what it said, or mean what it meant, for the dozens of
courts that have relied upon it for decades. According to
professor Robert J. Spitzer in his most recent book, Saving the
Constitution From Lawyers, in the 70 years since Miller, federal
appeals courts have relied on Miller's collective-rights theory
more than 40 times, and the Supreme Court has denied certiorari
in almost half of those cases—allowing them to stand because it
considered this a closed matter. Why is it easier for the majority
and the media to pretend this was a question never before
decided than one that had been—correctly or not—decided and
relied upon for decades?
It's not like I have any expectation that Justices Antonin Scalia
or Clarence Thomas would be moved by the existence of a
precedential ruling. They eat old precedents for breakfast. But if
you've been singing hymns to the chief justice and Alito for their
willingness to adhere to precedent with which they disagree, ask
yourselves whether it's better to overrule old cases directly or do
what everyone seems to wish to do with those old precedents
and pretend they aren't there. In yesterday's child-rape case,
Alito made a big point of arguing about the importance of state
court reliance upon dicta in Coker v. Georgia because even
though it's dicta, "lower courts and legislators also take into
account—and I presume that this Court wishes them to continue
to take [it] into account." Today, Scalia scoffs at later Supreme
Court reliance upon Miller as "footnoted dictum."
If the lower courts have indeed been suffering for 70 years from
the same mental defect as I am—the irrational belief that Miller
meant something—one might think Scalia would at least nod to
that. Offer up a little "whoopsie." Instead he spends his time
assailing Justice John Paul Stevens for his devotion to Miller as
though Stevens is some kind of nutty lone crusader. Poor
Stevens is left to huff in dissent that since Miller, hundreds of
judges have relied on the collective-rights view and that "even if
the textual and historical arguments on both sides of the issue
were evenly balanced," the court should have erred on the side
of precedent.
The reason I am so annoyed by this is that—as long as we're
trotting out hobbyhorses, Cliff—it's of a piece with the Bush
administration's claims in the torture context that every day is
Groundhog Day when it comes to the law of torture. Every
settled legal question can be reopened and re-examined—John
Yoo is doubtless testifying to that fact this very moment—so
long as someone, somewhere is willing to pretend it was never a
settled question in the first place.
Yours,
Dahlia
From: Walter Dellinger
To: Jack Goldsmith, Dahlia Lithwick, and Cliff Sloan
Subject: Justice Scalia's Absolutist Vision
Posted Friday, June 27, 2008, at 5:17 PM ET
Dear Dahlia and Cliff and Jack:
There is widespread agreement among commentators this
morning that the Supreme Court's Heller opinion adopts a legal
standard sensibly allowing "reasonable regulation" of guns. But
that may not be the Second Amendment Justice Scalia has in the
back of his mind. As Scalia seems to envision the amendment,
certain government restraints on guns are by historical practice
outside the definitional boundaries of the right—but within the
amendment, the rights it creates are absolute and cannot be
overcome by any showing of governmental necessity.
Fortunately for those who would seek to sustain sensible
regulations, Scalia's majority opinion itself resolves very little.
Understanding his broader jurisprudential conception of the
amendment, however, is important. First, it suggests how the
defense of other regulations should be shaped in the future to fit
Scalia's particular vision. Additionally, it may be important in
some cases to note that Scalia's particular approach to the
amendment was not part of the holding in Heller, and should not
be followed by other justices in the majority.
Justice Scalia's opinion includes a list of regulations and states
upon which "nothing in our opinion should be taken to cast
doubt." Most of these are cordoned off because they are
"longstanding prohibitions." What is striking, however, is the
rationale for the continuing validity of his relatively short list:
Each and every one is justified as a historically grounded
exception to the right created by the Second Amendment.
Because of history, each is excluded from the definition of the
"right." But within its scope the right itself may, in Justice
Scalia's view, be absolute.
Heller presented an extraordinary opportunity for the veteran
justice to confront a blank canvas upon which he could splash
his own highly individual approach to constitutional
interpretation. Antonin Scalia's Second Amendment closely
resembles Hugo Black's First Amendment. Each justice
distrusted the exercise of discretionary judgment by judges.
Free-speech champion Hugo Black rejected any test that allowed
judges to decide whether a sufficiently compelling government
interest could permit the regulation of some speech. The First
Amendment was absolute. No law meant no law.
Of course, if you believe a right is absolutely protected, you
must confine the definition of the right. Justice Black had to find
that flag burning was not part of "the freedom of speech"
because if it were a part of that freedom, then protesters would
have the right not just to burn the flag but to burn down the
White House as well. Black rejected the standard approach,
which was to acknowledge that although setting fire to a flag and
setting fire to the White House could both be communicative,
the government had a sufficiently strong and legitimate interest
in suppressing White House burning but not flag burning.
That may be how Justice Scalia conceives of the Second
Amendment. Indeed, he references the First Amendment in a
critical passage:
The First Amendment contains the freedomof-speech guarantee that the people ratified
which included exceptions for obscenity, libel,
and disclosure of state secrets, but not for the
expression of extremely unpopular and wrong
headed views. The Second Amendment is no
different.
Similarly, in Scalia's mind, the way to determine whether a gun
regulation is permissible is to ask whether such a regulation was
part of the historical background of the amendment and thus
excluded from "the right" that was being adopted. Note that he
precedes his discussion of certain permissible regulations by
stating, "Although we do not undertake an exhaustive historical
analysis today," we should not be taken to cast doubt on the
following restrictions.
What is striking about his discussion of the presumably valid
restrictions is both what is said and what is not said. In every
instance, historical practice is noted. In not a single instance is
the public necessity for a gun restriction noted. As to history, he
notes that there will be time to expound upon "the historical
justifications" for the presumed valid regulations "if and when
those exceptions come before us." Justifications based upon
necessity, on the other hand, are not part of Justice Scalia's
calculus: "[T]he enshrinement of constitutional rights necessarily
takes certain policy choices off the table." There is no need for
establishing a "level of scrutiny" if the amendment, once
defined, is absolute.
This approach is vintage Scalia. Find some historical practice,
use it to define and limit the scope of the right, and then apply
the remaining right absolutely. But whatever one can surmise
Justice Scalia had in mind, it is not dispositive. What is in the
holding of the opinion leaves open for future determination the
critical questions of permissible regulation. The key footnote
(added later, perhaps, by request of one of the justices in the
majority?) expressly states that Scalia's list of "presumptively
lawful regulatory measures … does not purport to be
exhaustive."
But if for no reason other than careful future advocacy, it is
important to understand Justice Scalia's own thinking, even if it
did not become part of the holding of the opinion.
"Reasonableness" arguments have no role in his conception of
the amendment. That does not doom the case for defending
sensible regulations. It does suggest that (1) any appeal to Justice
Scalia needs to be crafted in keeping with his historical approach
to the amendment and (2) for restraints whose justification is
rooted more in current public necessity and less in historical
practice, a majority may have to be assembled that does not
necessarily include the author of the Heller opinion.
I should note that although I argued Heller in the Supreme Court
for the District, these views are my own.
Regards,
Walter
From: Dahlia Lithwick
To: Walter Dellinger, Jack Goldsmith, and Cliff Sloan
Subject: A Shooting Range Next to the Supreme Court Gift Shop?
Posted Friday, June 27, 2008, at 5:38 PM ET
Dear Jack and Walter and Cliff:
Walter, your last post really drove home the reality that we are
going to be covering gun cases at the Supreme Court for years to
come, aren't we? Perhaps in much the same way the justices
used to screen porn for First Amendment purposes, they can now
finally build that little shooting range next to the gift shop. Wait,
no. The high court is actually one of the few places in America
where you still can't carry a gun. Well that's sure lucky.
I guess the consensus from today's op-eds and my inbox is that
the Heller decision is basically principled (as Cliff has urged)
and really quite limited (as everyone but Walter insists). And
that maybe a robust reading of the Second Amendment is
ultimately a good thing for progressives, and maybe all that
language about militias really was just dicta, and maybe the
whole fight for gun control is just too totally '90s. Clearly there
is nobody more confused about his own love-hate relationship
with the American gun than Sen. Barack Obama, whose
constitutional koan yesterday is incomprehensible on virtually
every level: "I have always believed that the Second Amendment
protects the rights of individuals to bear arms, but I also identify
with the need for crime-ravaged communities to save their
children from the violence that plagues our streets through
common-sense, effective safety measures." Maybe it's not an
accident that liberals found it so easy to capitulate on the issue of
guns. You can almost hear the relief in our voices today: Could
we be more tough and manly?
Walter and Jack and Cliff, I know that you are all busy, and I
also realize that banging out rough first impressions of 300-page
opinions for publication is hardly an exercise with which most
lawyers feel totally comfortable. Thank you all for sharing your
thoughts and insights with us this week. One of my favorite
Slate readers sent a note yesterday conveying his thanks that
"[i]n an election year and a journalistic climate where people
shout rather than debate, how remarkable to have a respectful
debate." I enthusiastically concur. See you 'round the court.
Fondly,
Dahlia
the green lantern
Nature's Air Conditioning
Does it really save gas to roll down your windows instead of flipping on the
AC?
By Brendan I. Koerner
Tuesday, July 1, 2008, at 7:48 AM ET
Like most people, I crank up my car's air conditioning on
hot summer days. But my wife has recently been tsk-tsking
me for this practice—she says the AC wastes too much $4-agallon gas, and that we should roll down the windows
instead. But I've read that rolled-down windows also
decrease fuel economy, since they increase drag. What's the
most efficient way to cool ourselves while driving?
The rule of thumb is to keep the windows down while on city
streets, then resort to air conditioning when you hit the highway.
Every car has a speed at which rolled-down windows cause so
much drag as to decrease fuel economy more than a switched-on
AC. As you might expect, however, that milestone speed varies
widely from car to car—and in some cases, it may be well north
of posted speed limits.
Your wife is certainly correct that air conditioners sap power
from the engine and increase gas consumption. Depending on
your vehicle's design, an active AC can cut fuel economy by
anywhere from 3 percent to 10 percent in standard summertime
temperatures. During a brutal heat wave, though, the power
drain can be near 20 percent—the hotter it is outside, the harder
the AC needs to work at maintaining your cabin climate. (It's
worth noting here that automotive air conditioners no longer use
ozone-depleting chlorofluorocarbons; now they use much safer
tetrafluoroethane.)
At low speeds, at least, the fuel-economy losses associated with
rolling down your windows are minuscule. But as your foot gets
heavier on the accelerator, the situation rapidly begins to worsen.
That's because drag increases with the square of speed. So when
you hit the highway, all that wind whipping through your open
windows begins to take a major toll. Even with the windows
sealed tight, the majority of your car's power goes toward
fighting wind resistance when you're cruising at 55 miles per
hour. With the windows down, the engine really starts to strain.
But at what exact point do the numbers tilt in favor of air
conditioning? The Society of Automotive Engineers studied
(PDF) this issue back in 2004, using both a wind tunnel and test
track in Mesa, Ariz. The organization's researchers looked at two
vehicles, an SUV and a full-size sedan, both of which featured
powerful eight-cylinder engines. (The tests were conducted at an
average ambient temperature of approximately 86 degrees
Fahrenheit.)
The engineers found that rolling down the windows on the SUV
had only a small negative effect, in part because the vehicle's
big, boxy shape was already creating a lot of drag. So, from a
fuel-economy standpoint, a driver of an SUV will always do
better to shut off the air-conditioner. The sedan, on the other
hand, has a sleeker shape and a lower drag coefficient. As a
result, its fuel economy was noticeably affected when the
windows were rolled down at highway speeds; at around 68
miles per hour (the test's maximum), there was barely any
difference between air conditioning and nature's cooling. If you
were driving the sedan any faster than that, the increased drag
would presumably make AC the more efficient option.
The Lantern would be curious to see this same test run for
smaller cars designed with fuel savings in mind, rather than V8
behemoths. Paradoxically, because many fuel-efficient vehicles
have low drag coefficients, they may actually experience larger
relative increases in drag when the windows are rolled down at
high speeds. (As the SAE researchers noted, the sedan's drag
increased by 20 percent with the windows rolled down, versus
just 8 percent for the SUV.) Some engineers have claimed that
45 miles per hour is the break-even threshold for average-size
cars; others put the figure closer to 75 miles per hour. The
Lantern can't vouch for the accuracy of either estimate, as there
are no scientific data to analyze, but the truth may lie somewhere
in the middle. Of course, that "truth" may vary according to such
factors as ambient temperature and wind velocity.
Even if rolled-down windows eke out a win at all but the highest
speeds, the Lantern realizes that many drivers will balk at the
idea of zipping along the highway while exposed to the
elements. There are safety issues to consider, as well as noise
and general comfort. Having once made a punishing mid-June
drive from Las Vegas to Los Angeles sans air conditioning, the
Lantern knows that natural cooling isn't always as effective as
man-made.
So stick with the rule of thumb mentioned in the first paragraph,
and you should save a few gallons of gas over the course of the
summer—though not nearly as much as if you decided to cut
down on your driving a bit. You needn't feel too guilty about
bathing in the air-conditioned splendor of a mass-transit vehicle.
In fact what prompted this essay was the convergence of three
instances of catchphrase self-consciousness I came upon on a
single day: Friday, June 20, 2008.
Is there an environmental quandary that's been keeping you up at
night? Send it to ask.the.lantern@gmail.com, and check this
space every Tuesday.
First, the estimable A.O. Scott in the New York Times noted that
Mike Myers' talent for catchphrases is not in evidence in Love
Guru the way it was in the undoubted classic Wayne's World,
which immortalized (if it didn't originate) "Party on." (Fave
variation: "The party is now." Someone actually gave me a Tshirt with that on it, perhaps as a subtle hint to lighten up, but I
think the phrase takes "Party on" to a whole new level of
philosophical complexity if you think about it. It says: Don't wait
for the party, or at least not for any particular party; the party—
the best party you've ever been invited to—is the now, is
"everything that is the case" as the philosopher Wittgenstein, a
notorious party person, put it.)
the spectator
Notes on Catch
Which catchphrases should be "thrown under the bus"?
By Ron Rosenbaum
Friday, June 27, 2008, at 7:49 PM ET
When Susan Sontag wrote "Notes on 'Camp' " back in 1964, she
was foregrounding—to use a current catchphrase—something
familiar but not yet defined.
"Many things in the world have not been named," her famous
essay began, "and many things even if they have been named,
have never been described. One of these is the sensibility—
unmistakably modern, a variant of sophistication but hardly
identical with it—that goes by the cult name of 'Camp.' "
I would choose nearly identical words to describe the
phenomenon, the linguistic sensibility, that I'd name "catch": the
way our language has become increasingly dominated by rapidly
cycling catchphrases. Rapidly cycling because in blogospheric
time, they speed from clever witticism to tired cliché in the
virtual blink of an eye.
Look how long it took "jump the shark" to jump the shark. But
"under the bus"—as in, "throwing someone under the bus"—got
old from overuse in a matter of weeks.
I present these "Notes on Catch" in a Sontagian spirit: My
thoughts thus far are preliminary, fragmentary, and digressive
(some might say disjointed). I'm hunting for clues as to what
makes a catchphrase catch on and which ones deserve to be cast
aside. And I'd like to make distinctions among the welter of
catchphrases in use today, to identify variations and to
distinguish the ones that still have some life in them from those
that are "past their sell-by date," as the catchphrase has it, and
need to be thrown under the bus along with "thrown under the
bus."
I'm interested in catchphrases because I think a case can be made
that our language has become more catchphrase-driven,
catchphrase-focused. So much so that catchphrase selfconsciousness has become a phenomenon of its own.
Then there was a Gawker item that mentioned Tim Gunn's
appealing Project Runway catchphrase "Make it work," which I
hadn't been aware of but, belatedly, really like; it says a lot more
than it seems to say. (Take-home test: Compare and contrast
"Make it work" with "Fake it till you make it.")
Then, in the Times on the same day, David Brooks engaged in an
emblematic struggle with catchphrase obsolescence. At least
that's what I think it was. In a column on Obama's alleged
Machiavellianism, Brooks used variations on "throw X under the
truck" no fewer than six times! Was this a deliberate attempt to
say, in effect: I know—as he must know, right?—that "throw X
under the bus" has been painfully overused, so I'm making a joke
about its overuse by switching "under the bus" to "under the
truck." After all, they're both large motor vehicles, right? Except
that a distinction is being lost. The admittedly overused "bus"
carries with it the suggestion that the person thrown under it was
originally on the bus, with the people doing the throwing,
making it all the more stinging a rejection. Most trucks carry
cargo, not passengers.
Why use the phrase, even a variant of it, at all? Well, the overuse
of "under the bus" began with conservative blogs using the
phrase (unfairly, I think) to describe the way Obama, in his
Philadelphia speech on race, spoke about his white
grandmother's occasional use of racial slurs. The resulting
meme? He "threw his grandmother under the bus." The phrase
recalls other transportation-related terms of abandonment, such
as "threw her off the sled" (i.e., threw her to the wolves) and
conjures up dim pop-culture memories of the Danny DeVito
movie, Throw Momma From the Train, I guess.
By changing "bus" to "truck," Brooks seemed to be trying to
have it both ways: acknowledging the obsolescence of "under
the bus"' while still attempting to reap the (now rather devalued)
currency of the phrase. Or perhaps he was simply attempting
what Henry Watson Fowler disapprovingly called, in his usage
manual, an "elegant variation." Was it worth the trouble? Did he
"Make it work"? Am I overthinking this?
But the whole phenomenon is worth thinking about more
closely, because of the way catchphrases can become—through
clever compression that verges on, or amounts to, distortion—
political weapons. And the way the rapid cycling of catchphrases
can confuse what is really being said or meant, obscure what
stage, what flavor of irony is being employed.
It is possible to think of catchphrase use in stages. There's Stage
1, when you first hear a phrase and take pleasure in its
imaginative use of language on the literal and metaphorical
level. This may not be the most beguiling example, but consider
"throw up a little in my mouth." I'm still kind of attached to it.
Then there's Stage 2, when you use it to establish "street cred"
(time to throw "street cred" under the catchphrase bus?) or
convey a sense of being au courant.
Then there's Stage 3, when the user acknowledges a phrase's
over-ness and tries to extract some final mileage out of it by
gently mocking it, usually by using ironic quotes, or adding "as
they say" to the end.
Finally, there's Stage 4: terminal obsolence, dead phrase
walking. Take "at the end of the day." It kind of stuns me
whenever I find someone still saying "at the end of the day" with
a straight face. What are they, stuck on stupid, as they say?
And then there's the danger that arises when Stage-4, zombie
catchphrases that have previously been confined to a subculture
escape their niche. We recently saw this happen with "It is what
it is," which used to be an all-purpose coach-speak sports-night
cliché. But since then, it's broken out and become a wisesounding but profoundly empty surrogate for wisdom and
perspective all too often used by idiot consultants and talkinghead political pundits who seek to make themselves sound both
worldly and gurulike: "It is what it is." To which one wants to
say, using a monosyllabic catchphrase that is a particular
favorite of mine and deserves its longevity: "Duh."
But if "It is what it is" is over and "broken"—a favorite
catchphrase of Mitt Romney, who argued that "Washington is
broken" (duh)—what about "It's all good"? This one belongs in
the faux-mystical category I'd call BSBS: Buddhist Sounding
Bullshit. I admit I still have a shameful fondness for "It's all
good," although now mainly ironically. (Does anyone recall that
"It's all good" can be traced back to a Hammer song circa 1994?
The year of the Rwandan genocide. But, hey, "It's all good.")
At least "It is what it is" doesn't suggest that the is-ness in
question is good or bad; it's just that you can't argue it doesn't
exist. Is "It is what it is" pop existentialism, at once an
acknowledgement of the tragic immutability of being and a
challenge to us to "take arms against a sea of troubles," as some
well-known guy once said? Or is it an Eastern quietism, a
rationale for resignation?
A lasting catchphrase often earns its longevity because it has
some philosophical question buried in it that hooks us. "It is
what it is" is something I struggle with: How much should I
accept in an "It's all good" way? Much of the time I'd much
prefer if "it" isn't what "it" is. That's my story and I'm sticking to
it. As they say.
And what about "not so much"? As in, I really admire Sontag's
essays. Her novels, not so much. Has that moved from Stage 2 to
Stage 3 or even the dreaded terminal Stage 4? I still like "not so
much." Not as much now. But I liked "not so much" when I first
began to come across it. And it still works for me if used
skillfully.
In fact, about six months ago, I became slightly obsessed with
"not so much"—so much so that at one point, I asked readers of
my blog to see whether they could trace its earliest use. I was
pleased when one commenter cited some research by my friend
Jesse Sheidlower, the American editor of the Oxford English
Dictionary and a witty writer on language, who weighed in with
a 2004 citation that read, "A romantic thriller? Interesting.
Starring Josh Hartnett? Not so much."
But then another commenter claimed that "not so much" had
been used on the sitcom Mad About You, which ran seven years
starting in 1992. Anyone else have an earlier "not so much"
sighting? I don't see it as likely to have been in the LincolnDouglas debates, but you never know.
And what does the success of "My bad" mean? It's brilliant in its
way. I know I've been seduced by the way it infantilizes and
trivializes whatever it ostensibly, forthcomingly apologizes for.
Cheap absolution. (Check out Paul Slansky and Arleen Sorkin's
great work of humor and moral outrage My Bad for hilarious
examples of people finding the stupidest most self-incriminating
ways possible to say, "My bad.") The culture of offense and
incorrectness had created a counterculture of "My bad" bad
apologetics.
"The optics"—as they say—don't look "all good" for the future
of "My bad" (and "the metrics"—as they also say—probably
don't, either), but I think it's still in Stage 3: a usable gray area.
Another blogospheric favorite that occupies that gray area: "Oh,
wait ..." Proper usage: Something obviously wrong is attributed
to an opponent and then a mocking "Oh, wait ..." is appended.
I like it and haven't gotten tired of Slate's Mickey Kaus using it
(did he originate it?), but I feel as if I can't use it myself because
it's one of those catchphrases that seems already to belong to
other bloggers—branded, if you will. (Which brings up an issue
for another day: Is using catchphases at all, if not plagiarism,
then secondhand or second-level—or second-rate?—thinking
and writing? Or is it just enjoyable swimming in the communal
pool of culture?)
Then there's the whole category of commercial phrases that cross
over into common speech. I promise not to mention the overobvious "Where's the beef?" Oh, wait ...
More recently, we've seen the variations on "What happens in
Vegas, stays in Vegas," apparently destined for the Catchphrase
Hall of Fame, as my friend Jaime Danehay pointed out to me.
She found a scholarly blog that noted more than 100,000
variations on it. Why that phrase? Because it's a variation on
"My bad," isn't it? The demand for clever-sounding ways of
excusing bad behavior is as infinite as our capacity for bad
behavior. As Mike Myers used to say: "Behave!"
To my mind the most unfortunate recent catchphrase is also the
title of the new public-radio show: The Takeaway. Excellent
show from what I can tell, but that title! So Dilbert! So Seven
Habits of Highly Effective People. So sales-boosting seminar at
the airport Marriott.
Really, if you "drill down," to use another corporatism, there's
something kind of industrially extractive about "takeaway," isn't
there? The impulse to reduce everything to a PowerPoint action
item? All the most interesting things in life are the things you
can't extract and "take away."
Please don't try to defend it, public-radio people. Please just take
it away.
Then there's the case of "teh." I'm sure Susan Sontag would have
a "note" on "teh." I'm sure there will be academic studies on it if
there aren't already. (Just as there has been a proliferation of
academic studies of "dude," a subject I first wrote about in
2003.)
"Teh" is unique because it's such a purely blogospheric
phenomenon. "Teh"—the deliberate misspelling of "the"—
already has … wait for it (as they say) … its own Wikipedia
entry. Its meaning, though, is still fluid and fungible. But there's
something appealing about it as a specifier with more character
than plain old "the." It has a kind of self-deprecating delicacy to
it. "Teh" calls attention to a word in a subtly more tentative way
than just "a" or "the" does. It's the third specifier. It's a little fey,
a little twee, a little "teh" goes a long "weh," you might "seh."
But I wouldn't vote it off the island, so to speak.
I don't mean this to be an exhaustive study, just notes. But I hope
that it will start a conversation about how to decide when a
phrase should be thrown under the bus.
Here are some I'm on the bubble about, as they say, because they
have some virtues that make up for the feeling they've been
overused. Or maybe there's a good reason they get overused. I'd
be interested to see which ones Slate readers would want to
preserve or make disappear. Gawker has "commenter
executions." I'd like to see occasional Slate "Phrase Purges,"
"Bus Tosses," or something like that, so we can identify at what
points a phrase goes from buzz to buzzkill (as "buzzkill" is due
to) and from buzzkill to roadkill (which still rocks). (By the way,
what about the formulation "X rocks a retro '90s look"?
Roadkill?)
So, thumbs up or thumbs down:








stay classy
up in your grill
overshare
tell us something we don't know
man up
go-to
drinking the Kool-Aid
mad props
I still like "mad props." I'm a sucker for anything with "mad" in
it, basically. It's a great praise word. And "stay classy" still feels
new and still performs a useful function. I'm on the bubble on
"drank the Kool-Aid," which has been used unfairly on Obama
supporters by those who bought the Clinton talking points, but
you've got to respect that it's been around for a quarter-century
now and still has "punch," so to speak. Mass cult suicide will do
that for ya. But, seriously, "Kool-Aid" must speak to an enduring
concern: lemminglike destructive cult behavior, an unfortunately
recurrent, if not always deadly, cultural phenomenon. As for the
others: under the bus.
Finally, "Dude." Sorry, guys, but the whole Lebowski cult just
killed it with its heavy-handed attempt at lightheartedness by
geek dudes who—how shall I put this delicately?—don't do
lighthearted well. Sorry dude geeks: I now pronounce "Dude"
over.
the undercover economist
Likely Bedfellows
How much do Republican-leaning corporations benefit from Republican
political success? A lot!
By Tim Harford
Saturday, June 28, 2008, at 7:04 AM ET
In the early hours of Nov. 8, 2000, the vice president of the
United States, Al Gore, was preparing to deliver his concession
speech to a sodden crowd in Nashville, Tenn. But then the
messages began to arrive on Gore's pager, suggesting that
perhaps he wasn't behind at all. Having previously conceded,
informally and in private, Gore called Bush again to deliver the
message that he'd changed his mind. (Oh, to have eavesdropped
on that conversation.)
Nov. 8 was not the only pivotal date in the race. On Dec. 8, the
Florida Supreme Court ordered a recount in certain counties,
raising the chance that Gore would win. On Dec. 13, after the
federal Supreme Court halted the recount, Gore conceded to
Bush.
Because these sudden decisions were hard to anticipate, they
provide an excellent test of the value of political connections to
listed companies. If politics means profit, a "Republican"
company should have taken a knock on Dec. 8 but surged on
Dec. 13, when the Republican victory was confirmed.
A recent study by financial economists Eitan Goldman, Jongil
So, and Jörg Rocholl found exactly that: Republican companies
beat the market by 3 percent over the week after Bush's victory
was assured; Democratic companies lagged almost as badly.
Goldman, So, and Rocholl defined "Republican" companies as
those with board members who had previously served as
Republican senators or congressmen or members of a
Republican administration, and with no Democratically
connected board members.
Another example: In May 2001, Sen. Jim Jeffords abruptly left
the Republican Party to become an independent senator. That
decision handed control of the Senate and its committees to the
Democratic Party. Seema Jayachandran, an economist at UCLA,
studied the market's reaction and concluded that it was bad news
for the share price of large firms that had donated to the
Republicans. The gains to Democratic donors were not as large,
so the total effect was to wipe $84 billion off the price of U.S.
shares.
Broadly, the same story seems to hold true internationally, and
Thomas Ferguson, a political scientist, and Hans-Joachim Voth,
an economist, have shone a light on a ghoulish example. Adolf
Hitler was appointed chancellor of Germany at the end of
January 1933 as head of a coalition government. Thanks to the
Reichstag fire, a snap election, and a constitutional change, the
Nazis had a stranglehold on power by the end of March. The
stock market valuation of the (mostly large) companies that tied
their fortunes to the Nazis surged between January and March
1933.
The question, of course, is why these political connections are
valuable. Innocent explanations are possible. Perhaps the
intelligence and energy that propelled Tony Blair and Al Gore to
high office would have justified their later work with,
respectively, JPMorgan and Apple, irrespective of any political
connections. Or perhaps they are of ornamental value, like a
head office draped in marble.
A less comforting possibility is that political connections give
companies access to the regulations that suit them or to juicy
government procurement contracts. Goldman, Rocholl, and So
have found evidence that such contracts do seem to flow to
companies affiliated with the party in power. If so, that is a
disgrace, if not entirely a surprise.
But not every study finds that political connections are a sure
route to profit. Economists Ray Fisman, Julia Galef, and Rakesh
Khurana, and epidemiologist David Fisman, have tried to
estimate the value of personal ties to Dick Cheney. One strategy
was studying the share price of Halliburton—where Cheney was
CEO from 1995 to 1999—when news broke of the vice
president's heart problems. The estimated value of personal ties
to Cheney? Zero—"precisely estimated." It would be nice to feel
sure of that.
today's papers
"You Have Been Liberated"
By Daniel Politi
Thursday, July 3, 2008, at 6:04 AM ET
The Los Angeles Times, USA Today, Washington Post, and the
Wall Street Journal's world-wide newsbox lead with the
Colombia military's movielike rescue operation that freed former
presidential candidate Ingrid Betancourt, three U.S. defense
contractors, and 11 Colombian soldiers and policemen who were
being held hostage in the jungle by leftist rebels. The daring raid
was years in the making as Colombian forces apparently
managed to infiltrate the upper echelons of the Revolutionary
Armed Forces of Colombia and convinced guards to group the
high-profile hostages in one location to be picked up by what
were supposed to be rebel-friendly helicopters. "The operation
was impeccable," Betancourt, who was kidnapped in 2002, said
at a news conference. Betancourt described how the hostages
had no idea what was going on until the rescue helicopter was in
the air and an undercover officer turned to them and said: "We're
the Colombian army. You have been liberated."
The New York Times fronts the news out of Colombia but leads
with a House committee's conclusion that Bush administration
officials knew about Hunt Oil's plan to sign an oil deal with the
Kurdish regional government in Iraq and didn't object. American
policy is to warn companies not to sign separate deals until Iraq
passes a national oil law. In fact, the State Department had
publicly said it was concerned the deal would undermine the
Iraqi central government. But e-mail messages and other
documents reveal that State and Commerce department officials
not only knew about the impending deal and didn't object, but in
some instances even seemed to welcome it. The chief executive
of Hunt Oil is a major backer of President Bush and a member of
the President's Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board.
The WSJ has the most detailed look at the Colombian rescue
operation and says it couldn't have come at a better time for
President Alvaro Uribe, who lately has been engulfed in a
bribery scandal. The paper is also, surprisingly, alone in
mentioning that the success of the mission is a finger in the eye
for Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez, who had tried to
position himself as the only leader able to negotiate for the
release of the hostages. USAT and WSJ note up high that the
rescue mission took place on the same day as Sen. John McCain
was visiting the country. Of course, the timing was pure
coincidence, but it seems Uribe and his aides had briefed
McCain about the operation. Curious how the operation worked?
The WSJ has a blow-by-blow in a separate story.
U.S. officials took pains to emphasize that the rescue mission
was a Colombian-led operation, but everyone notes the United
States helped with the planning and provided critical
intelligence. The three American citizens who were released
yesterday were flown directly to San Antonio, Texas. The
Northrop Grumman employees had been in captivity since 2003,
when their surveillance plane crashed.
The FARC is believed to be holding about 700 hostages, but
Betancourt, who holds dual French-Colombian citizenship, was
by far the most valuable. French President Nicolas Sarkozy had
made her release a priority since he took office, and more than
1,000 cities and towns around the world have made her an
honorary citizen. Interestingly enough, the NYT is alone in
noting that Betancourt seemed healthy, a contrast to how she
looked in a photograph that was widely circulated late last year.
Everyone notes the rescue mission is a huge setback for the
FARC, a group that has been fighting the government for more
than 40 years but has suffered some crippling blows lately.
Three of the group's top officials have died recently, hundreds
are deserting every month, and one top level commander who
surrendered in May said the FARC was "crumbling." The NYT
says that the "apparent disintegration" of the FARC has led some
to compare it to the Shining Path, a group that once inspired
terror but now is made up of a few hundred militants involved in
drug trafficking. An editorial in Colombia's El Tiempo describes
yesterday's raid as the most shattering setback for the FARC and
one that "inflicts an unprecedented moral blow."
The NYT, WP, and LAT front news that McCain made changes in
the top levels of his campaign staff in what was the second
personnel shakeup in a year. Yesterday, McCain put senior
strategist Steve Scmidt, who once worked with Karl Rove, in
charge of most day-to-day operations and diminished the role of
Rick Davis, his campaign manager. The move came after weeks
of handwringing by Republicans who have been complaining
that McCain seems to lack a clear message to sell his candidacy
to voters. Many say McCain is jumping around from issue to
issue without a clear strategy and point to his three-day trip to
Colombia and Mexico as a prime example of how his campaign
lacks focus. The NYT notes the move is the latest sign that many
who worked with Rove are gaining influence in the campaign.
The WSJ fronts a look at how McCain backers are finding ways
to get around the campaign-finance law, which the presumptive
Republican nominee helped to write, in order to catch up to Sen.
Barack Obama in the money race. The paper mostly focuses on
how the Republican Governors Association is recruiting bigmoney donors by telling them that anything they contribute will
help McCain in key swing states. These types of groups are
forbidden from pledging that they'll help a federal candidate with
their money, but those who work at the association are telling
donors that helping elect Republican governors will also be good
for McCain in November. Republicans are trying to raise $120
million on McCain's behalf through the national and state parties
and 527 organizations, including the governors group.
In yet another bit of bad news for the LAT, the paper reports that
it will be cutting 150 jobs from the newsroom by Labor Day and
will publish 15 percent fewer pages each week. The editorial
downsizing, which amounts to about 17 percent of the total
newsroom, is part of the latest cost-cutting effort that aims to
reduce the total Times staff by 250 positions.
The NYT reports that the polygamist sect that made headlines
when hundreds of children were seized from the Yearning for
Zion ranch has found a way to profit from all the attention. The
sect has created a Web site to sell children's clothing that adheres
to their strict standards "for modesty and neatness," and
apparently there's been lots of interest. "The venture may have
come not a moment too soon," notes the NYT. "There has not
been a soul in the fashion world who has not queasily wondered
which designers will cite the women of the Yearning for Zion
ranch as an inspiration for their next collections."
today's papers
My Friend, the Spy
By Daniel Politi
Wednesday, July 2, 2008, at 6:15 AM ET
The Los Angeles Times leads with word that the United States is
using "some of its most sophisticated espionage technology" to
keep tabs on the Iraqi army. The decision to employ spy
satellites on an ally came out of the frustration felt by American
commanders who have been kept in the dark by their Iraqi
counterparts about military operations. The New York Times
leads with a look at how a growing number of economists now
believe that current economic woes aren't going away in the near
future as tight credit and trouble in the job market could continue
until late next year. In the latest sign of how consumers are
cutting back in the face of hard times, automakers reported that
sales plunged last month. The Wall Street Journal leads its
world-wide newsbox with Barack Obama vowing to expand the
Bush administration program that gives federal money to
religious charities. Everyone sees it as Obama's latest effort to
move to the center on certain issues to gain Republican-leaning
voters.
Obama's pledge to expand the faith-based initiatives program
drew criticism from liberal groups that favor a strict separation
of church and state and provided yet another instance in which
the presumptive nominee's base expressed its displeasure with
the candidate. But Obama also made it clear that he would get
away from some of Bush's more controversial policies. Mainly,
Obama emphasized that religious groups who receive federal
money can't hire people based on their faith. "Federal dollars
that go directly to churches, temples and mosques can only be
used on secular programs," Obama said. The announcement
came at a time when the presumptive nominee is launching
"what many Democrats say is the most aggressive outreach to
religious voters ever by the party's presidential nominee," notes
the LAT.
The Washington Post leads with news that more American
troops died in Afghanistan last month than in any other month
since the 2001 invasion. Officials say the 28 U.S. combat deaths
are an illustration of how the Taliban and other insurgents are
getting stronger in certain parts of Afghanistan. USA Today
leads with a Pentagon report that was delivered to Congress last
week that says the military won't be able to meet the 2017
deadline to destroy its stockpile of chemical weapons unless it
ships the deadly agents across state lines to other facilities.
Congress would have to change laws that prohibit these types of
weapons from being moved, but it seems lawmakers and
watchdog groups aren't too keen on the idea, saying that it would
expose Americans to unnecessary risks.
The NYT and WSJ point out that if Obama wants proof that his
moves toward the center are angering his supporters, he needs
only to take a look at his own Web site. Obama's site gives
supporters the ability to organize into groups, and in the last few
days thousands have joined one that calls on Obama to reverse
his decision to support the new domestic-spying bill.
The LAT says that the stepped-up effort by the United States to
spy on the Iraqi military, "reflects breakdowns in trust and
coordination between the two forces." But while some say the
move shows the United States doesn't trust the Iraqi military
leadership, others insist it's a positive sign that the Iraqi army
can operate independently. Intelligence officials say that spying
on allies is quite a common practice, and there are only a few
countries in the world that the United States doesn't monitor.
"The bad news is we're spying on Iraqis," a former military
official said. "The good news is that we have to."
The unemployment rate has increased by a percentage point in
the last year, and, just as significantly, the number of people who
have stopped looking for work or have switched to part-time
employment is also on the rise. So far though, the weak job
market has been a product of employers not creating new jobs
rather than firing large numbers of people, but if the reluctance
to spend continues, mass layoffs may not be too far off. One
economist describes the current situation as a "slow-motion
recession" because instead of having a few months of really bad
news, it appears that there will be "two years of sub-par growth."
The tax rebate checks appear to be helping prevent consumer
spending from falling into negative territory, but few expect that
to last.
The NYT off-leads the fascinating revelation that a chart used by
military trainers in an interrogation class in Guantanamo came
directly out of a journal article published more than 50 years ago
that analyzed ways in which the Chinese got confessions from
American prisoners during the Korean War. The news is
shocking not just because the United States has long called these
interrogation methods torture, but also because many of the
confessions they elicited from American prisoners were false. In
what some describe as "a remarkable case of historical amnesia,"
officials began to look at these techniques to use on terrorism
detainees. Congressional investigators released the chart last
month but were seemingly unaware of the connection, which
was pointed out to the NYT by "an independent expert on
interrogation."
Everyone goes inside with the African Union issuing a
resolution urging President Robert Mugabe of Zimbabwe to
enter into talks with the opposition and form a power-sharing
government. But the prospect of that ever happening seems slim
as both Mugabe and Zimbabwe's main opposition party made it
clear they're not likely to sit down to negotiate. The two-day
meeting in Egypt was taken over by talk of Zimbabwe, and
Mugabe was quick to fight back against African leaders who
dared to question him by telling them to solve problems in their
own countries first before criticizing him.
So did the summit achieve anything? Depends whom you ask.
The WP says it demonstrated how the African Union is still the
same, as leaders are reluctant to get involved in another country's
internal affairs. The NYT, on the other hand, says the fact that
African leaders even discussed the issue and wrote a resolution
represents a change for a group of leaders who resisted ever
referring to Mugabe as anything but a liberation hero. Ultimately
though, Zimbabwe's opposition "won none of its key demands"
from the summit, notes the LAT.
In a Page One piece, the WSJ notes Zimbabwe's government is
about to face a potentially big problem as a Germany-based
company that provided the government with lots of special paper
to print its currency said it will no longer do business with
Mugabe. With an annual inflation rate estimated at more than 1
million percent, Zimbabwe was a good customer. The currency
gets devalued so quickly that new bank notes are introduced all
the time, and Mugabe relies on this new money to pay loyalists.
Meanwhile, the citizens have to deal with the consequences. The
treasurer of Zimbabwe's opposition party notes that even billions
are rarely used in his line of work and have been replaced by
quadrillions. "Our economy is too crazy to understand," he said.
As the controversy over Gen. Wesley Clark's comments on
Sunday continues, the WP's editorial board cries out for a bit of
sanity: "Enough already!" Clark's comments may have been
stupid but didn't reveal anything important about the candidate
that warranted this kind of attention when there are so many
pressing issues to discuss. "Casting guilt by surrogate
association is a bipartisan affliction," writes the editorial board.
"So ours is a nonpartisan lament: Cut it out!
today's papers
Patriot Games
By Joshua Kucera
Tuesday, July 1, 2008, at 7:30 AM ET
The Washington Post leads with a speech by Barack Obama in
which the presidential candidate laid out his take on patriotism
in an attempt to tackle head-on the persistent rumors that he is
unpatriotic. The Los Angeles Times leads locally; its top national
story is a critical look at Obama's rival John McCain and his
record on energy issues, saying "the Arizona senator has
swerved from one position to another over the years, taking
often contradictory stances on the federal government's role in
energy policy." The New York Times leads with the sad state of
wounded Iraqi veterans. The Wall Street Journal tops its worldwide newsbox with the opening of eight Iraqi oil and natural gas
fields to foreign companies, including those from the United
States, Europe, Japan, Russia and China. USA Today leads with
the stock market, which has lost $2.1 trillion this year, $1.4
trillion in June alone. It's also on the verge of a bear market—a
drop of 20 percent in the Dow Jones average—although the
paper also gives some perspective: That would be the 33 rd such
drop since 1900.
All the papers cover Obama's speech and tie it together with the
hubbub over Gen. Wesley Clark taking a shot at McCain's
military record. The Post gives the speech the most coverage,
comparing it to Obama's March speech on race, which was timed
to blunt the controversy around his former pastor the Rev.
Jeremiah Wright. Obama took a historical perspective and said
that presidents Jefferson and Adams had been accused of a lack
of patriotism, too. "But just as Wright has not disappeared from
the political landscape, no one expects the patriotism question to
be quelled with one speech," the Post writes.
Among McCain's energy flip-flops, according to the LAT: He
used to oppose subsidies for nuclear power and now supports
them; he has supported forcing automakers to build cars that run
on alternative fuels while opposing the same sort of
requirements for local utilities; and at times has supported
offshore drilling for oil while at other times opposed it. "There is
a very sporadic pattern here," said an official from the League of
Conservation Voters.
Think the soldiers in Walter Reed medical center have it bad?
Talk to Nubras Jabar Muhammad, an Iraqi soldier who had to
spend $2,100 of his own money on medical care after getting
shot on checkpoint duty last year. He lost a kidney and part of
his liver, and doctors ordered him to not stand for long periods,
but his superiors put him back on checkpoint duty. "They told
me if I keep complaining, they'll kick me out of the army," he
told the Times. There are few official figures on the number of
wounded Iraqi veterans (the NYT estimates it could be more than
60,000), and the officials interviewed by the paper argued that
veterans were treated well. But other veterans say they've been
drummed out of the military, denied pensions, and forced to use
public hospitals, which are often run by rival sectarian militias.
Iraq's announcement of the opening of several oil contracts to
foreign companies naturally erupted in controversy. "I do not
believe that the companies should sign contracts in such a fragile
political situation and confusing security situation," one Iraqi
member of parliament told the Post. "America has come over
here to Iraq in order to first control the oil wealth and, second,
the entire economical wealth."
The LAT notes that the regional Kurdish government in northern
Iraq has already signed its own agreements, and that those
companies were barred from the contracts in the rest of Iraq. The
NYT, which yesterday broke the story that the State Department
helped the Iraqi government draw up separate no-bid contracts
that went to five Western oil companies, mentions that the
announcement of those contracts, expected yesterday, was
delayed. The State Department yesterday denied the NYT story, a
fact the Post mentions but the NYT ignores.
But what it all really means … no one yet knows, even those
who stand to make a lot of money from it. As the Journal writes:
"Hoping to show cohesion and progress … the Iraqi oil ministry
may have accomplished the opposite. The announcement out of
Baghdad was so hard to parse that a number of big foreign oil
companies peppered advisers in Washington with questions
trying to grasp what was being floated."
Also in the papers … Algeria's nationalist insurgency has
revitalized itself by rebranding as part of al-Qaida, the NYT
reports in a 3,500-word story, including an interview with the
rebel group's leader. Zimbabwe's neighbors may finally be
getting tough on Robert Mugabe as the African Union summit
opens in Egypt, the Post reports, while the United States is
looking at U.N. sanctions. The oldest mosque in the United
States is in, believe it or not, Iowa, and was badly damaged
during the floods there, the LAT finds. McCain has gotten about
$70,000 from the men behind the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth,
whom he called "dishonest and dishonorable" when they
attacked John Kerry four years ago, USA Today reports.
Isn't it ironic? TP isn't sure that "irony" is exactly the word the
Post should have used in its penultimate graf of the
Obama/McCain patriotism story. Maybe "craven partisan
hackery" was too long? "In a bit of irony, one of McCain's
defenders was retired Col. George 'Bud' Day, a fellow prisoner
of war who appeared in the Swift boat ads that disparaged the
military service of 2004 Democratic nominee John F. Kerry.
Democrats accused McCain and Day of hypocrisy; Day
defended himself and the ads. 'The Swift boat, quote, attacks
were simply a revelation of the truth. The similarity doesn't
exist,' he said. 'One was about laying out the truth. This one is
about attempting to cast another shadow.' "
today's papers
Operation Cannonball
By Arthur Delaney
Monday, June 30, 2008, at 5:48 AM ET
The New York Times leads with a big story on the growth of alQaida in Pakistan and the Bush administration's waffling over
plans to give commandos greater latitude to operate in the
country's tribal areas. The Washington Post leads locally with
the surprise death of a suspected cop killer in Maryland. The
paper's top national spot goes to skepticism of Iranian president
Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's reliance on high oil prices to keep
himself afloat; rich businessmen are profiting, but rising
inflation is hurting Iranian consumers' purchasing power,
thereby hurting Ahmadinejad's re-election prospects. The Los
Angeles Times leads with word that high energy prices are
forcing local governments across the United States to scrimp and
save, just like consumers. The Wall Street Journal tops its
world-wide news box with the swearing-in of Zimbabwe
strongman Robert Mugabe. USA Today leads with news that a
high birth rate, not immigration, accounts for most of the growth
of the nation's Hispanic population.
The NYT's anonymous sources tell the paper that bureaucratic
squabbling in Washington has severely hampered "Operation
Cannonball," the code name for efforts to hunt al-Qaida in
Pakistan, where the terrorist organization has re-established its
base after being smashed in Afghanistan. Secret plans to make it
easier for commandos to go after Osama Bin Laden and his top
deputies have been held up over fears of alienating Pakistani
President Pervez Musharraf. And, according to the Times, the
war in Iraq has diverted lots of resources, such as Predator
drones, from the pursuit of al-Qaida in tribal areas. The NYT
says that the upshot of all this is that the United States today
faces a threat from al-Qaida comparable to the threat it faced
before the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001. For the past day, the Drudge
Report has promised "BUSH ANGER" over the NYT's coming
disclosure of highly classified details. TP expects the story to
make waves.
Twenty-four states are reducing services this year to cover
budget deficits due to high energy prices, reports the LAT. The
Times has some compelling examples. Here are three of them: A
sheriff's department in Colorado can't afford car patrols, a Seattle
school district is eliminating stops on school-bus routes, and
state offices in Utah are moving to a four-day workweek.
The WSJ fronts word that, for various reasons, the rebuilding of
the World Trade Center in New York City is going to take
longer and cost more than expected. The project might be
delayed by one to three years and cost overruns might total $1
billion to $3 billion. A key consequence of the delays is that the
memorial portion of the project might not be completed by the
10-year anniversary of the Sept. 11 attacks.
A new design for gallon milk jugs makes the containers cheaper
and easier to ship, and it keeps the milk fresher, but the NYT
reports that consumers are crying about it because it makes them
spill. The jug is a sign of the way changes will play out in the
American economy over the next couple of decades, experts say.
The benefits of the new design are so manifold that retailers are
"undeterred" by consumer complaints. The trick, according to
one smart person, is to tilt the jug slowly and pour slowly.
Put milk in a cumbersome jug that costs less money, consumers
get all upset. It follows, then, that if you put plain old water in a
fancy bottle, people will shell out for it. The WP fronts a
supersharp look at the bottled-water industry.
The NYT fronts a look at how food hoarding by at least 29
countries has contributed to increases in food prices worldwide,
making it more difficult for impoverished countries to import
what they need. The Times calls the situation an acute symptom
of a chronic condition.
The WP reports that the Department of Defense, "the nation's
biggest polluter," is refusing to go along with orders by the
Environmental Protection Agency to clean up contaminated
military bases. The EPA can't sue the Pentagon as it would a
private polluter, but the law is supposed to give the EPA final
say in environmental disputes with other agencies.
The LAT fronts the 2008 Veepstakes, hyping the large number of
highly prestigious folks getting mentioned for the No. 2 job. The
Times acknowledges, however, that the actual shortlists for
Democratic and Republican vice presidential candidates remain
a mystery. Still, the article boasts a very nice lede: "Never in
modern memory have so many eminent people been mentioned
for a job that has been compared—unfavorably—to a bucket of
warm spit."
Some Vietnam veterans who served on swift boats are annoyed
that thanks to the 2004 presidential election, most people
associate the term "swift boat" with a nasty political smear
instead of honorable military service, reports a Page One NYT
story.
The Islamic Republic of Iran is in the grips of a self-help craze,
reports a Page One WSJ story. Iranian youth are snubbing
religion in favor of New Age theories and motivational speakers.
The article notes that the theocratic regime, which typically
suppresses un-Islamic behavior, has so far done little to stymie
the trend.
today's papers
Showdown in Peshawar
A summary of what's in the major U.S. newspapers.
By David Sessions
Sunday, June 29, 2008, at 8:04 AM ET
The Washington Post leads with the Pakistani military moving
into Peshawar, a northern city about 30 miles from Afghanistan,
to counteract an impending attack by the Taliban and other
Islamist fighters. The New York Times leads with a sweeping
Army self-study that identifies a number of problems
contributing to the difficulty U.S. forces have faced in stabilizing
Iraq since 2003. The Los Angeles Times leads with an analysis of
Sen. John McCain's campaign stops. This week, McCain has
been to … Canada? Mexico?
Clouds of violence are gathering along the Pakistan-Afghanistan
border, the WP reports, as the Pakistani military lines up to face
the Taliban in Peshawar. The United States has been urging
Pakistan to take a stronger approach toward insurgents, though
Islamabad has carefully avoided a full-on confrontation until
now. Fighting along the border has intensified this month, with
more than 30 NATO soldiers being killed in Afghanistan and
several mutilated or beheaded. The new force Pakistan is
showing in Peshawar "may signal a strategic shift in the
country's struggle to quell extremist activity." The NYT reports
that Pakistani soldiers "shelled territory outside Peshawar held
by an extremist leader. Army forces were not used, and the
intent apparently was merely to push the militants back from the
city's perimeter."
A new Army study titled "On Point II: Transition to the New
Campaign" presents the results of 200 interviews in nearly 700
pages, including "long quotations" from military officers,
according to the NYT. Its authors were "instructed not to shy
away from controversy while withholding a final verdict on
whether senior officials had made mistakes that decisively
altered the course of the war." The problems diagnosed center
around poor planning and misguided reactions to unanticipated
problems—the Army, for example, assumed most of Iraq's
ministries would continue operating after the fall of Saddam
Hussein and reduced its forces too much too soon.
The LAT's lead story wonders if Sen. John McCain's unorthodox
campaigning—traveling to foreign cities to underscore his
foreign-policy image at a time Americans are most concerned
with the economy—might actually be his best option. McCain
seems to hope that being seen with foreign leaders will heighten
the country's impression that he is a strong, presidential leader
who takes national security seriously. But the lessons of
previous Republican campaigns (Nixon in 1960, George H.W.
Bush in 1992) remind us that banking on an issue voters don't
care about is a recipe for disaster. Maybe this time, "given
voters' contempt for Washington, the Republican Party and the
incumbent president, it might be McCain's best chance of
winning."
The NYT and WP front a pair of Supreme Court term analyses,
both addressing the crucial new role of Justice Anthony
Kennedy as the court's often-deciding swing vote. The NYT
fleshes out a theme that both pieces mention—the unclassifiable
nature of the past term—saying that the court "left a complicated
and to some extent blurred imprint." The WP predicts the rather
drastic role a John McCain presidency could have in moving the
court to the right, as the justices most likely to retire are on the
liberal end of the spectrum. Obama would likely nominate
similar-minded individuals, but conservative replacements
nominated by Sen. McCain would change the high court's
political makeup for the next several decades.
In an Olympic season already riddled with controversy, the LAT
uncovers one more: Mexican-American athletes who have
decided to compete for the country of their ancestry rather than
the one that helped them into the international spotlight.
Giovanni Lanaro, the world's sixth-ranked pole vaulter, who was
born in Los Angeles and attended California State University,
Fullerton, says he "will always compete for Mexico" and would
"never compete for any other country." (His mother was born
there.) The LAT reports that this crossing over is a "growing
practice" of athletes among the United States' 28 million
Mexican-Americans. The practice is legal for both Mexicans and
Americans under each nation's Olympic rules, but
understandably doesn't please many north of the border.
In the WP Style section, a former Vogue employee briefly
profiles the magazine and its famous editor, Anna Wintour, who
may be the only editor widely known to people who have never
seen a copy of her magazine. Wintour has been in charge of the
leading women's style magazine for 20 years today, an occasion
she will mark by doing "… nothing." As most of the nation now
knows, thanks to a certain film that wrung comedy from her
infamous fastidiousness, Wintour has spent the last two decades
becoming a cultural icon—mysterious, glamorous, and never
politically correct.
today's papers
Vote or Die
By Roger McShane
Saturday, June 28, 2008, at 5:58 AM ET
The Washington Post and Wall Street Journal world-wide news
box lead with, while the Los Angeles Times fronts, Zimbabwe's
one-man presidential election. Gangs of thugs loyal to President
Robert Mugabe, the only candidate, drove frightened voters to
the polls, collecting their personal information and threatening
violence if they resisted. The New York Times poetically
describes it as a "woeful event in a woebegone nation."
The LAT leads with a report on Barack Obama's move to the
center on many issues, while the WP fronts his appearance with
Hillary Clinton in Unity, N.H. The NYT leads with a potential
deal between the United States and Europe that would allow
American law enforcement and security agencies to access
information about European citizens. Credit card transactions,
travel histories, and Internet browsing habits might be shared,
but there are still about half a dozen outstanding issues to be
dealt with.
The nature of Zimbabwe's election is perhaps best captured in an
open letter from opposition leader Morgan Tsvangirai to his
supporters. Addressing those who might be compelled to vote
for Mugabe, he wrote: "If you need to do this to save your life,
be not afraid. Do it." The LAT says some did, if only to have
their fingers stained with the indelible voting ink that would save
them a beating from ruling party thugs. But many others stayed
away and the NYT reports that turnout was "very low, especially
in the opposition's urban strongholds." Unsurprisingly, the
government disagrees.
The LAT says results are expected late Saturday. It will be
interesting to see if the government tries to make the tally look
realistic. The ruling party "will have to rejigger the results from
the frightened masses, taking votes from themselves," a civic
group leader tells the NYT, predicting that Tsvangirai will get "at
least 30 percent." But Western and African nations have already
condemned the government's actions and some are threatening
new sanctions. Still, Mugabe seems unfazed. "Some African
countries have done worse things," a state-run newspaper quoted
him as saying.
Back in America, the LAT cites Barack Obama's "tougher stance
on Iran, mild reaction to expanded gun rights and malleable view
of free trade" as proof that the candidate is moving toward the
center to broaden his appeal. This is a typical move for a
general-election candidate, but tougher for Obama, who carries
the risk of diminishing his self-styled image as a new type of
politician. Mr. McCain, of course, is doing the same thing, but
he's moving right in an attempt to court conservatives, says the
Times. All this posturing makes TP sympathetic to Libertarians,
some of whom complain to the NYT that the party is
"fundamentally more committed to principle than electoral
action."
The WP reports that the Obama campaign is encouraged by
Hillary Clinton's willingness to stitch the Democratic Party back
together. Obama's advisers hope to use both Hillary and Bill
Clinton to speak to voters about the economy. The Post notes
that Obama will have a distinct advantage over John McCain if
he is able to consolidate the Democratic vote—many more
Americans identify with the Democrats than with the
Republicans. But he's not there yet. "We want Hillary!" chanted
some in the New Hampshire crowd yesterday. "It's over!" a man
yelled back.
Obama may also benefit from Bob Barr's candidacy on the
Libertarian ticket. Earlier in the week Obama's campaign
manager said a strong showing by Barr could deliver Georgia
and Alaska to the Democrat. Barr, meanwhile, tells the NYT that
a group of Republicans have told him not to run. But should they
really be so scared? Barr has raised just over $300,000 so far,
and "he has yet to lease a campaign headquarters, have a fundraiser, tape a television advertisement or hold a campaign event,"
says the Times.
The WSJ fronts bad news out of Afghanistan, where Taliban
militants have regrouped and the security situation has
deteriorated. The insurgency has now spread into areas
previously thought to be stable. If this all sounds familiar, it's
because the LAT reported much the same thing on Wednesday.
But the Journal cites a new Pentagon report (also mentioned in
the Post), which is part of a "top-to-bottom review of U.S.
strategy in Afghanistan." NYT readers might counsel the
department to look into "the Taliban's deepening penetration of
Pakistan" as well.
The papers report better news from another trouble spot. North
Korea razed the cooling tower at its Yongbyon nuclear facility
on Friday. While video of the event was broadcast widely in the
West, the NYT reports that North Korea's state news agency
didn't mention the demolition.
All the papers deliver some gloomy economic news. The WSJ,
NYT, and WP say the Dow Jones Industrial Average is now in
"bear-market territory," while the LAT envisions "a world of
$200-a-barrel oil."
The $4.6 million man … Everyone reports on the Justice
Department's $4.6 million settlement with Steven Hatfill, a
former Army biodefense researcher who was labeled a "person
of interest" in the probe of the 2001 anthrax attacks. The
department, which didn't admit to any wrongdoing, had good
reason to bury the news on a Friday, as the papers rehash the
bungled investigation that never solved anything. The NYT ends
its article on a comical note, retelling the story of how FBI
agents ran over Hatfill's foot as he approached their surveillance
car. The researcher was later given a $5 ticket for "walking to
create a hazard." I guess he can pay it now.
today's papers
Year of the Gun
By Daniel Politi
Friday, June 27, 2008, at 6:10 AM ET
All the papers lead with the Supreme Court's ruling for the first
time in history that the Second Amendment protects an
individual's right to own a gun. The justices—split along
traditional ideological grounds and by a 5-4 vote—struck down
the District of Columbia ban on handguns, the strictest guncontrol law in the country. The Washington Post naturally
devotes most of its front-page real estate to the ruling, noting
that it "wiped away years of lower court decisions that had held
that the intent of the amendment ... was to tie the right of gun
possession to militia service." The New York Times says Justice
Antonin Scalia's majority opinion was "his most important in his
22 years on the court." The Wall Street Journal points out that
"[f]or the third time this month, a major constitutional issue was
decided by a single vote—that of Justice Anthony Kennedy, the
maverick conservative" who had sided with the court's liberal
wing in the Guantanamo and child-rapist cases but yesterday
lined up with the conservatives.
In his majority opinion, Scalia took pains to emphasize that the
"decision, while historic, was narrow and its practical effects
limited," says the Los Angeles Times. The individual right to gun
ownership is not unlimited, and Scalia said the court would
uphold restrictions on concealed, as well as "dangerous and
unusual," weapons and laws that prohibit firearms from
government buildings and schools. "Beyond that, the court did
not address what types of regulations would survive legal
challenges," notes USA Today's lead that says the decision
"immediately cast doubt on gun restrictions nationwide." The
LAT points out that yesterday's decision "brought immediate
court challenges to similar laws in Chicago and San Francisco."
Advocates for gun rights praised the ruling and said the decision
provides them with a clear opening to issue a variety of legal
challenges to existing restrictions on the ownership of firearms.
But gun-control advocates also said they were at least heartened
by the fact that the court didn't dismiss all restrictions on
firearms as unconstitutional. In a scathing dissent, Justice John
Paul Stevens warned that yesterday's decision would likely lead
to a new era of judicial involvement in an issue that is best left to
elected lawmakers. In reality, though, the ruling "will have little
practical impact in most of the country," says the NYT in a Page
One analysis. It is likely to be felt mostly in a few urban areas
that have the most restrictive gun-control laws.
In their opinions, Scalia and Stevens "went head to head in
debating how the 27 words in the Second Amendment should be
interpreted," notes the NYT. Stevens emphasized that the right to
own a weapon exists only "in conjunction with service in a wellregulated militia," while Scalia said that the militia part of the
amendment isn't meant as a limit on the pre-existing right to bear
arms. The two also sharply disagreed on the 1939 decision that
was the last time the issue was analyzed by the court and has
been widely interpreted as a rejection of the individual-rights
argument for possessing firearms.
The presidential candidates both quickly praised the decision,
although Sen. John McCain was a bit more effusive than Sen.
Barack Obama. McCain called it "a landmark victory" that
brings to an end "the specious argument" that there's no
individual right to gun ownership. For his part, Obama said the
decision protects the rights of gun owners but also emphasized
that this protection "is not absolute."
The WP and LAT both publish opinion pieces that argue
yesterday's decision involved the court's conservative wing
displaying its most activist instincts. In the LAT, Erwin
Chemerinsky writes that the ambiguity of the Second
Amendment should have led the justices to follow precedent and
allow lawmakers to decide the issue. Instead, the majority took
matters into their own hands in "a powerful reminder that the
conservative justices are activists when it serves their political
agenda," writes Chemerinsky. In the Post, E.J. Dionne Jr. agrees
and says the conservative justices once again demonstrated
"their willingness to abandon precedent in order to do whatever
is necessary to further the agenda of the contemporary political
right." The decision serves as a good reminder "that judicial
activism is now a habit of the right."
It's Election Day in Zimbabwe, and those who don't vote risk
being beaten or killed, notes the NYT inside. President Robert
Mugabe has refused to bow to international pressure and insisted
the vote will go on as scheduled, even though his opponent
dropped out of the race and violence has engulfed the country.
Zimbabweans will likely be rounded up and taken to the polls,
where many believe that if they don't vote for Mugabe they will
face retribution. "If you don't show your finger that you've voted,
you'll be beaten," explained opposition leader Morgan
Tsvangirai, who tells the WP that he's boycotting the elections
and will "do nothing" today.
North Korea destroyed a 60-foot-tall cooling tower at its
Yongbyon nuclear plant.
So who's going to do the beating and killing? Young men whose
"life has come down to a painfully simple equation: If you don't
beat your victim hard enough, you may be the next victim,"
reports the LAT. Mugabe's thugs have often been portrayed as
ruthless villains, but the LAT talks to three who sound more like
scared children than vicious killers as they describe how they
want to escape but fear the militia would capture them or kill
their families. They also tell the LAT that young women and
girls as young as 15 are being kidnapped to serve as sex slaves
for the militias. It's another must-read story from the LAT, whose
reporter has been writing some of the best, most detailed
accounts of the situation on the ground in Zimbabwe that
manage to illustrate how regular citizens are caught in the
middle of the horror.
The WP's Steven Pearlstein writes that no one should expect the
economy to rebound in the near future. "This thing's going
down, fast and hard," he writes, while noting that this downturn
will be different from most because it's "a recession with an
overlay of inflation." The inconvenient combination is
particularly difficult for the Federal Reserve to deal with,
because trying to fix one problem makes the other worse. "Don't
let anyone fool you: It will be a while before things return to
normal."
The NYT fronts and the WSJ goes inside with interesting looks at
why exactly South Africa's president, Thabo Mbeki, has refused
to criticize Mugabe and continues to insist on mediation. The
world is puzzled by Mbeki's approach, which the NYT
characterizes as "walking softly, carrying no stick," but it's the
result of his close personal relationship with Mugabe as well as
his political convictions and a reluctance to allow the Western
world to meddle in Africa's affairs. Tsvangirai has called for
Mbeki to step down from his role as the region's appointed
mediator.
The NYT, LAT, and WP front President Bush's announcement
that North Korea will be removed from the list of countries that
sponsor terrorism after Pyongyang provided long-awaited details
about its nuclear efforts. Although the move is largely portrayed
as symbolic, the NYT highlights that it demonstrates how
Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice managed to win "a major
battle" against Vice President Dick Cheney and his allies, who
are none too happy about the move.
The country that Bush once designated as part of the "axis of
evil" provided details about its main nuclear effort, but everyone
says there was lots missing from the report, particularly any
information about assembled nuclear weapons. Pyongyang also
provided no details about a suspected uranium-enrichment
program, which has led some to speculate that perhaps North
Korea will continue secret efforts to build a nuclear weapon.
Early-morning wire stories report that, as had been announced,
Everyone notes the bad day at the stock market. Oil prices
continued to increase, and the Dow Jones industrial average fell
to its lowest level in almost two years. Although it seems like
just yesterday that many were saying the economy would
rebound in the second half of the year, there are doubts about
whether that will actually happen. Financial firms continue to
lose money, and consumers are highly pessimistic about the state
of the economy.
Starting next week, smokers won't be allowed to light up in
cafes, bars, restaurants, and clubs in the Netherlands. Well, light
up cigarettes, at least. USAT reports that while smoking a joint at
a coffee shop will still be perfectly legal, smoking cigarettes will
be forbidden. Naturally, people are confused, particularly since
many Europeans are used to mixing a little tobacco with their
marijuana. "I will have to ask, 'What's in that joint?' " one coffee
shop owner said. "It's going to make it pretty difficult to
enforce."
war stories
The Grunt vs. the Flyboy
The real reason for Wesley Clark's ill-advised comments about John McCain's
military record.
By Fred Kaplan
Tuesday, July 1, 2008, at 4:45 PM ET
There are two explanations for Gen. Wesley Clark's politically
tin-eared remark about Sen. John McCain last Sunday.
First, Clark is politically tin-eared. Remember his 2004
presidential campaign?
Second, and more fundamental, Clark was an Army infantry
commander during the Vietnam War while McCain was a Navy
aviator. As a rule, the grunts hated the flyboys.
Here, as a reminder, is what Clark said when asked about the
Republican presidential candidate on the June 29 episode of
CBS's Face the Nation:
I certainly honor his service as a prisoner of
war. He was a hero to me and to hundreds of
thousands and millions of others in the armed
forces as a prisoner of war.
That was where Clark should have zipped his lips. But, as if he
couldn't hold back some raging impulse, he went on:
He hasn't held executive responsibility. … I
don't think riding in a fighter plane and getting
shot down is a qualification to be president.
In a sense, of course, Clark is right. There's nothing about flying
a plane—or, for that matter, driving a tank or shooting a rifle—
that indicates a talent for high office. But if the retired general
wanted to be on the team and possibly in the Cabinet of Sen.
Barack Obama—who also has never held an executive position
and was, on that very day, fending off accusations of insufficient
patriotism—he should have known that it's best not to wander
this turf.
My guess is that we have heard the last of Clark as an Obama
surrogate. The next time Obama's campaign passes around a list
of national-security advisers, Clark's name won't be on it. But as
we say farewell, let us consider the professional passions that
animated his faux pas in order to improve our understanding not
only of Gen. Clark but also of rivalries that still beset the armed
forces.
In 1967, Navy Lt. Commander John McCain was flying A-4E
Skyhawk attack planes off the USS Oriskany aircraft carrier. He
was on his 23rd bombing mission over North Vietnam when an
air-defense battery shot him out of the sky. He crashed into
Hanoi's Truc Bach Lake (where a statue of him was erected, in
celebration of the event) and was held prisoner for the next five
years.
In 1970, Army Capt. Wes Clark was commanding A Company,
1st Battalion, 16th Infantry, of the 1st Infantry Division ("the Big
Red One"), when a Viet Cong soldier shot him four times.
Though seriously wounded, he ordered his men to fight back,
and they won the skirmish. Clark was hospitalized and awarded
a Silver Star.
You might think that Clark would feel a warm comradeship with
McCain, having fought the same war and faced death from the
guns of the same enemy. A retired Army general who also
commanded a company in Vietnam and has known Clark for
many years told me that, in one sense, he couldn't understand
why Clark would say such a thing. "The nightmare of every
soldier over there was that we'd get captured," he said. "We all
thought that would be worse than getting killed."
Yet, in another sense, the retired general understands Clark's
comments all too well. "The soldier's attitude toward Navy
aviators, Marine aviators, and Air Force aviators," this retired
general said, "was that they flew their missions, then went back
to the officers' club for a nice dinner and a good night's sleep,
while we ate scraps and huddled under a tree in the jungle."
Air Force and Navy commanders at the time had no interest in
using their planes to provide close air support to troops on the
ground. Their main missions were air superiority (shooting down
enemy planes in air-to-air combat) and deep interdiction
(bombing targets deep behind enemy lines). The grunts had to
rely on artillery and the Army's own helicopters, which were
easy to shoot down from the ground. (Under a 1947 interservice
treaty on roles and missions, the Army was not allowed to build
fixed-wing aircraft.) Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara
tried to press the Joint Chiefs of Staff to assign some airplanes to
provide cover for the troops. The most they could muster was a
handful of Navy A-1s, which were briefly taken out of mothballs
for that purpose.
Interservice rivalries are not nearly as fierce as they once were.
One reason is the Goldwater-Nichols reform of 1986, which
among other things required officers to serve on a "joint" (i.e.,
multiservice) command before getting promoted to general.
Another has been the experience of the past two decades' wars,
especially the ongoing Iraq war, in which the services have
conducted joint operations to an unprecedented degree. Finally,
the military budgets have lately been large enough for everybody
to get what they've wanted: There hasn't been much need for
rivalry.
Still, tensions persist. Some soldiers and Marines resent the Air
Force and Navy for shouldering so light a burden in Iraq,
bearing only 4 percent of the fatalities and 2 percent of the
injuries in this war. (See chart below.)
Last month, when Secretary of Defense Robert Gates fired the
top two Air Force officials—the secretary and the chief of staff,
the latter a four-star general—the official reason was loose
security at nuclear-weapons facilities. But the real reason was
Gates' frustration that they weren't pulling their weight in Iraq
and Afghanistan. He had long complained that the Air Force
wasn't deploying its "unmanned aerial vehicles" efficiently
enough. (These camera-carrying UAVs, which have provided
invaluable intelligence, are controlled by joysticks back at the
base, not by a pilot in the cockpit, so some Air Force officers
have been unenthusiastic about using them.) In an unusually
rebellious move, backed by Gates, the Army has started to build
and deploy its own reconnaissance aircraft.
Gates was also furious when Air Force generals publicly
challenged his decision to halt production of the F-22 stealth
fighter-attack plane. More than 100 of the planes are in the field,
but they have never been used in combat. They are rationalized
as necessary for a possible future war against China—an attitude
that Gates lambasted in a speech as "next war-itis."
Some Air Force officials privately protest the insinuations and
note that Gates has surrounded himself with Army generals—
most notably Gen. Peter Chiarelli, his very intelligent senior
military assistant—but no air officers. They have a point, but the
main point here is that interservice tensions drive much of what
goes on in the minds of military personnel.
And that may explain what was going on in the mind of Clark on
Sunday morning. In his case, the institutional resentments may
have been stiffened by personal ones. McCain, as he noted, has
never held a position of command. Clark, on the other hand, has
held many—not just as a company commander in Vietnam and
at Fort Knox but also as the supreme allied commander in
Europe and, in that capacity, as the commander of the air war in
Kosovo. And yet in his bid for the presidency, Clark barely
made it past the New Hampshire primaries, while McCain—this
fighter pilot and war prisoner—is one of the two finalists to
become the ultimate commander, the commander in chief.
Life, the Army man might have been thinking, just isn't fair.
war stories
Better Than Nothing
Decoding North Korea's latest moves.
By Fred Kaplan
Friday, June 27, 2008, at 6:40 PM ET
Some brief history of where we've been:
In 1994, President Bill Clinton negotiated the "Agreed
Framework," which froze activity at North Korea's reactor,
locked its fuel rods—which could be reprocessed into
plutonium—inside a pool, and stationed international monitors
inside the facility.
In 2001, President George W. Bush called off further talks and,
soon after, canceled the Agreed Framework. The North Koreans
announced that they would kick out the inspectors, unlock the
fuel rods, and reprocess them into plutonium. Soon after, they
did just that—to no response from the United States.
In July 2003, the North Koreans announced that they'd
reprocessed all 8,000 fuel rods, enough to build a half-dozen or
so A-bombs.
One month later, "six-party talks" began—involving the United
States, China, Russia, Japan, and both Koreas—to discuss the
nuclear issue. Bush never put any seriously enticing proposals
on the table.
In September 2005, the six-party talks resulted in a "Joint
Statement," in which the North Koreans committed to
abandoning their nuclear weapons and related programs—and
the other parties agreed to reward them with energy assistance. It
was also agreed that these steps would be taken in a phased
manner, "commitment for commitment, action for action." This
was a significant departure from Bush's previous stance, which
refused to make any concessions until after the North Koreans
dismantled all their nuclear facilities. Still, the statement was
vague. The North Koreans agreed to return to compliance with
the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty "at an early date."
Washington agreed to supply them with a light-water nuclear
reactor "at an appropriate time." No specific steps or
inducements were spelled out.
In October 2006, again after several announcements, the North
Koreans exploded a nuclear bomb in an underground test site.
The North Koreans blew up the cooling tower of their nuclear
reactor at Yongbyon today. (You can watch the explosion here.)
In the wake of their earlier steps, which include the release of a
60-page document itemizing their nuclear programs and
facilities, the path toward the country's total nuclear
disarmament seems fairly well-paved.
At that point, Bush got serious about arms control. In early 2007,
at Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice's prodding, he allowed
Assistant Secretary Christopher Hill to hold bilateral talks in
Berlin with his North Korean counterpart (the sorts of talks that
Bush had previously forbidden). A few days later, they
negotiated a deal that would give Kim Jong-il's regime specific
rewards for taking partial steps toward disarmament.
And yet nobody outside the State Department, dove or hawk,
seems very happy with this deal—and with good reason. It is
better than nothing, by a long shot. But, even compared with the
goals spelled out in joint statements by the two governments
over the past year, the step down the road is a small one indeed.
(For more on this saga, see my book Daydream Believers: How
a Few Grand Ideas Wrecked American Power, specifically
Chapter 2 and the last few pages of Chapter 5.)
Critics on the right, especially John Bolton, the administration's
former U.N. ambassador, lashed out at this deal as an
abandonment of Bush's principles—an accurate appraisal,
though the president's longstanding critics (including me) heaved
a sigh of relief, noting that these "principles" had been the main
problem all along. They were based on the fantasy that Kim
Jong-il's regime would collapse if we simply ignored it and
occasionally threatened to overthrow it. White House officials
said their policy stemmed from "moral clarity"; critics pointed
out that keeping Kim Jong-il from building and proliferating Abombs was a moral, as well as pragmatic, stance, too.
It is the "initial phase" of this controversial agreement—which
the six-party members ratified on Feb. 13, 2007—that is now
being implemented, triggering renewed attacks from the hawks
but also raised eyebrows from several arms-control advocates.
There was always one loophole in that document. The Bush
administration, in summarizing the deal, said that it required the
North Koreans, among other things, to list all their nuclear
weapons and existing nuclear programs. However, that wasn't
quite accurate. The document said only that the North Koreans
"will discuss" such a list. (Italics added.)
One lesson learned by those who negotiated the 1990s' Agreed
Framework was this: The North Koreans will exploit every
loophole, so nail the language down tight. That didn't happen
this time—for understandable reasons, which we will soon
discuss, but still.
The North Koreans did discuss a list. But, according to some
knowledgeable sources, the 60-page list that they actually
provided pertains only to the Yongbyon nuclear reactor and to
its nearby reprocessing plant. Now this is a big deal. Plutonium
is the element that produces the largest number of nuclear bombs
in the shortest span of time. But it's not quite the deal that the
administration said, or perhaps thought, it was getting. The list
was supposed to—or, minus that pesky "discuss" loophole, it
looked like it was supposed to—cover "all nuclear weapons and
existing nuclear programs," not just those dealing with
plutonium. Other programs would include highly enricheduranium facilities, high-explosive test sites, nuclear test sites,
and storage facilities that might contain bombs and fissile
materials. The list reportedly does not include any of that.
the Asia Foundation (and author of Negotiating on the Edge, the
best book about North Korea's diplomatic strategy), agrees: "The
scope of this agreement does not match what we signed up for."
He also says, "As always with North Korea, it's disappointing
and frustrating." Still, he says, "It's better than nothing." Both
Sneider and Snyder, it should be noted, have been strong
advocates of arms control and critics of the Bush
administration's earlier approach.
Two questions arise. First, could Rice and Hill have managed a
better deal? It's hard to say. In his book, Scott Snyder writes that
the North Koreans typically adopt a very hard line toward the
end of a negotiating session. At that point, the other side has to
be willing to stand firm and walk away. Clinton's emissary did
just that toward the end of the Agreed Framework talks, after the
North Koreans announced a signing ceremony then told the
puzzled American that the five remaining disputes would simply
be settled in Pyongyang's favor. (They relented when he said he
was going home.) Should Hill, too, have taken his car to the
airport? Would the North Koreans have backed down? Who can
say?
There is one big difference between 1994 and 2008: The United
States had lots of leverage back then—and it has very little now.
There are two reasons for this. First, when Clinton dangled the
threat of force in front of the North Koreans in '94, they might
have believed he'd really use it; Bush never even dangled a
threat, and, with military forces stuck in Iraq and Afghanistan,
such growling wouldn't have been credible anyway. Second, and
more important, by 2008, the North Koreans had already
reprocessed plutonium and set off an atomic bomb; they were a
bona fide "nuclear state." They could walk away from the table
with a more sincere shrug than we could.
When John Bolton was undersecretary of state in the Bush
administration's first term (a post in which he was installed at the
vice president's insistence), he and Cheney put up fierce
resistance every time then-Secretary Colin Powell tried to push
ahead on talks with North Korea. The next time Bolton writes an
op-ed decrying the Bush-Rice-Hill deal, he—or at least his
readers—should note that, to the extent it's less than perfect, the
fault, to a large extent, is his.
One caveat here: Only a few government officials have actually
seen this list. It will be publicly released, but it hasn't been yet.
The description that I'm going on (and I'm far from the only one)
may be wrong—though, on the main points, it's probably right.
(For an elaboration on this claim, click here.)
sidebar
Daniel Sneider, assistant director of the Shorenstein Asia-Pacific
Research Center at Stanford University, calls the deal "a
plutonium-containment program" and adds: "That's fine. But it's
not what it was supposed to be." Scott Snyder, senior associate at
In recent speeches and op-ed pieces, Condi Rice has emphasized
that the North Koreans' plutonium is the most dangerous threat
and thus that halting their program should be an agreement's
Return to article
core objective. She is right, but this emphasis reinforces the
widespread reports that the agreement doesn't affect much
besides plutonium. In a June 26 Wall Street Journal op-ed piece,
Rice acknowledged, "Getting a handle on North Korea's
uranium-enrichment program is harder, because we simply do
not know its full scale. … North Korea acknowledges our
concerns" about the issue. This is a reference to a side agreement
made in Singapore, in which the North Koreans literally
acknowledged our concerns. Period. The end. The North
Koreans have said that anything they did involving the pursuit of
enriched uranium (they have admitted to acquiring gas
centrifuges) did not amount to a "program." Perhaps they're
right. But the North Koreans did commit, back in September
2005, to "abandoning all nuclear weapons and existing nuclear
programs." If the point of the step-by-step negotiations is to
reach this point, and to do so in a complete and verifiable
fashion, then those other programs, having nothing to do with
plutonium, are going to have to enter into the talks at some
point.
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