Master Feed : The Atlantic

Tech Blog Payola?

2012-02-23T20:07:10-05:00

Suppose you have a stake in an investment fund and would like to get favorable publicity for the companies in your portfolio. One approach is to spend your day reaching out to influential tech bloggers, trying to sell them on the glories of these companies. But that takes so much time! How about this short cut: You could just be an influential tech blogger and sing the praises of the companies yourself .

It would be kind of like the payola scandals of the 1950s, when music companies paid disk jockeys to play their music, except that you get to be both the disk jockey and the music company, thus saving yourself the trouble of moving money from one pocket to another.

According to tech blogger Dan Lyons (who gained fame via the nom de plume "Fake Steve Jobs" years ago), this business model is catching on. Last week Lyons criticized Michael Arrington and MG Siegler, two bloggers who have a stake in CrunchFund and recently wrote in defense of one of its holdings, Path. This week Lyons reports that another well-known tech blogger, Robert Scoble, has been exploring possible participation in an investment fund. Lyons predicts that other "hacks for hire" will be doing so, too.

Would that be a bad thing?

Arrington and Siegler point out that when they wrote about Path they noted their connection to it. But is that full enough disclosure? I mean, doesn't a company like Path have companies that are rivals and companies that are strategic partners or potential partners--so isn't there a conflict of interest when Arrington and Siegler write about those? And if you add up all the rivals and partners of all the companies in CrunchFund's portfolio, aren't you talking about a lot of companies? How are readers supposed to know enough about these relationships to know when they should take the writing of Arrington and Siegler with a grain of salt?

I can imagine a couple of replies:

1) Now that anyone can have a platform--Twitter, Tumblr, comments sections, whatever--there can be hordes of skeptics combing the writing of Arrington and Siegler, and the list of CrunchFund investments, and bringing conflicts of interest to light. All you need is transparency and a bunch of people with too much time on their hands. (Arrington, in particular, sees transparency as the solution.)

2) You shouldn't think of a blogger as a "journalist" who is supposed to comply with some professional code of ethics. Bloggers can be politicians, entrepreneurs, and various other kinds of people who are part of the game they're covering. In fact, one of the best known tech bloggers, Fred Wilson, is a venture capitalist whose full disclosure is in his blog's title: AVC. But because he was a VC before he was a blogger, nobody complains about him having lost his journalistic integrity!

However satisfactory you think these answers are or aren't, I suspect they're the answers of the future. If so, the future will dovetail with the recent past. For the last few decades it seems that traditional beliefs about the human obligation to truth and the human capacity for objectivity have been giving way to the assumption that everyone has an agenda and it's up to the audience to figure it out. I'm not sure to what extent, if any, this change has been driven by the fact that technologies have been making it easier to discern the agendas--or, at least, to discern the web of affiliations that might suggest an agenda. Maybe it's just a happy coincidence.

[Postscript: Shortly before posting this I came across an exchange between Lyons and Scoble over whether Lyons had overstated Scoble's role in trying to start a new investment fund. In any event, the way I've put it in my post--that Scoble had been "exploring possible participation" in an investment fund--would, so far as I can tell, meet with Scoble's approval. And here, btw, are Siegler's and Arrington's original replies to Lyons.]

The Perishable Pundit on Organics, Crop Yields, and Food Politics

2012-02-23T18:07:46-05:00

Jim Prevor responds to Marion Nestle's article about organic food production, discusses the downside of the community's deal with USDA.

I don't ordinarily reprint or comment on discussions of my work but Perishable Pundit Jim Prevor's response to my recent post on organics is worth a read. I reprint his piece with his permission. Skip the flattering comments about my work and scroll right down to his discussion of the downside of the organic community's deal with the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA).

Our piece, Organics, Crop Yields And Feeding The World, brought many letters and public comments, including an article from one of the most prominent food analysts writing today.

Marion Nestle, the Paulette Goddard Professor in the Department of Nutrition, Food Studies and Public Health at New York University and the author of many food and food policy related books, is often perceived by many in the trade as an enemy of the food industry. We find her enormously thoughtful and willing to ask many questions that are sometimes uncomfortable for the trade to address. We don't always come down on the same side as her, but we always find reading her to be a wise investment of our time.

She recently wrote a piece titled "The Endless Controversy Over Organics," which focused on our interview with Dr. Steve Savage. As usual, Professor Nestle was open to the evidence presented -- in this case regarding the relative yield between conventional and organic production. In the end, though, she threw up her hands at the conflicting research:

"What impresses me about research on organic productivity is that its interpretation can be predicted by who is doing the interpreting. I've seen, and review in my book, What to Eat, plenty of research demonstrating that organics are only slightly less productive than industrial agriculture and at much lower cost to soil and the environment."

We think this is where most people will end up. The problem is that it is relatively easy to do research that will show organic production to be competitive. This is because as long as organic has only a tiny share of production, producers have the option to grow organic in a location that is optimized for organic production.

The yields in these optimized locations can sometimes be competitive with those of conventional production. This has, though, almost no relationship to the question of whether if all production was converted to organic, would the yields be competitive.

Here at the Pundit, we are in touch with too many growers who have tried to grow organic to have many doubts. Most of these growers were very motivated, they tried to grow organic because they thought they could make money doing so. Yet the results are in ... demand or not, East Coast organic apples will remain a rarity.

This issue is not a trivial one. Professor Nestle highlights that organic growing operates at "much lower cost to soil and the environment." This is controversial. Organic growing utilizes all kinds of substances, and it is not easy to establish that utilizing, say, copper, is more beneficial for the environment than synthetic substances.

Even if true, however, the environmental benefit would depend crucially on the ability to use the same area of land to raise food. If we were compelled to, say, destroy the rain forest to increase acreage for food production, it would be very difficult to make the case that the net benefit of organic production was beneficial to the environment.

One area we find ourselves in sympathy with Professor Nestle is in her critique of the interactions between the organic community and the U.S. government:

"The USDA has long been an uncomfortable host for The National Organic Program. This agency's job is to support industrial agriculture, and organics are indeed small in comparison.

But organic production is an explicit critique of industrial agricultural systems. Organics get higher prices. And their sales are increasing.

No wonder the USDA and representatives of industrial systems don't like organics much and do everything they can to find fault with it.

Sure there are faults to find:

Weak and inadequately enforced standards.

Endless pressure to add industrial chemicals to the approved list and further weaken the standards.

Expenses that few small farmers can afford.

Inadequate protection from contamination with genetically modified crops.

Suspicions about the equivalency of standards for imported organic foods.

Bad apples who make things difficult for farmers who are doing things right.

The USDA ought to be doing all it can to work with organic producers to fix these problems. To its credit, the USDA recruited undersecretary Kathleen Merrigan to try."

We think most at the USDA would dispute her characterization of the agency, saying instead that its responsibility is to promote U.S. agriculture, and since 99 percent of that agriculture is not organic, it should mostly promote the agriculture we actually have, rather than the agriculture organic advocates might wish we had.

That doesn't mean that the USDA doesn't want to help organic farmers. As Professor Nestle notes, there is now an "agreement between the U.S. and the EU to recognize each other's organic standards, thereby opening the European market to American organics. The USDA reports that the organic industry is delighted with the opportunity for new market possibilities."

Although Professor Nestle sees a problem in the USDA hosting the program, we would say the organic community made a deal they will find difficult to live with in asking the government -- any agency of the government -- to manage this effort.

Obviously, organic advocates could have gone out and registered a trademark and could have kept organic standards pure and enforcement rigorous.

The minute the government is involved, though, politics is involved. And in politics, the organic community faces a difficult state of affairs. As long as organic is a tiny and insignificant industry, it could probably make its own rules without much interference. After all, who would care enough to fight?

Yet as organic grows, it becomes a more significant business opportunity and then General Mills, Kraft, etc., become more interested. As they become more interested, they also will look to see that the rules established meet their needs.

Now, obviously, there is no upside for them in tarnishing the organic "brand" -- after all they want to profit from the brand. Still, over time, if organic becomes a substantial part of the food business, since organic growers are not the most powerful political force in the food industry, we will see the standards and enforcement change in a way that will benefit larger, more politically powerful companies.

This is not a function of the USDA misbehaving. It is a function of tying one's hopes to political forces. Of course, we don't have to lecture to Professor Nestle on that subject ... she is the author of Food Politics: How the Food Industry Influences Nutrition and Health.

According to the Organic Trade Association, organic sales totaled nearly $27 billion in 2010, and constituted 11 percent of produce sales. Is this "tiny and insignificant"? I don't think so.

Is the National Organic Program really a pact with the devil? Organic producers worked long and hard -- fully 12 years -- to get organic standards codified in 2002. Was this a mistake?

Image: Straight 8 Photography/Shutterstock.

This post originally appeared on Food Politics, an Atlantic partner site.

Encyclopedia Britannica's 1949 Animated Guide to Alcohol

2012-02-23T18:03:37-05:00

This vintage educational film covers alcohol's chemical composition and its effects on the human body and mind. Courtesy of the Prelinger Archive, this excerpt from the film includes retro animated diagrams and actors demonstrating human behavior under the influence.

For more films from the Prelinger Archive, visit http://www.archive.org/details/prelinger.

Failing Up: Why Mediocre Workers Keep Getting Promoted

2012-02-23T17:55:23-05:00

The economics of how average people get some of the best jobs in the most high-profile industries ... and why (just maybe) they deserve more credit than we give them

Reuters

I have a confession to make. I have problem with actor Matthew McConaughey. Matthew could be a really swell guy, but for a star cast in ten movies in the last five years, he lacks a certain je ne sais quoi. Actually, scratch that. I do sais quoi. He can't act. We grow up. His emotional capacity stays the same age.

You might have heard the term "failing up." I would define it as the ability to advance in your career -- e.g.: being promoted, finding a better job, being cast in Ghosts of Girlfriends Past -- despite demonstrating mediocre talent. It's true for entertainers. It's true for overpaid corporate executives. What's behind the failing up phenomenon?

Marko Terviö might have an idea. He's the author of Superstars and Mediocrities: Market Failures in the Discovery of Talent, a 2008 research paper I read, after seeing it at Marginal Revolution. Terviö's thesis is that some industries are particularly susceptible to the career advancement of mediocre talent -- especially in fancy management positions, sports, and Hollywood.

THE TRIUMPH OF MEDIOCRITY

Terviö doesn't use the term "failing up." His subject is "market failure in the discovery of talent." But these are related problems, I assure you.

Let's say you want to hire somebody to run your well-known magazine. The pool of candidates includes (a) journalists who show some promise, but haven't run a magazine, and (b) journalists who have run magazines but performed at a mediocre level. Whom do you hire?

There are no correct answers here, only risks and opportunities. The risk of hiring the whippersnapper is that he might be in over his head. The risk of hiring the incumbent is that, having been visibly mediocre in a former job, she might demonstrate the same mediocrity in the new job.

But the odds favor the second "incumbent" candidate for a few surprising reasons (besides "she has more experience"). First, an unproven worker might cost extra money. You might have to train him. You might have to wait until his talent emerges. And after all this, he might leave you before the firm has captured the full benefits of his talent.

Second, at the highest levels of some very public industries -- such as sports or entertainment -- there is a perceived scarcity of talent. But the more important limitation might be the scant opportunity to demonstrate talent. There are fewer elite jobs than super-talented people. As a result, we probably underestimate the number of uniquely talented people, because only a sliver of them are currently in jobs where they can prove how awesome they are.

"When talent is industry-specific, can only be revealed on the job, and once learned becomes public information, firms tend to bid excessively for the pool of incumbent workers at the expense of trying out new talent," Terviö writes. This bias leads to mediocre workers crowding out the talented whippersnappers. The upshot is a worse-off company (or movie, or sports team) and higher wages for "known high talents."

Put another way: To be noticeably mediocre in a job with considerable public exposure is a mixed blessing. You were mediocre. But you were noticed! There is a bias toward favoring mediocre incumbents in professions "where performance on the job is to a large extent publicly observable."

DOES ANYBODY REALLY FAIL UP?

In the process of writing this, I asked Twitter which actor, athlete or coach has "failed up" most blatantly. The responses complicated any easy theory about "failing up."

Numerous people suggested Lane Kiffin (at left), the current football coach at USC. He's a decent choice, having endured troubled runs with the University of Tennessee and the Oakland Raiders before his latest promotion. But he also had success as USC's offensive coordinator ten years ago. Others suggested Nick Saban, the football coach who failed to turn around the Miami Dolphins and was rewarded with the head coaching spot at Alabama. But he had been a legend at LSU. Another offered Isiah Thomas (pictured above), the NBA star whose post-player career has been a series of embarrassments in Indiana and New York City.

Shifting to movies, some coworkers challenged the assumption that Matthew McConaughey had failed at all. Hadn't Fool's Gold made $111 million worldwide? Wouldn't Ashton Kutcher be a better choice, having landed the biggest role in TV comedy despite sleep-walking his way through a movie career? Hadn't Ryan Reynolds failed to beat expectations in practically every movie he carried?

When you lasso all of the "failing up" candidates, the first thing you see is that all have something in common: Before they "failed up," they had succeeded up! Kiffin thrived at USC, Saban won a championship, Thomas was an all-star, Kutcher was a celebrity, and Reynolds was a cross-over TV/movie star.

Before famous people reached a point where they could be accused of accruing unearned plaudits, most of them did something to become famous. After all, publicity isn't just a random platform on which people might see you doing a mediocre job. It's also an indicator that you did something right and achieved something scarce, which is public attention.

For most of us, there is a funneling process that produces and highlights elite talent. But after that initial funneling, attention becomes its own asset, which can be exploited to an extent that, in some industries, career development appears to be the result of the self-perpetuating power of publicity rather than the logical result of clearly earned success. Take our friend, Matthew McConaughey. His biggest movie in the last five years was the romantic comedy Failure to Launch. Was it horrible? Of course it was horrible. It also made $100 million. Failing up into Failure takes a certain kind of success.

Mitt's Motor Menagerie: Cars of the House of Romney

2012-02-23T17:23:19-05:00

The Republican front-runner likes to say he's a son of Detroit, and he's got the automobile obsession to prove it.

Mitt Romney loves cars. But don't take our word for it: take his.

"I love cars. I grew up totally in love with cars. It used to be, in the '50s and '60s, if you showed me one square foot of almost any part of a car I could tell you what brand it was, the model and so forth. Now with all the Japanese cars, I'm not quite so good at it, but I still know the American cars pretty well," he told a crowd in Farmington Hills, Michigan, last week -- adding, for good measure, "I love cars, I love Americans cars, and long may they rule the world, let me tell you."

Motor oil runs in Romney's blood, and not because he's a robot. His father, 1968 presidential candidate George Romney, was chief executive of American Motors Corporation and helped to put together the merger of the Nash and Hudson companies to create AMC.

The son's affection for cars seems genuine, but it's smart politics too. Romney, as a very wealthy, Harvard-educated businessman who doesn't drink, may not naturally connect with the Average Guy -- but the garage offers a point of contact. Still, his recent relationship with Detroit has been troubled. Back in 2008, Mitt Romney wrote a column in The New York Times titled (rather unsubtly), "Let Detroit Go Bankrupt." As he fights to win his native state, Romney has struggled to explain the op-ed away, relying on complicated and convoluted arguments about structured bankruptcy. But while there may be questions about his commitment to the Big Three carmakers, there are should be no question about his affection for their products. Here is a short guide to the cars Romney owns, has owned, and wants to own.

Symbolic Legislation to Nowhere: Why Statehouses Fail in Governance

2012-02-23T17:00:00-05:00

With proposals such as mandated ultrasounds for abortion seekers and bans on Sharia law, state legislatures avoid actual governance in favor of dead-end ideas.

Virginia's attempt to intrude (literally and figuratively) upon the privacy of its pregnant women would be bad enough if it were merely a rare example of state lawmakers unhinging proposed legislation from law, science, and sense. Unfortunately, however, such official recklessness has become a national trend. All over the country, and especially since the 2010 election that swept Tea Party candidates into office, local lawmakers have spent a great deal of time and effort promoting measures they either don't fully understand or can't reasonably believe are constitutional.

Here's how The Washington Post explained how and why Virginia's anti-abortion measure got as far as it did before enough grown-ups began to pay attention:

Confusion over the legislation and ultrasounds -- and considerable national media attention -- preceded the unraveling of the bill. The original measure stated, simply, that a woman needed an ultrasound before an abortion. Many lawmakers did not understand that at the young fetal age abortions usually occur, the invasive vaginal ultrasound would be needed to establish gestational age, as required by the bill.

The fact that these lawmakers evidently didn't understand what their law would mean to women, and what it would require of doctors, didn't stop the legislators from pushing forward with the measure anyway. Ignorance of the law may be no legal defense to you and me, but ignorance of the law among those who are passing the law surely is the definition of bad governance. For the politicians now scrambling away from Virginia's measure, however, pleading ignorance perhaps is easier today than confessing the truth, which is that the pols who supported the measure probably didn't care in the first place if its mandated procedures offended women. That was the whole point, wasn't it?

At a minimum, the barely-averted disaster in the commonwealth raises questions about whether the same intellectual disconnect is happening in New Hampshire, where the Republican-dominated legislature is pressing ahead with anti-abortion measures over the objections of medical experts. Or in Iowa, where a GOP lawmaker recently introduced a bill that would ban abortions and generate potential life sentences in prison for doctors who perform what the law calls "feticide." Or in Nebraska, where legislators are considering a bill that would create a legal defense -- justifiable homicide, it's called -- for the murder of a doctor who intends to harm a fetus.

It's not just the divisive issue of abortion that has generated legislation divorced from reality. According to Bill Raftery, who smartly tracks such trends at the Gavel to Gavel site of the National Center for State Courts, 22 states have legislation pending now that would ban the use of Sharia law or international law in their state courts. Never mind that there is no discernible proof that state or federal judges are suddenly swooning over sharia law, or that there is some vast judicial conspiracy afoot to supersede constitutional doctrine with foreign principles. It's enough that the proposed legislation merely suggests that this is so.

Most of these newer anti-sharia measures do not explicitly use the word "sharia law" -- a lesson lawmakers seem to have learned from the thumping Oklahoma's voter-approved Sharia law ban has received so far from the federal courts that have reviewed it. Such stylistic alterations likely won't matter. The Bill of Rights and the Constitution -- which were themselves based upon English common law and other international norms -- forbids the government from discriminating in this fashion. Did I say discrimination? In Iowa, a measure now before the state senate would imprison any judge (on a Class 4 Felony) who employs international law in a decision.

Indeed, the past 16 months have seen persistent and pernicious efforts by state lawmakers to undermine the independence of the judiciary. I have written about this topic before as it relates to New Hampshire. But it's rampant all over. In Arizona, lawmakers angry about a state court's redistricting decision are trying to punish the state's judicial system by dramatically reducing the number of appellate judges from 22 to six. Meanwhile, in Maryland, Florida, Minnesota, and Tennessee, to name just a few states, conservative legislators are seeking to strengthen rules that would allow "commissions" to remove judges from office for unpopular decisions. Kansas has even managed a quinella, combining anti-judicial sentiment with the "birther" movement, by pushing a measure that would require judges to prove their citizenship.

At a time of great economic turmoil and pain, while Americans have clamored for jobs and financial security, how many thousands of official hours have our state legislators spent since the 2010 election on bills that purport to solve problems that don't exist (like a Sharia-led takeover of American law) or which cannot exist in conformity with criminal law (like a state law which protects those who kill abortion providers) or which contravene individual constitutional rights (like laws that are aimed at religious minorities)? These legislative Jeremiads, frivolous even in the best of times, seem downright obscene today.

America, sadly, has grown accustomed to "symbolic" legislation which is designed not to advance the public good, or even to become sustainable law, but rather to appease particular interest groups. The campaign promise becomes the pending measure; the donor's crusade becomes the subject of public hearings. And what is squeezed out of the legislative process as a result of such pandering is the more moderate legislation, the more practical measures, which do stand a chance of passing constitutional muster and which do solve real problems in sensible ways. That's no way to run a country -- or even a state.

When public outrage forced them into a choice this week between appearing stupid about the ultrasound law or appearing venal toward it, Virginia's Republican lawmakers, and the Commonwealth's governor, chose to act stupid. It's a choice that zealous lawmakers all over the country would be forced to make if their own senseless, unlawful legislation ever made it to the Supreme Court. But chances are those bills never will. Instead, America's pet legislation will continue to whistle to all the political dogs out there while wasting everyone else's time and money.

Image:AP Images

Why the Academy Awards Need a 'Best Soundtrack' Category

2012-02-23T16:39:02-05:00

In the age of the playlist, we should recognize the people assembling previously published and original music for films.

Various

Hollywood's film-music scene received a blow this year when, for the first time, the Academy nominated only two tracks for Best Original Song: one from The Muppets, and one from the animated Rio. It's a subject that's already generated complaints--about the quality of songs, the Academy's arcane nomination rules, and the decoupling of Hollywood with the recording industry. What's inarguable, however, is that film music has changed. It's the rare modern song written for a film that becomes an enduring hit like Jerome Kern's "The Way You Look Tonight," and it's the even rarer film score that stands alone in the manner of, say, Bernard Hermann's "Psycho." Today's composers are often required to write music that fits a contemporary, often more interstitial, film's tone and form; the proclivities of the director; and in a larger sense, the broad aesthetics of an increasingly less patient, Internet-raised pop culture.

How should the Academy respond?

The art is in the curated mix as well as in how the collection functions as independent parts in specific scenes.

Why not by adding a new category that the Grammys have included since 2000: Best Musical Soundtrack? To be fair, a "soundtrack" might be considered property of the music industry only: many soundtrack albums cannot, due to clearance rights and budget issues, include every sound and song you hear in a movie. The Grammys awards "soundtrack" albums, specifically: products. But the Oscars should consider "Musical Soundtrack" a category of creative work, like Art Direction. Musical Soundtrack could distinguish itself by referring to pre-written songs, original songs, an original or pre-written score, and any other notes and chords heard in the course of a film.

iPods have been available for over a decade, Spotify is the rage, and it's high time for the change: Every year, music supervisors and the directors, editors, and producers they collaborate with, go unheralded as they assemble increasingly artful collections of songs and other kinds of music tracks to complement films. These tracks and lists often function to tell a movie's story, act as characters or arcs in their own rights, and mix well with a film composer's original music, whether or not it's a symphonic score or deconstructed sound-collage made of incidental chord progressions, loops, and electronic beats. Of course, we also have historic original soundtracks made of songs from the same artist—for instance, The Graduate, which could not have happened without Simon & Garfunkle, as well as recent movies with complete soundtracks of music by Daft Punk and Phoenix, among others.

MORE ON THE OSCARS

Why Don't Movies Feature Oscar-Worthy Songs Anymore?

Our Oscar Predictions

The Make-No-Money 2012 Oscar Nominees

The Academy Awards' Anti-Comedy Bias

Fact-Checking 'Midnight in Paris'

Who's responsible for soundtracks? A lot of people, sometimes. But insightful music supervisors often shoulder most of the work and lead distinctive careers. Take, for example, Randall Poster (Velvet Goldmine, The Aviator, I'm Not There, Boardwalk Empire), who gave us Rushmore's wonderfully quirky compilation soundtrack, as well as all the Wes Anderson playlists, made of unique songs including artists like the Kinks, Yves Montand, and Cat Stevens. T-Bone Burnett, acting as "music archivist"—he reportedly did not like the word "supervisor"—gave us The Big Lebowski's beloved soundtrack, including Nina Simone, Bob Dylan, and the Gipsy Kings singing "Hotel California": a mélange that yelped "The Dude." And leading music supervisor Karyn Rachtman worked with Quentin Tarentino on Pulp Fiction to produce a weirdly epic surf-music adventure perfect for that groundbreaking romp of a '90s So-Cal indie film.

This year's notable "soundtracks"—that is, the musical sounds we hear in a film, not just the songs cleared to be included as part of an album for sale—vary widely. For one, there's The Descendants (music supervisor, Dondi Bastone), the soundtrack of which blends various "slack-key" artists from Hawaii. Also notable is Midnight in Paris, which seems, unsurprisingly, to have been musically supervised by Woody Allen himself, who matched Josephine Baker and Sidney Bechet with the recurring original guitar track "Bistro Fada" that liltingly sends us along back in time with his protagonist to the 1920s Ile St Louis.

The art is in the curated mix, something which has to date been ignored by Oscar, as well as in how the collection functions as independent parts in specific scenes. Whether or not a music supervisor alone picked all of the songs as well as the film's composer—he or she might have only worked on clearing the rights and steering the director's choices—these professionals are artists who deserve to be publicly celebrated as senior members of a film's creative staff. Given our social-media-playlist-driven world, whatever benefits and detriments it brings to the art of listening, adding Best Musical Soundtrack to the Oscars for next year would be a welcome change for everyone who makes and loves going to movies with open ears.

Confessions of a League Pass Addict

2012-02-23T16:25:00-05:00

Son, I could do this all day. NBA League Pass is some kind of drug. I had to cut the thing off last night after the first quarter of the Clippers game, but I did it begrudgingly. I think I kind of like these Timberwolves. First of all, Kevin Love is a great name. It's even greater because he's white. I'm not sure why that is, but it feels true.

Coming back to the league after all of these years has been fascinating. It really does look like a whiter NBA. Someone tweeted me last night noting that the Lakers will sometimes have four white dudes on the court at the same time. Dude says he calls it their "Jim Crow" lineup.

I don't know. It feels in sync with my life. I loved Iverson, Mourning, Larry Johnson, and that whole 90s hip-hop generation of ballers. But it did bother me that the NBA was seen as a black league, and specifically as thug league. I think that had more to do with the politics of the time than with Iverson's corn-rows. Still, I'm an integrationist and a futurist. I believe in an NBA that looks like America. Circa 2150.

Seriously, these dudes are rocking mohawks and neck-beards now. And prescription-less eye-glasses. The age of the right Caesar is over. Things done changed.

Picture of the Day: A Sheep Interrupts a UN Mission in Darfur

2012-02-23T16:21:56-05:00

Reuters

Senegalese soldiers stand to attention to welcome the visiting United Nations Mission in Darfur (UNAMID) Force Commander Lieutenant General Patrick Nyamvumba.

Suddenly, a sheep appeared out of nowhere.

Greek Deal Leaves Europe on the Road to Disaster

2012-02-23T16:09:30-05:00

I'm not much impressed with the new Greek "rescue", as I explain in a column for Bloomberg View.

If Europe's new plan for Greece succeeds, nobody will be more surprised than the politicians who designed it. At best, the arrangement is a holding action, one that fails yet again to deal with the much larger confidence crisis facing the euro area...

Even if it sticks, the designers don't sound confident it will work. An official analysis leaked to the Financial Times discusses a "tailored downside scenario," which, to many observers, looks more like a plausible central case.

In this projection, Greece postpones the structural changes -- such as a lowering of wages -- needed to make its economy competitive. Fiscal adjustment and privatization are delayed. The government's dependence on official loans grows, and its debt burden surges higher. The debt trajectory would be "extremely sensitive to program delays," the officials conclude, "suggesting that the program could be accident prone, and calling into question sustainability."

Sounds like business as usual. All through this crisis, the EU has chosen to keep muddling through, never doing quite enough to resolve the problem, infusing each round of subsequent crisis-management with high political drama. Advocates of this method argue, with a particle of justification, that it's working. Unilateral default has been avoided and pressure has been brought to bear on Greece and others to push ahead with economic reforms that were long overdue.

If there is some intelligent principle behind this approach, rather than mere flailing incompetence, it would sound like this: "Let's build this manageable problem up into a crisis capable of vast destruction that we might be unable to control. That will create the fear needed to force some real improvements in economic policy."

I submit that this is no way to run a railroad. You can read the whole column here. And here is the leaked Debt Sustainability Analysis for Greece.

A Diabetes Management System Controlled by Your Smartphone

2012-02-23T16:01:39-05:00

London's Cellnovo has received approval for a system that includes a wirelessly connected insulin pump, activity monitor, and glucometer.

Corey Booker Responds To NYPD Profiling

2012-02-23T16:00:00-05:00

The mayor of Newark says neither he--nor his officers--knew anything about the NYPD's efforts to nationalize their spy network:

"The Newark Police Department was not involved in joint operations with the New York Police Department as was described in the disclosed NYPD report," Mayor Cory Booker said Wednesday, referring to a leaked internal New York police document that allegedly detailed police surveillance of Muslim-owned business and mosques across the city.

"I strongly believe that we must be vigilant in protecting our citizens from crime and terrorism but to put large segments of a religious community under surveillance with no legitimate cause or provocation clearly crosses a line," he said.

Governor Chris Christie says he has no recollection on being briefed (he was the state's attorney at the time) and has asked the state's attorney general to investigate. I expect very little to come out of that. The disturbing truth is that the NYPD's efforts are in line with the national climate. Moreover, while it has proved very easy to build bureaucracies who exhibit minimal concern for individual liberties, I suspect it will be significant harder to dismantle them.

The NYPD's religious profiling should be considered in the context of the killings of Shem Walker, of Ramarley Graham, of Sean Bell, the beating of Jatiek Reed (see above,) the federal charges of gun running, the federal charges for civil rights violations. There has been minimal outcry about these incidents beyond the communities where these people live. The line that unites these incidents with the NYPD religious profiling efforts is power--or lack thereof. The NYPD's victims hail from communities--the black, the poor, the Muslim-- which enjoy little of society's faith, but a great deal of skepticism.

I see little demonstrable evidence that any of this will change.

What Was the Point of the GOP Debates?

2012-02-23T15:00:01-05:00

They fought. They fumbled. They recited talking points and fielded unexpected questions. But what did the Republican candidates really gain from their 20 debates? In this video, The Atlantic's Molly Ball talks with National Journal's Major Garrett about how these televised events influenced the race.

Video by Jennie Rothenberg Gritz and Theresa Poulson

The Secret Power of Saying 'I Love You'

2012-02-23T14:58:34-05:00

Mr. Happy Man is the true story of 88-year-old Johnny Barnes, who spends hours each morning wishing Bermuda's commuters well. "From twenty to four to ten [a.m.], I stand on the corner and just greet people and let them know that life is sweet, life is beautiful -- no matter what happens in life, it's always sweet to be alive," Barnes explains in the film. Directed by Matt Morris, this short documentary imparts a little slice of that feeling. As Jason Sondhi put it in his review for Short of the Week, "What's fascinating about the film to me is that the narrative arc occurred within myself rather than within the film ... through the sheer relentless optimism and good-feeling this film exudes, my cynicism fades, until I feel like I genuinely care about Johnny and his wellbeing like everyone else in Bermuda." Morris talks about the making of the film, and what Johnny's up to now, in a brief interview below.

The Atlantic: How did you find this story and decide to tell it?

Matt Morris: I found Johnny Barnes while browsing the photo sharing website Flickr. I came across a photo someone had taken of Johnny while on vacation in Bermuda and the caption underneath the photo explained his morning ritual of waving and blowing kisses to people, shouting "Good morning!" and "I love you!" I couldn't believe it. Once I found out how dedicated he was to this pursuit of sharing love and happiness, I knew I had to make a film about him.

Where is Johnny Barnes now?

Johnny is turning 89 this summer and he's as healthy as ever, still to be found every morning at Crow Lane from four to ten a.m. I call him on the phone every now and again to chat about his mornings at the roundabout and get news on how his garden is growing! I've got a Facebook page that I like to keep updated with my conversations with Johnny.

What's next for you?

Right now I'm working on a few things, including a short documentary about a lounge singing duo in Winter Park, Florida. Unfortunately one of the main characters in the film passed away last week, so I'm still processing that personally as well as figuring out how it will shape the film.

For more films by Matt Morris, visit http://www.mattmorrisfilms.com/.

How to Fix NBA All-Star Weekend

2012-02-23T14:13:46-05:00

Revamp the dunking contest, add a H-O-R-S-E competition, and more

AP Images

Every week, our panel of sports fans discusses a topic of the moment. For today's conversation, Patrick Hruby (writer, ESPN and The Atlantic), Jake Simpson (writer, The Atlantic), and Hampton Stevens (writer, ESPN and The Atlantic) talk about pro basketball's ho-hum talent showcase.

All,

The good news about the NBA All-Star Game? It's more competitive than both the NFL's Pro Bowl and the the average Harlem Globetrotters-Washington Generals tete-a-tete. The bad news? That isn't saying much. Professional basketball's annual marketing jamboree-cum-post-Super Bowl coming out party—emphasis on party—All-Star weekend has much to offer: star power, spectacular dunks, celebrity sightings, league gossip, and player rosters unseen outside of using the CPU OVERRIDE trade function on XBox 360.

That said, the weekend mostly lacks the one element that makes sports compelling. Namely, drama.

Oh, sure: We'll never forget an HIV-positive Magic Johnson coming out of retirement to win MVP honors in the 1992 contest. Or a teenaged Kobe Bryant impetuously waving off Karl Malone to go one-on-one with an end-of-his-prime Michael Jordan. Or even Blake Griffin dunking over a car, thereby taking YouTube and corporate sponsorship synergy to literal new heights. For the most part, though, All-Star weekend is a lot like the relatively new Skills Challenge: intriguing in theory, a bit ho-hum in practice.

So why not make it better?

Fact: the NBA is hardly as wedded to tradition as, say, Major League Baseball. Also fact: To gin up fan interest and excitement, baseball actually made its All-Star Game count for something. Now, I'm not suggesting the NBA game determine conference home court advantage in The Finals—I don't want to see any torn ACLs out there—but I do think the league could tweak the weekend, just as it has in the past. (Speaking of torn ACLs: Does anyone remember the now-kaput legends/old-timers' game? Ouch).

A few suggestions: Make the Dunk Contest and every-other-year event. There are only so many dunks that can be done, and a biannual schedule would keep them fresher. Next: Up the number of Three-Point Shootout invitees to 16, and have them compete head-to-head—two men shooting at the same time at the opposite ends of the court—in a single elimination bracket. (Everyone has widescreen HDTVs now, so viewing in split-screen wouldn't be a problem). Grantland guru Bill Simmons repeatedly has called for the addition of a H-O-R-S-E competition. I'm all for that—as anyone who has spent time around NBA practices can tell you, the pros are incredible trick shooters. Why not share with the world?

Jake, how would you revamp All-Star Weekend?

–Patrick

So many ways, Patrick. Only the NBA can take one of its unique advantages among American sports—its street-ball, trick-shot, Etch-A-Sketch side that is in own way as amazing as the fundamental stuff—and pave over it on the one weekend it should be let out.

So, yes to H-O-R-S-E. But make it a four-player bracket (two one-on-one games, winner meet in The Finals), and make it P-I-G.

The Rookie-Sophomore Game? It's nice, but make it two 20-minute halves. Not only would it be cool to see pros playing the ol' college schedule, but the setup would be more catered to rotating in 10-12 guys, which is supposed to be the point anyway.

LOVE that 3-point shooting idea, Patrick. I wouldn't change a thing.

Half-court shooting contest. Start with 20 players, everyone shoots, whoever makes goes to the next round, repeat until there's a last man standing. Enough said.

And I can't have an All-Star Weekend without the dunk contest. But—and here's the real but—you have to get better dunkers. Have some corporate sponsor step up and offer $10 million to the winner's charity of choice. Get only the best to judge it—former dunk contest winners, preferably sensible ones. Make it eight players over three rounds (top four advance, then top two). Allow two dunks per round still, but you only are allowed one miss per dunk—whiff twice and you get a zero. Wouldn't you rather see Blake Griffin vs. LeBron James in The Finals, rather than Chase Budinger or (gulp) Paul George?

That's all I got, Hampton. Think I'm a radical who needs to be stopped? Got any better ideas?

–Jake

Sure, the All-Star Weekend could add a half-court shooting contest. They could add H-O-R-S-E. Or better yet P-I-G, sponsored by Farmland. That would go nicely with the Taco Bell Skills Challenge, the Foot Locker 3-Point Shooting Contest, and Sprite Slam Dunk extravaganz-o-rama.Or whatever. How about a Trash Talking contest sponsored by Orbit?

It wouldn't change a thing.

Patrick, Kevin Love disagrees. The Timberwolf thinks the NBA should imitate baseball, and let the All-Star Game winner get home-court advantage for The Finals. Oh, sure. Like that would make Joe Johnson care. Jake, you hit on one surefire way to get the players fired up: money. A big, fat check for the winning team would work.

But why? Making the game more competitive would increase the risk of injuries, sure. But, just like in baseball, trying to make the game matter misses the whole point of the exhibition. Namely, exhibiting. The idea is for fans to see the game's biggest stars in a loose, relaxed setting where they can not only show off their streetball skills, but also let their personalities shine through. The problem, and the reason that all your perfectly sound suggestions won't change much, is that the game doesn't have any. Personalities, that is.

What we have here is an "all-star" game with precisely two stars. Kobe Bryant and LeBron James. The rest of the starters—Derrick Rose, Dwight Howard, Dirk Nowitzki, or Kevin Durant—they are all great players, sure. But none of them has a personality bigger than the game. None has the charisma to match their skills—not the kind to draw new fans or more deeply engage old ones. It's not like anyone is clamoring for commercials where Marc Gasol sells underwear, or anyone wants to put LaMarcus Aldridge in a movie with Bugs Bunny.

Bizarrely, the most interesting player in the league almost wasn't invited to Orlando. The roster for Saturday night's young stars game was set before Jeremy Lin's breakout streak. Commissioner David Stern, in an insanely self-destructive burst of legalism, had told USA Today he wouldn't make an exception and add Lin to the roster, then came to his senses and invited the kid.

But, well... Beyond getting more Ivy League, undrafted Asian-Americans to electrify a whole new fan base, I'm stumped about how to improve the weekend. Because all the format tweaks in the world won't make the festivities on the court any more interesting until fans care about the players off it.

–Hampton

Santorum's Google Problem on CNN

2012-02-23T14:09:09-05:00

A risque sign mocking the former Pennsylvania senator made its way onto television.

Whoops! Televised national debates are highly choreographed occasions, with rules set ahead of time, seating arrangements tightly negotiated, and the stagecraft neatly planned out. Sometimes, though, accidents happen -- the political equivalents of a wardrobe malfunction.

Twitter user @GOP_2013 took this picture as CNN scanned the crowd outside the GOP debate in Mesa Wednesday night. Amid a sea of ordinary posters -- mostly for Ron Paul, but at least one for Newt Gingrich -- one saboteur held a sign reading "Frothy Santorum," a reference to Santorum's infamous "Google problem." If you've somehow missed it, it stems from sex columnist Dan Savage's quest to redefine the former Pennsylvania senator's surname to mean something very specific and sexual -- as as form of online retaliation for Santorum's 2003 comments comparing homosexuality to incest and bestiality.

Image: Twitter / @GOP_2013

Impaired Driving Skills Just the Latest Problem With Marijuana Use

2012-02-23T14:03:12-05:00

Researchers have shown that acute cannabis consumption can lead to a host of medical issues, including, now, automobile accidents.

In laboratory and simulator settings, cannabis consumption impairs driving skills, but whether the same is true for real-world driving has remained unclear. In a new meta-analysis of nine observational studies involving nearly 50,000 participants, investigators examined whether recent cannabis consumption (determined by toxicologic analysis of whole blood or by self-report) raises risk for motor vehicle accidents.

Driving under the influence of cannabis was associated with significantly higher risk for motor vehicle accidents than driving unimpaired, the researchers found. (The full study, "Acute Cannabis Consumption and Motor Vehicle Collision Risk: A Systematic Review of Observational Studies," is published in the British Medical Journal.)

* * *

Acute cannabis consumption has now been proven to substantially increase the risk for motor vehicle accidents, whether fatal or not. And we are learning that cannabis can lead to a whole host of other medical problems.

There is abundant circumstantial evidence pointing to a plausible biological relationship between marijuana smoking and lung cancer. We may be lacking the smoking gun, but few juries could fail to convict on this evidence.

We have the advantage of knowing that consistent smoke inhalation, whether tobacco, marijuana, or anything else, is a really bad thing. For instance, the high incidence of lung cancer among non-smoking Chinese women in Hong Kong has been linked, at least in part, to cooking fumes associated with frying. Smoke in wildland fires in the United States has at least 15 carcinogens, and risk assessment for firefighters with chronic smoke exposure includes a significant excess of cancers.This allows us to be even more certain of a probable link between marijuana smoking and lung cancer, and not to be too hung up about wanting more evidence.

Several studies link marijuana use to psychosis, anxiety, and panic attacks. The heavier the use, the greater the propensity toward psychologic symptoms. Additionally marijuana has been associated with gum disease according to a recent prospective study. Heavy usage is also linked to a loss of intelligence and even a marijuana withdrawal syndrome (PDF).

Studies on marijuana used medicinally as opposed to recreationally are lacking; this is, at least in part, because of the current restrictive scheduling of the drug. However, the available evidence shows that marijuana is effective in the treatment of chronic pain, muscle spasms resulting from various diseases (including multiple sclerosis), severe nausea, anorexia and wasting, glaucoma, and seizure disorders. Each state that allows the medical use of marijuana has ratified its own set of approved indications.

Marijuana is a drug that poses significant risks to our overall well-being. Therapeutic interventions will require further study in order to determine the efficacy of this drug.

Image: Gordon Swanson/Shutterstock.

Project Icarus: Laying the Plans for Interstellar Travel

2012-02-23T13:56:29-05:00

Andreas Tziolas is drafting a blueprint for a mission to a nearby star. Here, he discusses how we'll get there -- and why we try.

We humans have known for a very long time that going to the stars will be difficult, if not impossible. The motto of NASA, Per Aspera Ad Astra, a latin phrase meaning "through hardship to the stars," comes down to us all the way from Seneca the Younger, a contemporary of Nero. Even today, when our metaphors of exertion and ambition are many --"swing for the fences," "go for gold" -- when we strain to capture the difficulty of a task, or the enormity of an achievement, "reach for the stars" is the first and most natural phrase that comes to mind. Our hierarchy of the ultimate human accomplishments is in this sense remarkably stable at the top.

And with good reason, because interstellar travel is in fact very difficult. With today's best propulsion technology, chemical rockets, it would take between 50 and a 100 millennia to reach Proxima Centauri, the nearest star to the Sun. The ideas we have about how to expedite such a journey are just that: ideas. They belong to the realm of speculation. Nonetheless, they are beginning to take on an empirical glow. To be sure, the bundle of technologies that could conceivably send a spacecraft to another star won't be here within the decade, or even within several, but neither are those technologies mere magical realism -- indeed, planning for their development has begun in earnest.

In September of last year DARPA, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, convened a conference in Orlando, Florida, to discuss and promote one of its newest and most intriguing research projects: The 100 Year Starship Study. According to DARPA, the study is intended to "develop and mature a technology portfolio that will enable long-distance manned space flight a century from now." To that end, DARPA is now negotiating a grant of $500,000 to ex-astronaut Dorothy Jemison, whose personal foundation will team up with Project Icarus, a division of Icarus Interstellar, to seed the plans for an interstellar mission that could span several centuries.

Project Icarus, which will focus on the mission's technological challenges, is a theoretical engineering study that was launched in 2009 by the British Interplanetary Society with the purpose of designing an interstellar spacecraft. It brings together an international group of volunteer aerospace engineers from government space agencies, universities and the private sector with the purpose of generating technical reports on the engineering layout, functionality, physics, operation, and mission profile of an interstellar probe. You can think of it as a kind of repository for bleeding-edge thinking about interstellar travel.

Project Icarus takes its inspiration from Project Daedalus, a five-year study launched by the British Interplanetary Society in 1973 to determine whether interstellar travel was feasible at all. Project Daedalus ultimately concluded that interstellar was possible, but acknowledged that the technical challenges were significant. Icarus aims to pick up where Daedalus left off, by trying to chip away at some of those technical challenges. Andreas Tziolas, a former research fellow at NASA who holds a Ph.D. in Gravitation and Cosmology, is the Project Leader for Project Icarus. Yesterday I spoke to Tziolas about how and, more interestingly, why we might someday send a mission to the stars.

How did you first get interested in interstellar travel?

Tziolas: I've been interested in interstellar travel ever since I was a young boy. I'm not ashamed to say that I was a child of Star Trek. When I was growing up in Greece, I remember Star Trek would come on very early on Sunday mornings, but that didn't stop me from watching -- I never missed an episode. My mother used to joke, "if only you would get up for school with the same excitement that you get up on Sundays."

When it came time to choose a career, I knew it had to be this, because for something like this to get done someone has to say "I'm going to dedicate my life to this, to this thing that is difficult, this thing that is on the fringe of science, so that we can put down a kind of stepping stone, and the next generation can step on it in order to enter into this interstellar culture."

And that's what I've been doing these past 25 years. My first degree was in spacecraft engineering, after which I worked on several space missions for NASA. I worked on the Hubble Space Telescope, the Galileo Mission to Jupiter; I worked on the Mars Pathfinder, and on the Mars Polar Lander. And after a pretty intense period of involvement, I realized that from an employment perspective, these projects were kind of tenuous. When you work on a space mission, especially a planetary explorer, you're generally out of a job once you make it to launch. Maybe two or three people out of the twenty working on the mission will stay on as support staff, with the rest looking for work elsewhere. So it's not the best way to pursue a career. At the time I was interested in more analytical and computational physics, so I went back and did a Ph.D. in Cosmology at Baylor University. In doing this, I was trying to balance my capabilities, both the theoretical and technical capabilities, and I think it worked, I think it gave me an advantage.

When Project Icarus was first started, one of the main reasons we thought it was important was that people the original Daedalus team, and several of the very important researchers in the field of interstellar engineering had been slowly passing away, or else retiring. Suddenly you had this situation where there wasn't a new generation of interstellar engineers on the market. There was no one working on this.

When we started up, one of our first objectives was to raise up this new generation of interstellar engineers -- we wanted volunteers, anyone, whether they are Ph.D.'s or garage inventors, or just people who are passionate, people who spend every evening reading about interstellar exploration. There are several people around the world who have extraordinary technical expertise, but don't necessarily look good on paper, and so they don't have an opportunity to contribute to NASA or ESA or any of the other major space agencies. And so where do those people go? They end up working in I.T. or they end up working as clerks, but in their hearts they have this burning fire to do research. So what we do is corral all of those people with that fire and we organize them, and we organize the research in a detailed way, so that we can harness the power of inclusiveness in doing this kind of research.

In Greek, Daedalus means "cunning worker," and in Greek mythology of course Daedalus is this master craftsman, the mythical embodiment of man as a maker of technology. But his son Icarus was another story. He's famous for ignoring his father's warnings about flying too close to the sun, and for drowning as a result of that. So why Icarus?

Tziolas: Well there are two reasons. First of all Dr. Allen Bond, who was the project leader for Daedalus, left a note to future generations in the final program report for the Daedalus spacecraft. In it he said "we've laid down some stepping stones, the first pebbles, and we set a direction, but it will be the sons of Daedalus, perhaps an Icarus, that will have to come through and make this a much more feasible design." Because remember what Daedalus was trying to achieve was just a feasibility study, a study to see if this was even possible. And the Daedalus reports are very underappreciated. This was the first time in human history that some team proved that interstellar exploration is feasible using the physics of today. That had never been done before by NASA or anyone else. It was a significant milestone.

So that's why we chose "Icarus," but besides that we have a clever way of seeing the Icarus myth, which brushes away some of the inhibitions people have. Because we hear it a lot, that we picked the wrong name, that "hey isn't this the guy who tried to fly with his father's wax wings and fell into the ocean." But that was a myth, a myth from 2,500 years ago, and like many myths it's flexible, especially in a time like ours when we have Hollywood and CGI, which are tools that allow you to reshape a myth. In our version, Icarus falling into the ocean wasn't the final chapter. We believe that he washed up on a beautiful deserted island, and he looked for his father in the sky and didn't see him. So he started a fire on the beach, and tried to think about how he might get back to the sky. And at that moment he looked toward the sky and he saw his destiny, and his destiny was to forge new wings of steel and fire so that he could try again. And he wouldn't repeat the mistakes of his father, who after all had fashioned the original wax wings. He would improve on his father's design.

A lot of reasons have been offered for why this project, this general project of going to the stars, is important for humanity. Some have said that in the long term the project is necessary as a means of "backing up the biosphere," that we need to find another planet in order to ensure that humans survive future extinction events on earth. Others point to the potential for scientific knowledge, especially in the areas of cosmology or astrobiology. And then there's the idea that deep space is a kind of proving ground for humanity, that it provides the ultimate test of our intellectual and creative capacities. In your eyes, what is the most compelling reason we ought to pursue this?

Tziolas: This could be a very long conversation. At Project Icarus we keep adding new reasons and new motivations for going interstellar, as we call it. First is obviously the survival of humankind. If humanity is capable of achieving interstellar flight but does not pursue it, does not pursue a program of seeding other planets and other solar systems, then really we risk receiving a Darwin Award as a civilization. If you can save yourself, but you don't, for whatever reason -- how can you justify that?

"Why do we pay this obsessive attention to backing up a document, which we can reproduce, when we pay no attention to backing up our civilization?"

When you're working on a sensitive document on your computer, the first thing you do is back it up. You make a copy of it, you email it to yourself, you put it in your dropbox, and your flash drive -- sometimes all these things at once. Why do we pay this obsessive attention to backing up a document, which we can reproduce, when we pay no attention to backing up our civilization? There is no greater endeavor than ensuring the survival of humankind.

You also want to push technological boundaries. If you don't have one of these huge problems to solve, that's hard, really hard, then you won't motivate yourself to solve it. If the human population had never risen past one billion people, everyone would live very comfortably, spread out, there might not be high rises, transportation would be different -- the whole civilization would be different. The unique problems that come with high populations have given rise to these technologies, to these ways of living. Similarly, had we never decided to go into space, our civilization would be very different. We wouldn't have cell phones, we wouldn't have satellite systems, and we wouldn't have this type of computational power. We would have been fine, but we would be stuck at a certain level of technological advancement.

In order to achieve interstellar flight, you would have to develop very clean and renewable energy technologies, because for the crew, the ecosystem that you launch with is the ecosystem you're going to have for at least a hundred years. With our current projections, we can't get this kind of journey under a hundred years. So in developing the technologies that enable interstellar flight, you could serendipitously develop the technologies that could help clean up the earth, and power it with cheap energy. If you look toward the year 2100, and assume that the 100 Year Starship Study has been prolific, and that Project Icarus has been prolific, at a minimum we'd have break-even fusion, which would give us abundant clean energy for millennia. No more fossil fuels. We'd also have developed nanotechnology to the point where any type of technology that you have right now, anything technology-based, will be able to function the same way it does now, but it won't have any kind of footprint, it will only be a square centimeter in size. Some people have characterized that as "nano-magic," because everything around you will appear magical. You wouldn't be able to see the structures doing it, but there would be light coming out of the walls, screens that are suspended that you can move around any surface, sensors everywhere -- everything would be extremely efficient.

An artist's rendering of a blueprint from Project Daedalus (Image courtesy of Nathan Fowkes)

Project Daedalus favored a nuclear fusion pulse engine, in which small pellets of fusion fuel would be injected at high velocity into a reaction chamber and ignited by high-energy electron beams. Is that still the favored propulsion technology?

Tziolas: Project Icarus is focused on a fusion-based propulsion system, but the flavor of fusion is still up for debate. One of the problems with the Daedalus fusion propulsion system is that it runs on Helium³ and Helium³ is very scarce on the surface of the earth. In fact, in order to collect enough Helium³ to visit another star, you'd need to mine the atmospheres of the gas giants like Neptune and Jupiter. So our current thinking is that this is probably not the best way to go to another star if it requires that we mine half of the solar system just to get enough fuel. So, we're trying to present a new fuel source or a new type of fusion, of which there are several.

There are also other alternatives, such as beam propulsion, which uses a ground station or an orbital station that focuses energy from the sun into a beam, a stream of particles or radiation, in order to push a spacecraft to the other star. The physics and engineering of this are both well understood. We know how light reflects off of surfaces and we have experience with solar panels, so we don't have the same disconnect that we have with fusion. Because remember we haven't actually achieved fusion, sustained fusion, in the laboratory. But the major problem is that the beam that you transmit is going to diverge to a certain degree, and as a result you are going to lose some thrust. The other obstacle is the sail you'd need to capture the beam; to complete a mission like the one we're talking about you'd need a sail that was roughly a hundred square kilometers in area, and that isn't feasible right now.

The third option is nuclear fission, which Project Orion intends to use, and there you have small-scale nuclear warheads -- although we don't call them that, we use something more diplomatic like "fission pulse units" -- and you detonate them behind the spacecraft to push it through space. Freeman Dyson has been an advocate of this approach.

Obviously there would be enormous challenges involved in communicating with a starship at such great distances. What is the latest thinking on how that might be accomplished?

Tziolas: Yes that's a major concern. If you can't communicate with the ship then you don't know what the results are of your mission. It's an active area of research, and we're considering several alternatives. One idea is to moderate the fusion pulses in the main engine, and using it to encode signals -- but that's a worst case scenario. We're also considering point-to-point laser communications, but the challenge there is the power drain would be enormous. It would probably require a second fusion reactor, and that's fine but you have to design that in.

Another, more interesting option is the use of relays, and this was explored in the previous phase of our research at Project Daedalus. The idea is that when you drop the empty fuel tanks along the way, you design them so that they can double as relay stations. You could power them with small reactors, and use them to relay signals back to earth. We have two studies on this, and one says this could work and the other says it can't, so we're working on it.

What are the main considerations involved in choosing a destination star?

Tziolas: Well we're somewhat limited by the timescale we've chosen. We want this to be a hundred year mission, and that puts our maximum range at fifteen light years, using the best estimates about fusion technology. Right now we're designing around Alpha Centauri because it's the easiest, and because it's a double star we expect it to be very interesting scientifically. However, if a terrestrial planet is discovered and it has a few oceans and it's within 22 light years instead of our maximum of 15, we would button down and make that our mission. Habitability is the prime consideration.

Interesting. I'm surprised it's that and not extraterrestrial life, but then I suppose they overlap.

"To us, proliferating the human race must always come first."

Tziolas: If there were two planets: one of them is teeming with life, but it's not habitable because it's methane or sulfur based life, and the other is an Eden with an oxygen-nitrogen atmosphere and only eighty percent our gravity, so everyone would be a superman, and they're in opposite directions, where would we go if you had to pick one? To us, proliferating the human race must always come first. We would go to the Eden and not think twice about it.

Do you expect that the current exoplanet fever -- sparked by, among other things, the recent data from the Kepler Space Telescope -- will lead to more attention and investment in interstellar travel? Are there any other developments, be they cultural or technological, that could give momentum to a serious public desire for a mission to the stars?

Tziolas: The investment in exoplanet research is not going to end any time soon. It's something you can keep on doing for a very long time, and it's a nest that astrophysicists will be able to build and nurture, with advances in capabilities on the scale of the great particle colliders on the Earth. You can always go to higher power, you can always go to higher magnification, you can try interferometric methods, better angular resolution, more spacecraft, the James Webb Space Telescope, the list goes on. So once we find this Eden, this beautiful place that is in our solar neighborhood, people are going to want to go there. There will be a push for an interstellar mission and it's our hope that Project Icarus is in a position to deliver when that happens.

In the meantime we are trying to raise the profile of interstellar travel. It's something I often think about because I'm in charge of education and outreach for the project. One thing we're doing is adding courses in interstellar engineering to aerospace programs in the United States and in Europe. We expect the first of those to begin this Fall. But more interestingly, we're also opening a new gaming division. For a while we'd pictured these as educational games, but when we got to the 100 Year Starship conference, the feedback we got was: "It doesn't have to be that educational -- just make some spaceships that reflect your designs and let people fly around and explore Alpha Centauri." And so we came back the next week and we started looking into that, and now we're designing these games that we can use to attract people to the concept of exploring another star.

This is something that is a constant focus for us, because while it's certainly true that a mission of this kind needs a dedicated engineering program, it also needs mindshare. We need people to believe that interstellar travel is a reality, and we need them to adopt it as the next great space exploration effort that humankind is going to undertake. And to do that we're going to need a cultural shift in the way that we think about space, and the way we think about the universe.

Have you and your colleagues given any thought to including something like the Golden Record that was stowed away on the two Voyager probes, the disc of sounds and images from Earth compiled by Carl Sagan?

Tziolas: We have, actually. It only took a week after the project began for people to start putting together a new record, and to start thinking about what the content of the record would be, but we haven't really agreed on what the message would be. After the core design team had the initial discussion, we decided that the message should not be designed by physicists and engineers but rather by a sociologist or an anthropologist, but that was the limit to what we agreed on. We all agreed that what Carl Sagan sent was great; we just need to adapt it to our own time. Since then we've been actively trying to recruit anthropologists and sociologists to the team.

One of my concerns is that if we send another golden disc, it might not be well suited to reaching its audience. The chances of an extraterrestrial finding it and reading it are worse than a needle in a haystack; it's like a particle in a universe. So my preference is to design some kind of module that was more technological than the analog disc, that way you could send it in to orbit around your target star, equip it with solar panels, have it charge up and once every twelve hours or so it gives out a pulse. And that would be just to give this other civilization something to look at, and when they design the capabilities to go check it out, they would, and then inside there would be something static, something like the golden record.

An artist's rendering of a ship powered by nuclear fusion (Image courtesy of Adrian Mann)

Swing Vote: How the Election Could Tip the Balance of the Supreme Court

2012-02-23T13:32:00-05:00

Justice Kennedy is often the deciding vote in divisive 5-4 decisions. A new nomination could strip him of this role and steer the court sharply left or right.

Reuters

The president sworn in next January may have the opportunity, through a single appointment, to move the Supreme Court strongly in a conservative or liberal direction, with significant implications for some of the most controversial issues of this era far beyond the future of Roe v. Wade.

We were reminded of this critical dimension of the election when the Supreme Court recently announced that next fall it will hear a new case on affirmative action in higher education. It probably will decide the fate of the new health care law this spring. And it may soon decide issues bearing on the constitutional right to gay marriage.

Aside from the ritualistic calls for a Supreme Court decision to overturn or uphold Roe, the court has not figured prominently in the positioning of Democrats and Republicans in this year's presidential or Congressional races.

But it should. The reason turns on dislodging Justice Anthony Kennedy from the pivotal position he currently holds, in which he frequently provides the fifth vote in 5-4 decisions -- often on the conservative side, but at times on the liberal side.

A new appointment to the court could signal the end of that swing vote role for Justice Kennedy in most controversial cases. In the court term that ended last June, Kennedy provided the fifth vote in 14 of the 16 cases decided by a 5-4 margin. In the term ending in 2010, he was the controlling vote in 12 out of 17 cases decided 5-4. In the 2009 term, he was the fifth vote in 20 of 25 cases with a 5-4 margin.

Often, Kennedy is on the so-called conservative side of cases with the liberal bloc of Justices Breyer, Ginsberg, Sotomayor, and Kagan facing off against the conservative wing of Justices Roberts, Scalia, Thomas, and Alito. Examples include: Bush v. Gore, Citizens United (voiding Congressional limits corporate and union election expenditures on First Amendment grounds), and a case voiding District of Columbia gun control provisions under the Second Amendment. He has also sided with the liberals in, for example, cases striking down sodomy laws under the constitution, declaring the death penalty unconstitutional for juvenile offenders (citing principles from foreign jurisdictions) and ordering the release of thousands of prisoners in overcrowded California jails under the 8^th amendment's prohibition against cruel and unusual punishment.

Advocates practicing before the Supreme Court must direct an important part of their argument to Justice Kennedy in order to satisfy the first principle of successful lawyers before the high court: being able to count to five. Certainly, those arguing in favor of health care reform have to focus first on securing Justice Kennedy's vote (they assume Justices Ginsburg, Breyer, Sotomayor, and Kagan will vote to uphold).

Here is how Justice Kennedy's importance could be severely reduced after the 2012 election.

If a Republican is elected president and if a member of the court's liberal bloc leaves the court, then the new chief executive would nominate a more reliable conservative justice, in the mold of Justice Roberts or Justice Alito (George W. Bush's appointments). Were such a person confirmed, there would be a solid five-vote conservative majority without Justice Kennedy, who would lose his swing vote position and his ability to influence the holding of the conservative majority in 5-4 cases.

If President Obama is re-elected and if a member of the court's conservative bloc leaves the court, then Obama would nominate a reliable (if moderate) liberal justice, like his earlier appointments of Justice Sotomayor and Justice Kagan. Were such a person confirmed, there would be a solid five vote liberal majority without Justice Kennedy, who would, again, lose his influence in shaping or defining the liberal rule of the case in major constitutional matters.

Just to preserve the status quo, it is also important for conservatives to have a conservative president nominate a conservative justice for a vacancy in a conservative seat. The opposite is true for liberals.

It is, of course, impossible to predict whether the president elected in the fall will have a Supreme Court vacancy. The ages of the Justices vary widely -- from 51-79 -- but health problems or other issues can occur at any time.

One thing is for sure: If there is a vacancy and one of the two scenarios outlined above occurs, there will be a titanic confirmation fight. The stakes are that high.

The Dis-United States of Gas Prices: Why Fuel Is So Cheap in Denver

2012-02-23T13:26:02-05:00

Thanks to America's overwhelmed oil pipelines, some lucky drivers in the Rockies are getting a big discount on gas.

Reuters

Right now, it's very, very good to be a commuter in Colorado.

Gas prices have been on the rise for the past two months, as the international game of chicken between the West and Iran over Tehran's nuclear program has sent global price of crude oil up above $120 a barrel. In California, an average gallon of fuel now costs more than $4. In New York, it's about $3.90. Even in Houston, the gas-pumping heart of U.S. refining capacity, motorists are paying more than $3.50. The run-up has many contemplating whether gas prices could break the U.S. economic recovery, as they nearly did in 2011.

Yet up in the Rockies, as well as in parts of the Midwest, motorists have been getting spared, relatively speaking. As the map below from Gas Buddy shows, prices in states such as Colorado, Idaho, and Utah are lagging well behind the national average of $3.65. As the U.S. Energy Information Administration points out, prices in the Rocky Mountain region were actually falling towards the end of January, even as the rest of the country saw average fuel costs tick up.

It's not unusual for U.S. gas prices to vary by region, sometimes drastically. All sorts of factors come into play, including local regulations, gas taxes, and the distance from the nearest refinery. But those aren't the reasons behind the big discrepancies we're now seeing in American gas prices. There's a much bigger issue at play that speaks to the strange state of the country's oil supply.

Right now, the United States has a big glut of crude oil sitting in the middle of the country, and no easy way to move it. The combination of surging production from Canada's tar sands and North Dakota's Bakken region has overwhelmed the existing pipelines to the Gulf of Mexico, where it would ordinarily be refined and shipped onto the global market. As a result, the price of American and Canadian crude oil is trading at a steep discount to varieties from elsewhere in the world. After all, with fewer potential customers, oil buyers can dictate friendlier prices. West Texas Intermediate, which is traditionally considered a benchmark variety of crude used to price other types, is selling for about $106 a barrel. But according to Oil Price Information Service analyst Tom Kloza, oil from North Dakota has recently been selling for around $83 a barrel. Canadian crude has been trading for even less.

"I've never seen anything like it, this kind of [price] diversity," Kloza told me.

The big beneficiaries of this strange situation have been refiners in the West and Midwest, who get cheap oil, while refiners on the coast have had to continue importing the most expensive varieties from abroad. According to the EIA, before 2011, refineries in the Rocky Mountain region paid about $3 less per barrel of oil than the national average. By November of last year, they were paying $16 less. Those discounts get passed on to drivers in places like Denver, where gas is currently averaging $3.12 cents a gallon.

That good fortune might soon be coming to an end, however. Owners of the Seaway pipeline are planning to reverse it's flow in June, which will allow it to begin shipping 150,000 barrels of oil a day from Cushing Oklahoma, where most of that Canadian and North Dakotan crude is currently sitting, to the gulf. Eventually, it will be able to ship 400,000 barrels a day. If the new pipeline capacity can ease all those backed up supplies, it means prices will rise. Goldman Sachs is now urging investors to go long on American crude futures. In other words, the bank is telling it's customers to buy cheap while they still can.

So no, unlocking that big supply of oil won't do much for gas prices on the coasts. It'll just make American and Canadian oil equally expensive as the stuff drilled up in Nigeria and Saudi Arabia. And it'll mean higher gas prices in the middle of the country. So those commuters in Colorado will finally be suffering with the rest of us.

A Whirlwind Escape to Vietnam's Culinary Landscape

2012-02-23T13:16:26-05:00

The Perennial Plate, a series about sustainable eating, spent two weeks traveling around Vietnam before compiling this mouthwatering montage of their food adventures there. The series is produced by Daniel Klein and Mirra Fine, and more episodes from the series can be found on the Atlantic Video channel here.

For more information about The Perennial Plate, visit http://www.theperennialplate.com/.

Social Media: Virtue or Vice? Pinterest Tops the 2012 Lenten Index

2012-02-23T13:05:52-05:00

You can take our tweets. But do not -- do not -- take our pins.

Lent is upon us. For the next 39 days, Christians (and non-Christians who find appeal in the idea of strategic self-denial) will give up something they love -- or at least something they tend to over-indulge in -- in the name both of sacrifice itself and of self-and-social-improvement.

Traditional sacrifices include: meat, sugar, coffee, booze, TV-watching, snacking, gossiping, lying, procrastinating, complaining, and complaining about procrastinating. And while, recently, Lenten forfeitures have come to include additions to, rather than subtractions from, people's daily routines -- "I'll exercise more," "I'll eat more vegetables," "I'll make a point of paying someone a compliment every day" -- for the most part, the sacrifices made during the 40 days before Easter rely on the classic dialectic between addiction and destruction. You give something up both because you love it ... and because you know it's bad for you.

So it's interesting that the list of Lenten sacrifices has recently expanded to include another category: social media. People, taking the digital sabbath concept to a days-long level, are giving up Facebook. They're giving up Twitter and Tumblr and Foursquare. And if the love it/leave it dichotomy holds true, their self-imposed abstinence from those platforms indicates not only sacrifice, but also the general sense that the services being sacrificed are, on some level, destructive. Their popularity as sacrifices suggests, actually, the negative feelings people have about social media services.

Lenten abstinence, in other words, can offer an unscientific-but-still-revealing insight into how people are feeling about social media. A Big Mac Index for our feelings about Facebook.

So how are our current popular services stacking up? I did a search of tweets posted over the past day; and, within that day, there have been tons of references to giving up Facebook.

Giving up rice, McDonald's, Facebook and KFC for lent.
-- Belieberauhl.(@SexifiedBiebs) February 23, 2012

Giving Up Facebook For Lent.. So I Will Be Back On Twitter Alot More!
-- Syanna Reyes (@SyannaaaReyesss) February 23, 2012

Giving up Facebook for lent! :X Let's see how this goes....
-- Laura Janis (@EL_VEE_JAY) February 23, 2012

I'm giving up swearing, facebook, and sarcasm #finaldecision
-- Ngan Nguyen(@ngannerz) February 23, 2012

In addition to giving up facebook..I'm gonna try and give up saying 'sorry' never realized just how much I say it..
-- Lindsay Nitishin (@lindsayyy_loo) February 23, 2012

Making sure you have a perfect profile pic before giving up Facebook for lent. #TSM
-- Total Sorority Move (@totalsratmove) February 23, 2012

There are fewer, but still substantial, references to giving up Twitter.

For lent I'm giving up Twitter & Facebook, so later all see ya in 40 days!
-- Shemeka Levine (@ShemekaLevine) February 23, 2012

Pope to tweet message a day for 40 days of #Lent -lat.ms/AwZ7Yj via @romeneskoToo bad I'm giving up Twitter for #lent
-- david carr (@carr2n) February 23, 2012

Starting tmrw I'm giving up twitter and lying for lent #nojoke
-- Loading... (@_oddmentality) February 22, 2012

I know sooooooo many people giving up twitter for lent... Yea, I'm not about that life. lol
-- †hat boy. (@nicktheweirdo) February 22, 2012

Foursquare got a few sacrificial shout-outs, as well.

Giving up @foursquare for Lent. I'll miss my mayorships, but need a break from life feeling like a location-based game. #socialmedia
-- ashley lee (@ashleyllee) February 23, 2012

Giving up #foursquare, coffee and rice for #lent
-- glenn fajota (@nowthatsfresh) February 22, 2012

@DragonNash @ameliacfarmer Amelia is giving up foursquare for lent Nash. can you believe it?! she needs support.
-- Catherine Farmer (@cathfarm) February 22, 2012

And so did Tumblr.

Shawty said she is giving up Tumblr for lent#cray
-- Justin Delio (@WhatTheDelio) February 23, 2012

Im giving up tumblr for lent
-- Carolyne Marie ✌(@Heartsparx) February 23, 2012

Giving up Tumblr for lent..This is going to be hard
-- Eve Reeves (@Eves_By_U) February 23, 2012

But! Take a look at the results for Pinterest. Some people are, indeed, giving up the service:

For Lent this year I'm giving up: liver, Pinterest, cat-petting, and Lifetime Movie Network. Call me the "Religious Self-Discipline Ninja."
-- Kevin Childs (@rockconway) February 22, 2012

Better late than never, but I am giving up all forms of social media for Lent (Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr and Pinterest).
-- Ashleigh Finley (@ashfinle) February 23, 2012

But the general consensus seems to be that Pinterest is too valuable to give up, even for six weeks:

Someone said they were giving up Pinterest for Lent!!!!! I'm hyperventilating just thinking about that. #nojoke
-- Belle Living (@BelleLiving) February 21, 2012

What am I giving up for #Lent? Not Pinterest.
-- Bridget Marie Forney (@BridgetForney) February 22, 2012

Giving up shopping and sweets for Lent. So, really, I should be giving up @Pinterest.
-- Hilary S. Cocalis (@hilary_SC) February 22, 2012

Giving up pinterest for Lent? Yeah, didn't think so! #pinning yfrog.com/esfe9nyj
-- Angela Smith (@cinemagenius) February 22, 2012

So people can happily spend 40 days deprived of TV and dessert and (yes, even!) coffee, and of Tumblrs and tweets and Facebook's photos and messages. Pins, on the other hand? That's a sacrifice most aren't willing -- or able -- to make.

Image: Shutterstock/Pan Xunbin.

Who Is the Aggressor in the Culture Wars?

2012-02-23T13:03:32-05:00

Traditionalists say it's gay marriage advocates, who want radical change. But settled customs are hardly without their fierce advocates.

America's culture wars make everyone feel like a victim. That is arguably its most lamentable feature. Lots of different kinds of people take themselves to be objects of unparalleled ire. It cannot be so. But we're often most sensitive to criticism aimed at the groups to which we belong.

Take Rod Dreher, a traditionalist, a religious believer, a parent whose children are home-schooled, and an advocate for thick community ties. He is sometimes on the receiving end of intemperate, unfair criticism. And he correctly perceives that the culture is increasingly antagonistic to his world view, his advocacy for preserving marriage between a man and a woman especially. But his description of who the aggressors are in the culture wars isn't persuasive.

Here's how he explains it:

From time out of mind, the idea that marriage constitutes the union between one man and one woman has been the unquestioned standard in our civilization. Same-sex marriage has only been on the national radar since 1993, when a Hawaii court ruled that the state had to demonstrate just cause for why marriage ought to be denied to same-sex couples. That was fewer than 20 years ago, and in that time, support for same-sex marriage has increased at a pace that is nothing short of revolutionary. According the the trajectory of polling, at some point in the next few years, what had been the settled view of the nature of marriage for millennia will have been rejected by a majority of the American people. Whether this is a good or a bad thing, all must agree that it is a revolutionary thing.

This stunning victory has been achieved by mounting an all-out assault on tradition. It wouldn't have succeeded had the tradition not been hollowed out by the (hetero)sexual revolution, of course, but that's an argument for another thread. The point is, the marriage innovators assaulted the settled tradition -- and have just about won. But here's the thing: they won in part by framing their own assault on tradition as self-defense. This is what it means when same-sex marriage advocates talk about attempts by marriage trads to attack their families and their rights. It's brilliant propaganda, because it paints people who preferred the status quo into culture-war aggressors, rather than those who are actually aggressing against the settled tradition. The point is not that the pro-SSM folks are wrong, or that they're right. The point here is that they are by any rational measure the culture-war aggressors, but paint themselves as the victims of a right-wing assault. It's brilliant propaganda.

This is a narrow way of looking at the fight over same sex marriage. It proceeds as if prior to 1993, the status of gays in American culture was uncontroversial -- as if tradition itself is apolitical, by virtue of being the status quo. But that isn't an accurate account of history or politics.

For decades, American culture and law were openly hostile to homosexuals. They were mocked, demonized and beaten. Their relationships were criminalized. Religious observers contended they'd wind up in hell. For all these reasons, many were closeted or self-hating or suicidal. Despite the fact that gays and lesbians bore these indignities across many centuries, no one now defends the sum of their treatment, because tradition alone doesn't confer legitimacy, nor does it define what is "settled," if that word is meant to imply consensus and consent.

This is almost universally accepted when we talk about slavery and bans on interracial marriage. Those abominations reflected longstanding traditions. It is nevertheless absurd to call slaves who sought freedom or mixed couples who wanted to marry "the aggressors" in a culture war. As clear is what's lost by referring to slaveholders or opponents of mixed marriage as merely "preferring the status quo," as if entrenching the status quo in law wasn't effectively an aggressive act. This isn't to say gay marriage opponents are the moral equivalent of slaveholders or mixed marriages opponents -- it's only to say that in all these cases, identifying what is "traditional" or what is "the status quo" doesn't tell us much about who "the aggressor" is in a dispute.

One thing Dreher does in the excerpt above is to conflate the religious, cultural, and legal definitions of marriage. That is misleading. For example, sacramental marriage as defined by the Catholic Church and civil marriage as defined by the state of California aren't equal inheritors of thousands of years of tradition, nor are their avowed purposes identical. I'll defend the Catholic Church's right to marry or refrain from marrying anyone it likes, whether because they're gay or previously divorced or of mixed faith or eat meat voraciously on Fridays during Lent.

Civil marriage is a different matter. Gays and lesbians who want to partake in it are insisting that tradition, embedded in law, treats their relationships as inferior and is aggressively discriminatory -- that it deprives them of practical goods and perpetuates the stigma against them through force of law, even if the fact that it has long been the status quo masks the aggression. They'd point out that many slaveholders thought themselves to be upholding the natural way of things, even as they perpetuated a status quo that in fact aggressively violated core rights.

Guys and lesbians aren't "painting themselves as the victims of a right-wing assault" as propaganda. They earnestly believe, for plausible reasons, that marriage excluding same sex couples is but one part of a status quo that has been aggressively antagonistic and discriminatory for decades, even if we're just starting to realize it. Meanwhile, people like Rod Dreher aren't attempting propaganda when they claim that their opponents are the aggressors in the culture war; they see themselves as defending marriage as a procreative institution, losing a series of cultural battles of which gay marriage is only the most recent, and being wrongfully conflated with anti-gay bigots, though they tout procreative marriage even when it has nothing to do with gays. As I see it, neither principled proponents nor opponents of same sex marriage are necessarily aggressors in the culture war. What I'd encourage, to make the fight a bit less unpleasant, is for gay marriage proponents and opponents to grant that at least some of their interlocutors have good reason to feel as if they've been unfairly demonized by the culture wars.

Image credit: Reuters

Ranking the Best Picture Nominees by Design Aesthetic

2012-02-23T13:01:15-05:00

Which film most effectively captured time and place via track suits and vintage furniture?

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If you're like us and doing the obligatory Oscar week movie-cramming in preparation for Hollywood's big night, here's something else to think about when considering your pick for Best Picture: the anthropological question of good taste. We took it upon ourselves to rank this year's nominees according to their design aesthetic. Wikipedia defines aesthetics as the study of sensory or sensori-emotional values, sometimes called judgments of sentiment and taste. So, what films have it? What films don't? Does it matter? Take a look at how the nine nominees measured up.

This post also appears on Flavorpill, an Atlantic partner site.

Image credit: Columbia Pictures

Foxconn Is Doing Its Utmost to Brighten the Picture of Its Working Conditions

2012-02-23T12:27:03-05:00

Somehow Foxconn has convinced the world that its treatment of workers isn't that bad. Sure, we've heard the stories from those on the inside, seen workers in their natural habitats, and we know all about the suicide nets. And yet, Foxconn has managed to turn its image around, allowing us to rationalize it, Apple, and our own obsession with iThings.

Read the full story at The Atlantic Wire.