President Obama's speech at the National Defense University Thursday offered a nuanced defense of the U.S. drone program against Islamic militants in hard-to-reach areas of the world as the best of a bad set of military options for fighting those who want to kill American civilians. The drone program costs fewer American military and foreign civilian lives than would use of more conventional weapons or strategies, the president said, but still should only be used when the "detention and prosecution of terrorists" is "foreclosed" as an approach.

The president also laid out what the standard should be for domestic use of armed but unmanned aerial vehicles: They should not be used.

"For the record, I do not believe it would be constitutional for the government to target and kill any U.S. citizen -- with a drone, or a shotgun -- without due process," Obama said. "Nor should any president deploy armed drones over U.S. soil."

Let me repeat the second part of that quote, since this has been such a controversial and much-discussed topic: "Nor should any president deploy armed drones over U.S. soil."

That's the standard. No armed drones over U.S. soil.

Obama's justification for the use of drones overseas involved an array of circumstances, but significant among the factors he listed were the geographic and geopolitical challenges in using conventional force in "remote tribal regions," "caves and walled compounds," and "empty deserts and rugged mountains" where "the state has only the most tenuous reach" and the presence of conventional or special forces could trigger "a firefight with surrounding tribal communities that pose no threat to us" or "a major international crisis."

None of that describes the United States.

Obama's articulated standard for the domestic use of armed drones -- no president should use them -- is tougher than the one the president's Republican critics in the U.S. Senate had been demanding.

Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas has suggested an imminent threat standard for the domestic use of armed drones, saying in March, "It is unequivocal that if the U.S. government were to use a drone to take the life of a U.S. citizen on U.S. soil and that individual did not pose an imminent threat that would be a deprivation of life without due process."

Sen. Rand Paul of Kentucky, who in March held a nearly 13-hour filibuster of John Brennan's nomination to be CIA director over the domestic drone-deployment question, endorsed a similar imminent threat standard in remarks in April.

"I've never argued against any technology being used when you have an imminent threat, an active crime going on. If someone comes out of a liquor store with a weapon and fifty dollars in cash, I don't care if a drone kills him or a policeman kills him," Paul told Fox Business's Neil Cavuto.

"If there's a killer on the loose in a neighborhood, I'm not against drones being used," he added.

A number of Paul critics called those remarks a flip-flop from what he'd said during his filibuster: "[N]o American should be killed by a drone on American soil without first being charged with a crime, without first being found to be guilty by a court."

Paul's office objected that picking that one quote out of his hours of remarks during the filibuster overlooked his earlier articulation of the imminent threat standard. "Armed drones should not be used in normal crime situations," Paul said in a statement. "They only may only be considered in extraordinary, lethal situations where there is an ongoing, imminent threat. I described that scenario previously during my Senate filibuster."

And, in fact, Paul did make that point clear, saying in March that he made an exception in his objection to using armed drones domestically for "someone with a bazooka, a grenade launcher on their shoulder. Anyone committing lethal force can be repelled with lethal force. No one argues that point.... No one is questioning whether the U.S. can repel an attack. No one is questioning whether your local police can repel an attack."

But President Obama just did: If no armed drones are to be used over U.S. soil, they certainly are not going to be used by a local police force against someone with a bazooka who could, presumably, be taken out by a sniper, a S.W.A.T. team, or some other domestic law enforcement approach using conventional weapons.

Today's presidential statement should but likely will not lay to rest the lingering controversy started by Paul in response to a hypothetical scenario laid out by Attorney General Eric Holder in a March response to a February query from Paul.

"The U.S. government has not carried out drone strikes in the United States and has no intention of doing so," Holder wrote to Paul on March 4. "As a policy matter, moreover, we reject the use of military force where well-established law-enforcement authorities in this country provide the best means for incapacitating a terrorist threat."

If there were some "extraordinary circumstance" on the level of the attack on Pearl Harbor or Sept. 11, Holder wrote, drones might be considered as part of a broader authorization for the use of military force domestically. But, he said, such a scenario was "entirely hypothetical." Holder further clarified the point in second letter to Paul on March 7, following Paul's filibuster. "It has come to my attention that you have now asked an additional question: 'Does the President have the authority to use a weaponized drone to kill an American not engaged in combat on American soil?' " Holder wrote. "The answer to that question is no."

Before Paul's filibuster, Holder rejected the use of drones, a form of military force, when domestic law enforcement could do the job. Obama made that standard even clearer today.

Obama's full remarks, as prepared for delivery, from the drones section of his speech:

[D]espite our strong preference for the detention and prosecution of terrorists, sometimes this approach is foreclosed. Al Qaeda and its affiliates try to gain a foothold in some of the most distant and unforgiving places on Earth. They take refuge in remote tribal regions. They hide in caves and walled compounds. They train in empty deserts and rugged mountains.

In some of these places - such as parts of Somalia and Yemen - the state has only the most tenuous reach into the territory. In other cases, the state lacks the capacity or will to take action. It is also not possible for America to simply deploy a team of Special Forces to capture every terrorist. And even when such an approach may be possible, there are places where it would pose profound risks to our troops and local civilians - where a terrorist compound cannot be breached without triggering a firefight with surrounding tribal communities that pose no threat to us, or when putting U.S. boots on the ground may trigger a major international crisis.

To put it another way, our operation in Pakistan against Osama bin Laden cannot be the norm. The risks in that case were immense; the likelihood of capture, although our preference, was remote given the certainty of resistance; the fact that we did not find ourselves confronted with civilian casualties, or embroiled in an extended firefight, was a testament to the meticulous planning and professionalism of our Special Forces - but also depended on some luck. And even then, the cost to our relationship with Pakistan - and the backlash among the Pakistani public over encroachment on their territory - was so severe that we are just now beginning to rebuild this important partnership.

It is in this context that the United States has taken lethal, targeted action against al Qaeda and its associated forces, including with remotely piloted aircraft commonly referred to as drones. As was true in previous armed conflicts, this new technology raises profound questions - about who is targeted, and why; about civilian casualties, and the risk of creating new enemies; about the legality of such strikes under U.S. and international law; about accountability and morality.

Let me address these questions. To begin with, our actions are effective. Don't take my word for it. In the intelligence gathered at bin Laden's compound, we found that he wrote, "we could lose the reserves to the enemy's air strikes. We cannot fight air strikes with explosives." Other communications from al Qaeda operatives confirm this as well. Dozens of highly skilled al Qaeda commanders, trainers, bomb makers, and operatives have been taken off the battlefield. Plots have been disrupted that would have targeted international aviation, U.S. transit systems, European cities and our troops in Afghanistan. Simply put, these strikes have saved lives.

Moreover, America's actions are legal. We were attacked on 9/11. Within a week, Congress overwhelmingly authorized the use of force. Under domestic law, and international law, the United States is at war with al Qaeda, the Taliban, and their associated forces. We are at war with an organization that right now would kill as many Americans as they could if we did not stop them first. So this is a just war - a war waged proportionally, in last resort, and in self-defense.

And yet as our fight enters a new phase, America's legitimate claim of self-defense cannot be the end of the discussion. To say a military tactic is legal, or even effective, is not to say it is wise or moral in every instance. For the same human progress that gives us the technology to strike half a world away also demands the discipline to constrain that power - or risk abusing it. That's why, over the last four years, my Administration has worked vigorously to establish a framework that governs our use of force against terrorists - insisting upon clear guidelines, oversight and accountability that is now codified in Presidential Policy Guidance that I signed yesterday.

In the Afghan war theater, we must support our troops until the transition is complete at the end of 2014. That means we will continue to take strikes against high value al Qaeda targets, but also against forces that are massing to support attacks on coalition forces. However, by the end of 2014, we will no longer have the same need for force protection, and the progress we have made against core al Qaeda will reduce the need for unmanned strikes.

Beyond the Afghan theater, we only target al Qaeda and its associated forces. Even then, the use of drones is heavily constrained. America does not take strikes when we have the ability to capture individual terrorists - our preference is always to detain, interrogate, and prosecute them. America cannot take strikes wherever we choose - our actions are bound by consultations with partners, and respect for state sovereignty. America does not take strikes to punish individuals - we act against terrorists who pose a continuing and imminent threat to the American people, and when there are no other governments capable of effectively addressing the threat. And before any strike is taken, there must be near-certainty that no civilians will be killed or injured - the highest standard we can set.

This last point is critical, because much of the criticism about drone strikes - at home and abroad - understandably centers on reports of civilian casualties. There is a wide gap between U.S. assessments of such casualties, and non-governmental reports. Nevertheless, it is a hard fact that U.S. strikes have resulted in civilian casualties, a risk that exists in all wars. For the families of those civilians, no words or legal construct can justify their loss. For me, and those in my chain of command, these deaths will haunt us as long as we live, just as we are haunted by the civilian casualties that have occurred through conventional fighting in Afghanistan and Iraq.

But as Commander-in-Chief, I must weigh these heartbreaking tragedies against the alternatives. To do nothing in the face of terrorist networks would invite far more civilian casualties - not just in our cities at home and facilities abroad, but also in the very places -like Sana'a and Kabul and Mogadishu - where terrorists seek a foothold. Let us remember that the terrorists we are after target civilians, and the death toll from their acts of terrorism against Muslims dwarfs any estimate of civilian casualties from drone strikes.

Where foreign governments cannot or will not effectively stop terrorism in their territory, the primary alternative to targeted, lethal action is the use of conventional military options. As I've said, even small Special Operations carry enormous risks. Conventional airpower or missiles are far less precise than drones, and likely to cause more civilian casualties and local outrage. And invasions of these territories lead us to be viewed as occupying armies; unleash a torrent of unintended consequences; are difficult to contain; and ultimately empower those who thrive on violent conflict. So it is false to assert that putting boots on the ground is less likely to result in civilian deaths, or to create enemies in the Muslim world. The result would be more U.S. deaths, more Blackhawks down, more confrontations with local populations, and an inevitable mission creep in support of such raids that could easily escalate into new wars.

So yes, the conflict with al Qaeda, like all armed conflict, invites tragedy. But by narrowly targeting our action against those who want to kill us, and not the people they hide among, we are choosing the course of action least likely to result in the loss of innocent life. Indeed, our efforts must also be measured against the history of putting American troops in distant lands among hostile populations. In Vietnam, hundreds of thousands of civilians died in a war where the boundaries of battle were blurred. In Iraq and Afghanistan, despite the courage and discipline of our troops, thousands of civilians have been killed. So neither conventional military action, nor waiting for attacks to occur, offers moral safe-harbor. Neither does a sole reliance on law enforcement in territories that have no functioning police or security services - and indeed, have no functioning law.

This is not to say that the risks are not real. Any U.S. military action in foreign lands risks creating more enemies, and impacts public opinion overseas. Our laws constrain the power of the President, even during wartime, and I have taken an oath to defend the Constitution of the United States. The very precision of drones strikes, and the necessary secrecy involved in such actions can end up shielding our government from the public scrutiny that a troop deployment invites. It can also lead a President and his team to view drone strikes as a cure-all for terrorism.

For this reason, I've insisted on strong oversight of all lethal action. After I took office, my Administration began briefing all strikes outside of Iraq and Afghanistan to the appropriate committees of Congress. Let me repeat that - not only did Congress authorize the use of force, it is briefed on every strike that America takes. That includes the one instance when we targeted an American citizen: Anwar Awlaki, the chief of external operations for AQAP.

This week, I authorized the declassification of this action, and the deaths of three other Americans in drone strikes, to facilitate transparency and debate on this issue, and to dismiss some of the more outlandish claims. For the record, I do not believe it would be constitutional for the government to target and kill any U.S. citizen - with a drone, or a shotgun - without due process. Nor should any President deploy armed drones over U.S. soil.

But when a U.S. citizen goes abroad to wage war against America - and is actively plotting to kill U.S. citizens; and when neither the United States, nor our partners are in a position to capture him before he carries out a plot - his citizenship should no more serve as a shield than a sniper shooting down on an innocent crowd should be protected from a swat team.

That's who Anwar Awlaki was - he was continuously trying to kill people. He helped oversee the 2010 plot to detonate explosive devices on two U.S. bound cargo planes. He was involved in planning to blow up an airliner in 2009. When Farouk Abdulmutallab - the Christmas Day bomber - went to Yemen in 2009, Awlaki hosted him, approved his suicide operation, and helped him tape a martyrdom video to be shown after the attack. His last instructions were to blow up the airplane when it was over American soil. I would have detained and prosecuted Awlaki if we captured him before he carried out a plot. But we couldn't. And as President, I would have been derelict in my duty had I not authorized the strike that took out Awlaki.

Of course, the targeting of any Americans raises constitutional issues that are not present in other strikes - which is why my Administration submitted information about Awlaki to the Department of Justice months before Awlaki was killed, and briefed the Congress before this strike as well. But the high threshold that we have set for taking lethal action applies to all potential terrorist targets, regardless of whether or not they are American citizens. This threshold respects the inherent dignity of every human life. Alongside the decision to put our men and women in uniform in harm's way, the decision to use force against individuals or groups - even against a sworn enemy of the United States - is the hardest thing I do as President. But these decisions must be made, given my responsibility to protect the American people.

Going forward, I have asked my Administration to review proposals to extend oversight of lethal actions outside of warzones that go beyond our reporting to Congress. Each option has virtues in theory, but poses difficulties in practice. For example, the establishment of a special court to evaluate and authorize lethal action has the benefit of bringing a third branch of government into the process, but raises serious constitutional issues about presidential and judicial authority. Another idea that's been suggested - the establishment of an independent oversight board in the executive branch - avoids those problems, but may introduce a layer of bureaucracy into national-security decision-making, without inspiring additional public confidence in the process. Despite these challenges, I look forward to actively engaging Congress to explore these - and other - options for increased oversight.

I believe, however, that the use of force must be seen as part of a larger discussion about a comprehensive counter-terrorism strategy. Because for all the focus on the use of force, force alone cannot make us safe. We cannot use force everywhere that a radical ideology takes root; and in the absence of a strategy that reduces the well-spring of extremism, a perpetual war - through drones or Special Forces or troop deployments - will prove self-defeating, and alter our country in troubling ways.

Sears! Once the catalog king, then an eminent brick-and-mortar retailer, and now, perhaps, a real-estate holding company that leases out space for computers that power the cloud.

Data Center Knowledge reported today that Sears had created a new unit -- Ubiquity Critical Environments -- to look into repurposing its shuttered stores as datacenters, starting with this one in Chicago.

Yes, this is this week's sign that the 21st century is upon us.

Sears Holdings has a portfolio of 2.5 million square feet of retail space. Not all of it will be suitable for housing server farms, but some percentage of it will be. Ubiquity is tasked with figuring out which stores could be converted. 

Right now, mall sites are out, but you never know. "I don't think the industry is yet ready for a mall-based data center," Ubiquity's manager told the site. "That may take some time. The stand-alone location is optimal." 

(Imagine wandering an empty mall. Closed, closed, closed. But behind each grate, you hear the whir of a shard of the Internet. Finally, you come to an open storefront. It's a Starbucks and there are 30 IT guys at makeshift standup desks.) 

Sears is considering other options for its closed stores: renting them out as "disaster recovery facilities (euphemistically: "business continuity centers") or leasing their roofs to wireless carriers.

It's weird out there.

H/t: Motherboard

John Stemberger, head of the conservative evangelical Florida Family Policy Council, told this morning's New York Times, "Allowing openly gay scouts will mean the blunt injection of hypersexuality and gay activism into a youth organization." Stemberger, who does not always invoke sexual imagery in his speech on the subject, has been mobilizing activists to "stand strong" against a measure that would allow gay boys to be Boy Scouts. His site, On My Honor, includes a Wall of Supporters: Photos of people who fought to the end to keep openly gay boys out.

Today, if we were to adopt similarly antagonistic terms -- which we shouldn't, but if we were to -- those people lost. As the president of the Boys Scouts of America (BSA) Wayne Perry wrote in an op-ed this morning, "At the BSA's National Annual Meeting today, the 1,400 voting members of our National Council will vote on a proposed resolution that would end the restriction on gay youth membership. That's the right decision for Boy Scouts."

Vote they did, in Grapevine, Texas. Before today, the group's policy was,"We do not grant membership to individuals who are open or avowed homosexuals," but that is no longer. The resolution passed with 60 percent approval.

As Perry wrote going in, he supported the measure. He added, though, "The change to the Boy Scouts of America's membership policy is not the result of pressure from outside." That's unlikely, since the decision comes amid some of the most outspoken gay-rights lobbying in history, including a Supreme Court hearing in 2000. 

It's okay -- good, progressive, even -- to hear and respond to outside pressure. Like when politicians talk about flip-flopping, as if changing to accommodate an evolving landscape is a negative thing, the BSA seems to revere notions of a value system that does adapt to feedback. Everybody benefits from feedback, and people appreciate when being heard them. Today the BSA recognized norms that are different from when the organization was founded in 1910 (and when the official anti-gay policy was signed in 1978). 

Of course it's within their rights to limit membership as they see fit, but when a massive organization that professes values of a good, moral life but also distances itself from an already oppressed minority group -- one at higher risk for bullying, depression, and suicide -- it enters the realm of tangible public health concerns. BSA is a celebrity in the arena of morality. When it endorses ideals, they do not manifest in a vacuum.

With regard to seeing this as a half-measure, in that the BSA will still prohibit gay adult members, Stemberger said, "It was clear from our listening phase that changing adult standards would have conflicted with the majority of our partners, 70% of which are religious organizations, and would have disrupted our ability to deliver Scouting."

The BSA is totally self-empowered and considerate when they announce a progressive change, but when they announce continued discrimination it's because they're under the thumb of influences beyond their control. Though as Stemberger, who at least owns his stance, notes on his site, it will only be a matter of time before adoption of this policy leads to integration of gay adult leaders.

So, this essentially settled, we can soon go back to appreciating the BSA simply as a time-honored institution that teaches kids and young men about being good people in the real world. They still don't allow atheists, but as a religiously-affiliated organization, that's a separate issue. If anyone is concerned for the fate of the American boy or the moral landscape of the nation now, they can always look to how things have turned out for the American girl. Girl Scouts, which is supported more by corporations and foundations than religious organizations, has had progressive positions on LGBT issues for years.

So here you are, once again, on the Internet. (Hello, there. Welcome back, friend.) Here you are, another Norm within the Cheers that is the World Wide Web, hanging out in the place where everybody (or, more likely, nobody) knows your name.

But why are you really here? I mean, why are you really here? Why, ultimately, do you -- and, because I'm right here with you, we -- keep coming back to this crazy place, day after day? 

It's easy to attribute the web's ongoing magnetism to the powerful combination that is "human connection" and "cat videos"; that isn't the full story, though. The Internet is beguiling not just because of its content, but because of its structure.

That's according to Tom Stafford, a cognitive scientist at the University of Sheffield in the U.K. The Internet, Sheffield told told LiveScience, offers the same kind of incentives and rewards that, say, slot machines do: You could pull several -- even several hundred -- rounds of duds (cherry-bar-7! bell-bell-lemon! unfunny "humor" piece! terrible listicle! bell-bell-lemon!). But when you get that one payoff -- when you hit even the smallest of jackpots -- your patience is rewarded. The monotony of the arm-pulls or the button-presses seems to be justified by the win. You get a rush of dopamine. You are happy. (For more on how this works, check out the excellent "No Armed Bandit" episode of Roman Mars's 99 Percent Invisible podcast.)

In the same way, Stafford suggets, the Internet offers cognitive rewards -- "a tidbit of juicy gossip," say, or "a heartfelt email" -- within its mix of bars and lemons and creaky gifs. The payoff is instant; the reward is quick; and this, LiveScience puts it, "only strengthens the Internet's pull." As a massive sociological experiment, the Internet effectively turns us into Pavlov's dogs: It conditions us to respond, automatically and physically, to the promise of future rewards. The little gems we encounter -- from early Mark Twain stories to cats-and-pot-bellied-pigs -- offer rushes of joy. Over time, we come to crave that rush. And we know exactly where to get it.

So, yeah. The next time you wonder whether you're spending too much time on Facebook or Buzzfeed or whatever, just remind yourself: You're wasting time because your brain wants you to. The Internet's charisma is a function not just of all the great stuff that lives on it, but also of humans' carefully honed survival mechanisms -- mechanisms evolved long ago, in response to vicious enemies. We can't quit our cat videos, it turns out, because of ... lions.

That's per Linda Stone, a researcher who has studied the physiological effects of Internet use. (She's the one who coined the all-too-useful term "continuous partial attention," and you can read more on her work, via a fantastic interview with James Fallows, here.) Stone told LiveScience that much of our compulsive behavior when it comes to our screens -- and to email in particular -- can be attributed to the fight-or-flight response that originated with early humans' need to escape predators. That response is a function of our autonomic nervous system (a condition also known as hyperarousal), and it prepares us, as its name suggests, either to run away from our attackers or to stick around and do battle with them.

The Internet, a plain whose grasses hide so many digital predators, can activate that same response in contemporary humans. It offers "fight" and "flight" in one tidy package. Reading emails or hunching over a screen, Stone says, can cause people to go into a kind of resting state. Some 80 percent of people, she has shown, stop breathing (temporarily) or start breathing shallowly (continuously) when they check their email or look at a screen. Stone calls this condition "email apnea." And she attributes it to our anticipation that the stuff we're scanning will eventually require a response from us. Our drone-like surveys of our screens will eventually reveal an email from our boss or a note from a friend. And, when that happens, we'll need to spring to action to respond. 

We anticipate this, Stone suggests, by holding our breaths -- storing our energy -- as we look at our screens. Spacing out is, in its way, a survival mechanism. It's the system we've developed, in spite of ourselves, for navigating the crazy environment that spreads out before us -- an environment that reveals itself, increasingly, on screens. 

Marc Whitten stands in front of an army of servers (Microsoft).

Watching the reveal of the Xbox One this week, one particular claim about Microsoft's new console caught my ear. Marc Whitten, the executive in charge of Xbox Live, the company's online gaming network, charted its historical progression.

"When we launched Xbox Live in 2002, it was powered by 500 severs. With the advent of the 360, that had grown to over 3,000," Whitten said. "Today, 15,000 servers power the modern Xbox Live experience."

Then Whitten said something extraordinary, "This year, we will have more than 300,000 servers for Xbox One, more than the entire world's computing power in 1999."

Now that's impressive! The statement even turned into an (unplanned?) applause line that tripped up Whitten's presentation. Because 1999 is not some distant date. It was the height of the dot-com bubble, after all. On an average home computer, you could play complex 3D games and download MP3s, edit video and mess around in Photoshop. Tens of millions of people had computers in their homes and Microsoft Office was nearly universal in business. Deep Blue had already beaten Garry Kasparaov!

And now, not even 15 years later, that same amount of information processing -- all the nuclear physics and climate simulations and videogames and spreadsheets and databases -- was being dedicated to running just one entertainment network, just one videogame network.

Stoners the world over were mumbling, vaguely, "Moore's Law, man. Moore's Law."

But then I started thinking: how did they figure this out? And can it be true? I contacted Microsoft's press people, who told me, "We do not have information to provide on these calculations."

Luckily, last year, Martin Hilbert and Priscila López estimated the world's information processing capacity at various points in time for a paper published in the journal Science: "The World's Technological Capacity to Store, Communicate, and Compute Information." I got a hold of Hilbert over email and asked him if Microsoft's assertion held up to inspection. Let me walk you through his answer.

First, because Hilbert and López were dealing with historical terrain, they used a measure called MIPS, short for million of instructions per second. They broke out the world's computation resources into two broad categories: 1) General-purpose computing tracks mostly the CPUs in personal computers and videogame consoles (see chart) and 2) Application-specific computing, which is composed of digital signal processors (say in a DVD player), microcontrollers, and GPUs. By those two measures, in 1999, the world had 180 billion MIPS in general-purpose computing power and 800 billion MIPS in application-specific computing power for a total of 980 billion MIPS. With me? OK.

Hilbert said, let's create an upperbound, by taking the average performance of the bottom 100 supercomputers on the Top 500 supercomputer list, and imagine that Microsoft has 300,000 of them. Under those (improbable) conditions, they'd reach 300 billion MIPS, more than the general-purpose computing power of 1999, but not even a third of the total processing power available. 

Of course, we know Microsoft is not deploying 300,000 top supercomputers, so their claim is very likely an exaggeration.

But here's the weird thing: It's not that big of an exaggeration, according to Hilbert. "Realistically, since they are using less powerful (but specialized) servers, and orienting ourselves on the computing powers that are common in the gaming industry," he said, "I think the reality is rather that the computing power of this cluster is equal to the world's total computing power in 1994 or the world's general-purpose computing power in 1996."

As he summed it up, "I'd say they are some 5 years off... but nevertheless very impressive!" 

Because 1995 is less than 20 years ago. More than a quarter of American households already had a computer. This is not a comparison to the Apollo guidance computer or some IBM machine that used punch cards.

And now all of that power, all of it, resides in some cluster of computers served up by one company in Redmond, Washington, so that we can all play Call of Duty and watch movies together. How strange exponentiality (re)makes the world.

In his speech, President Barack Obama sought to redefine and in many ways "rightsize," the global war on terror.

By the president's own reckoning, there does not seem to be an end of war up ahead, but rather a shrinking, a targeting and a restructuring of it.

"Beyond Afghanistan, we must define our effort not as a boundless 'global war on terror' - but rather as a series of persistent, targeted efforts to dismantle specific networks of violent extremists that threaten America," said the president. "We cannot use force everywhere that a radical ideology takes root; and in the absence of a strategy that reduces the well-spring of extremism, a perpetual war -- through drones or Special Forces or troop deployments -- will prove self-defeating, and alter our country in troubling ways."

Obama argued to the crowd at National Defense University that, "our systematic effort to dismantle terrorist organizations must continue. But this war, like all wars, must end."

The question seems to come down to the definition of war and how broadly and widely you apply it. By the president's own reckoning, there does not seem to be an end of war up ahead, but rather a shrinking, a targeting and a restructuring of it.

The last decade has seen more than 6,500 American men and women die in the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. By some estimates the bill for the two conflicts could reach $4 to $6 trillion when the costs of caring for those who served in battle are included. Earlier this week the Pentagon requested another $80 billion for combat operations in Afghanistan.

Now those conventional wars are scaling back. As, perhaps, is the reliance on the special operations that have captured the nation's imagination. "Our operation in Pakistan against Osama bin Laden cannot be the norm," Obama said.

Yet, what exactly replaces them remains the question. The world is growing more complicated, not less. Iraq is unraveling, sliced apart by suicide bombings and sectarian violence. Syria is mired in a civil war the world has lacked the will to help stop. Afghanistan faces violence and a looming threat of insurgents battling an army not yet prepared to rebuff the entirety of its attacks. In West Africa, Mali's future is threatened by al-Qaeda affiliates as well.

The president may want to stop America's endless war, but can he? Or must America simply change tactics in the face of an evolving threat against which we no longer wish to deploy the blood and treasure of our conventional forces? That is really the argument the president seemed to make, though appealing for endless war is far less appealing than calling it abridged war and arguing for its continuation.

The president noted that when it comes to deploying drones, his administration is "insisting upon clear guidelines, oversight, and accountability that is now codified in Presidential Policy Guidance." That is, structure and process will become the new normal when it comes to drones. And in Afghanistan, after 2014, the "progress we have made against core al Qaeda will reduce the need for unmanned strikes." Reduce, not remove. Outside Afghanistan, "we only target al-Qaeda and its associated forces. Even then, the use of drones is heavily constrained."

So while the president discussed new rules that will govern the evolving war on terror, the pronouncement of its end remains premature. It may be lighter, but it is not leaving.

As the president himself said, "the conflict with al-Qaeda, like all armed conflict, invites tragedy. But by narrowly targeting our action against those who want to kill us, and not the people they hide among, we are choosing the course of action least likely to result in the loss of innocent life."

That, for the moment, looks unlikely to change in a war whose wins, as the president noted, "will be measured in parents taking their kids to school; immigrants coming to our shores; fans taking in a ballgame."

"Our laws constrain the power of the President, even during wartime, and I have taken an oath to defend the Constitution of the United States," President Obama said in a speech Thursday at the National Defense University. Obama's role as defender of the Constitution has been subject to justified criticism recently, with the rise of the secretive drone war in Pakistan and elsewhere. Obama took belated steps to address those concerns. And he did more: He committed himself to a legal path to ending the current "war" with the Taliban, and vowed not to allow Congress to expand it.

There seem to be two Obamas: the public idealist who seeks to harness and fulfill American ideals, and the tight-lipped commander in chief who asks the nation to trust him. The two dueled uneasily in the speech, but the advantage goes to the idealist.

In his discussion of the "drone war," the speech rates a B. Because the administration has stonewalled on the law and the policy behind the use of drones, the president found himself forced to make the following disavowal: "For the record, I do not believe it would be constitutional for the government to target and kill any U.S. citizen -- with a drone, or a shotgun -- without due process." 

This issue was always a red herring. The NDU speech identified the real problem with drones: "The very precision of drones strikes, and the necessary secrecy involved in such actions, can end up shielding our government from the public scrutiny that a troop deployment invites," he acknowledged. But there was no commitment that I can see to opening the drone war to public scrutiny. Instead, Obama offered the standard defense of the policy -- it is effective, aimed against only those terrorist targets who cannot be captured, and conducted to minimize civilian casualties -- in even more truncated form than that given months ago by figures like former State Department Legal Adviser Harold Koh and Attorney General Eric Holder.   

Further, he said, all drone strikes outside battlefield areas are already being reported to "the appropriate committees of Congress" and have been since 2009.   He announced that he had  signed on Wednesday a "Presidential Policy Guidance" document to codify "a framework that governs our use of force against terrorists - insisting upon clear guidelines, oversight, and accountability." Again, we do not know what the policy consists of; nor was there any suggestion that the "accountability" would be to the public. Accountability after the fact--investigation and reporting of whether a given strike was successful and justified--has never been part of the Administration's vocabulary. 

The president gave a distant nod to the proposals recently floated for a more formal review of specific strikes. A special "drone court" would "brin[g] a third branch of government into the process, but raises serious constitutional issues about presidential and judicial authority."  An independent oversight body in the executive branch "avoids those problems, but may introduce a layer of bureaucracy into national-security decision-making, without inspiring additional public confidence in the process." Obama indicated no preference for either measure, or indeed for any statutory limit on the drone war at all, simply committing himself to "actively engaging" Congress on options for "increased oversight." In the Washington we live in, that means there will be no statutory mechanism for a good long while, leaving the secret policy document as the final word.

But Obama can perhaps be forgiven for not taking on that legislative task, given that the speech commits him to two potential fights with Congress. "I once again call on Congress to lift the restrictions on detainee transfers from GTMO," he said, leaving him free to close the facility. That effort -- one of the first in his administration, stymied by Congressional fear-mongering about terrorists walking away from supermax prisons -- seems to be slated for a new push, with a new senior official devoted to moving detainees to other countries, and a commitment that "we will bring terrorist to justice in our courts and military justice system. And we will insist that judicial review be available for every detainee."

Finally, and in some ways most importantly, he reaffirmed the constitutional basis for the war, and announced his intention to end it. Unlike George W. Bush, Obama has steadily insisted that the war in Afghanistan, and the covert actions and drone strikes taking place in third countries, are not prerogatives of any president who decides that potential enemies need a touch of steel. Every administration defense of its actions abroad has been rooted in the Authorization for the Use of Military Force, passed on September 14, 2001, which allows the President to "use all necessary and appropriate force against those nations, organizations, or persons he determines planned, authorized, committed, or aided the terrorist attacks ... or harbored such organizations or persons." 

So it is significant when Obama said "I look forward to engaging Congress and the American people in efforts to refine, and ultimately repeal, the AUMF's mandate." Even more significantly, he said, "I will not sign laws designed to expand this mandate further.  ... [T]his war, like all wars, must end."

If Obama really has committed himself to ending the war, he has taken a course few presidents can be expected to choose. As early as 1787, Americans have noted that war empowers presidents. The Bush Administration quite openly used the aftermath of September 11 to expand presidential authority to the full scope Dick Cheney had always thought it should enjoy. Obama has seemed, over the past five years, reluctant to give too much of that expanded authority back.

But unlike Bush, he has insisted that his power comes largely within a framework of law. If he makes a systematic effort to remove the AUMF, we'll see a president voluntarily laying down not only the nation's arms, but his own.  

• Ta-Nehisi Coates, on the encounter-with-French-language-and-the-French-people-eux-mêmes he has previewed on his site;
• Benjamin Schwarz, on the disappearance of "charming" men, an essay I loved despite specific disagreement with one sentence;
• Carl Zimmer with a fascinating extension of a grisly-fascinating discovery (people ossifying) reported 15 years ago in our pages;
• and a lot more.

This is by way of segue to two extra in-house aspects of the issue that involve me. One is a long story by me about the past-present-and-future governor of my original home state, Jerry Brown. I'll do a follow up item here soon, but the two points I tried to convey in the story are what is unusual (and impressive) about Brown as a person, and what is unusual (and instructive) about the predicament of California as a state. For now I'll say that I really enjoyed doing this story, except the always-tedious "writing" part; and it helped me come to terms with the changes for good and bad in California between my time growing up there and my sons' time there now.

Oh, yes, the story also involves my (and the governor's) discovery of what a certain literary term means.

The other is a Q-and-A with Linda Stone, known inside the tech world for her work at Apple and Microsoft and known to the world at large for coining the term "continuous partial attention" to define our modern mental state. The print version of the interview, with tips on maintaining your own focus despite the blur, is here; the next post in this space will be a "director's cut" extended version of the interview, with more tips. I will try to maintain focus long enough to get it posted.

Rain beat down (again!) on the press queuing outside for an evening screening of Abdellatif Kechiche's La vie d'Adèle (Blue Is the Warmest Color) Wednesday at Cannes, while poker-faced security guards stared down from their dry, awning-covered perch at the top of the steps.

"This better be good," I griped to a colleague, as critics booed and hissed in a vain attempt to shame the gatekeepers into letting us in.

But by the time the three-hour film was underway, with more than 2,000 damp journalists sitting in rapt silence, all was forgiven and forgotten.

In what has been a strong competition (with works from the Coen brothers, Jia Zhangke, and François Ozon among standouts), Blue Is the Warmest Color all but towers above the rest: based on a graphic novel by Julie Maroh about a teenage girl who falls in love with a slightly older woman, it's a shattering masterpiece about sexual awakening, heartbreak, and self-discovery.

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The French-Tunisian Kechiche stumbled with his last film, Black Venus, never finding a convincing way into very tricky material (the true story of an African woman brought to Europe to be displayed as a freak-show attraction). But before that, he made two of the best French films in recent memory, Games of Love & Chance and The Secret of the Grain, both vibrant, novelistic examinations of a multi-ethnic France too rarely brought to the big screen.

His brilliantly acted, intensely erotic new film is his greatest achievement yet, the director so fully enveloping the viewer in his protagonist's world, mind, and emotions that I stumbled out of the screening dizzy, exhilarated, and shaken.

Blue Is the Warmest Color covers six years in the life of Adèle (Adèle Exarchopoulos, little known now, but not for long), who, at the film's start is a quiet 17-year-old high schooler living with her middle-class parents outside the northern French city of Lille. The story's catalyst comes in the alluring, blue-haired form of Emma (Léa Seydoux, whose star has now officially risen), a lesbian graduate student and artist from a loving, bourgeois-bohemian family.

The film serves as confirmation that Kechiche, with his interest in people living on the margins of modern France (North African immigrants and their children, inner city youth, and, here, gays, lesbians, and bisexuals), is French cinema's greatest observer of human behavior—and of French society in all its complexities and contradictions.

Indeed, Blue Is the Warmest Color is both a meticulous portrait of an individual and a broader study of the ways socioeconomic differences come to bear on that individual's romantic life. With the most subtle of outsider's perspectives (Kechiche moved to France from Tunisia as a six-year-old) and the lightest of touches, the director shows us how class dynamics become a sneakily toxic force in the relationship between Adèle and Emma; two masterfully staged family dinner scenes capture the dissimilar milieus these young women come from, foreshadowing feelings of frustration, alienation, and inadequacy that will eventually haunt their life together.

Kechiche also proves once and for all that realism (the default stylistic mode of European art cinema) does not have to be austere or punishing; his film is warm and sensually alive, the camera sticking close to the actors' faces and bodies without fetishising them, and alternating objective and subjective points of view with fluidity and control. You get so caught up in the fly-on-the-wall thrill of seeing these characters in their everyday lives that it's easy to forget the tremendous technical craftsmanship involved.

Anchoring Blue Is the Warmest Color, and then lifting it into the realm of the sublime, are two of the best female performances I've seen in years. The 19-year-old Exarchopoulos, with her full lips and sleepy eyes, initially looks like an ordinary, sullen teen. But when she falls in love, she conveys seismic swells of sadness and yearning without the slightest hint of actress-y histrionics. It's a performance of instinct, intuition, and empathy, rather than technique—and it's a wonder to behold.

Seydoux, meanwhile, has always been a charismatic screen presence, but nothing she's done before prepares us for the force and precision of her work here. Though the actress often plays a somewhat passive object of desire, she saunters into this film as a seductress with a sly smile and darting eyes. In early scenes, Seydoux manages the impressive feat of suggesting someone simultaneously reeling in and falling for the person in front of her. Later, Emma becomes increasingly headstrong and ambitious—as uncompromising in her personal life as in her professional pursuits—and when she pulls away from the more modest Adèle, and Adèle responds by acting out, the actresses hit notes of fury and regret that are painful in their authenticity. If the jury is smart, it'll give these two a joint acting prize.

The actresses hit notes of fury and regret that are painful in their authenticity. If the jury is smart, it'll give these two a joint acting prize.

Payne's lovely, low-key road movie
Blue Is the Warmest Color is a hard act to follow. Still, U.S. director Alexander Payne's Nebraska, a black-and-white road movie revolving around a stubborn old man (played by Bruce Dern) and his endlessly patient son (Saturday Night Live veteran Will Forte) made for a nice change of pace Thursday morning. It's far from the director's richest or most interesting work (that would be Sideways or About Schmidt), but the movie is a pleasure to watch: a melancholic comedy graced with the trademark Payne balance of tenderness and irony.

If Nebraska covers familiar thematic and visual ground—father-son tensions, wide fields dotted with grazing cows, an acoustic guitar soundtrack, small-town Americana tweaked with a sharp but forgiving satirical touch—and is a bit long at nearly two hours, it also feels lived-in (Dern and Forte are wonderful), and strikes gold in June Squibb's scene-stealing turn as Dern's exasperated wife.

With four films still to go in competition, including eagerly awaited works from James Grey and Roman Polanski, one could already draw up a distinguished list of prize winners from the impressive, varied group of movies that screened over the past 8 days.

After a relatively weak edition of Cannes last year, what a joy to feel spoiled this time around.

A version of this post appears on France 24, an Atlantic partner site.

Last month, Venezuela elected a president on the recommendation of Hugo Chavez. But as the problems the country faces loom larger, President Nicolas Maduro is finding his predecessor's one-man show a difficult act to follow.

It was inevitable that whoever succeeded Hugo Chavez risked being seen as "egg without salt," a popular Venezuelan expression used to describe those lacking charisma. So to a country more inclined to be accepting of economic and social troubles, as long as there's some juicy political scandal to be discussed, there's nothing quite so damning as being as a huevo sin sal, a label Maduro is rapidly acquiring.

The signs were there even as the election results were being announced. The huge double-digit polling lead Maduro enjoyed over his rival, Henrique Capriles, at the start of the campaign was whittled down to a mere 1.5 percent margin of victory come election day -- a sorry contrast to the 11 percent victory margin Chavez had scored over Capriles five months earlier.

"We don't need jokes, or songs, or dancing politicians. We've had fourteen years of that and look where it got us."

"No matter what you thought of Chavez, at least he kept Venezuela entertained," says Marianna Hernandez. Hernandez never voted for Hugo Chavez, who died in March following his two-year battle with cancer, but nevertheless laughs along with a smartphone app that replays a selection of the politician's more comedic outbursts.

"Just listen to this one," she enthuses, tapping a speech bubble on her phone's screen.

"I am a-studying English because I want to see the Condoleezza!" Hugo Chavez's lyrical drawl, comedic even in his non-native tongue, rasps out from her phone's speaker. Marianna giggles along with the assembled crowd to the recording, a sound bite from Chavez's weekly Aló Presidente television show.

"Because, she does not a-speak a-Spanish, so I must to a-speak English with her," it continues.

Marianna shakes her head fondly as the recording ends. "It'll be a long time before we see anything like Hugo Chavez again," she laments.

***

"No one knows what they've got until they lose it," said Belkis Brito, the managing director of socialist television channel Guatopo TV, which she and her team run from the chavista stronghold of Santa Teresa del Tuy, an industrial conurbation on the outskirts of Caracas.

A member of one of the more radical factions of chavismo, Belkis works hard to propagate the ideologies of her comandante. From her radical perspective, she has little faith in President Maduro's commitment to the Bolivarian Revolution.

"We voted for him because he spoke passionately about the revolution," she said in an interview in the television studio, overlooking the asbestos roofs of the surrounding slum. "But Maduro is not continuing the fight with the speed that we need. We want to see concrete action."

President Maduro is not only feeling pressure from the chavistas who mourn his predecessor, he is also facing an opposition party that refuses to accept his victory in last month's elections. Citing over 3,000 counts of electoral fraud, the party's allegations range from multiple-voting in chavista-strong areas to polling booth intimidation. Such claims have been lent momentum by the U.S. government's refusal to legitimize Maduro's leadership on similar grounds.

"He's fighting a battle on two fronts," said Mark Jones, professor of political science at Rice University in Texas, "with an opposition that denies his legitimacy as president and with the chavistas who supported him only because Chavez told them to."

The crisis created by the opposition's refusal to legitimize the newly elected president has been magnified by a schism within the government itself. With the opposition barred from participating in congress until Maduro is recognized, decisions are being made by the shadowy "political-military command" fronted by Diosdado Cabello, the congress president and military-backed political powerhouse currently embroiled in a corruption scandal. Ultimately, the power wielded by Cabello within the government could turn into the most serious threat to Maduro.

Polarizing the country further than ever, the opposition's position manifested a brawl in the National Congress and Capriles himself has been threatened with jail for his submission to the supreme court that Maduro's victory be annulled.

Yet while the politicians bicker, Venezuela is suffering. The annual inflation rate is nearing 30 percent, the country's annual homicides exceed those of the United States and Europe's combined, and the chronic shortages of basic goods are causing supermarket waiting times of up to three hours.

"There's no sugar, flour, oil, or toilet paper," said Ricardo Mota, a 34-year-old publicist waiting in a Caracas store to buy four bags of rice, the maximum permitted due to short supply. "We're forced to stock up on these things because we don't know when there will be more."

"It's the government's fault," he added. "The socialists have been fighting so hard to stay in power that they've ignored the needs of the people."

Many observers doubt Maduro's ability to handle these problems. The new president's public confidence and political influence have suffered following a difficult post-election period for the socialists.

"Maduro looks like someone who just barely scraped a win after Chavez left him a 15 percentage point lead," says David Smilde, professor of sociology at the University of Georgia. "His lack of popularity gives him less power within the government, and therefore less mandate to be an effective president."

Maduro has been left with no one but himself to blame for the country's worsening situation. The political strategy of passing the buck to the preceding government is unavailable to a politician who campaigned primarily on extolling the virtues of his predecessor.

"Right from the beginning there was the danger that whoever had to follow Chavez would become the scapegoat for the problems he left behind", says Professor Smilde, "and it's going to make Maduro go down in history as the man who couldn't keep up Chavez's legacy".

"Chavez's charisma and popularity allowed him to get away with far more in terms of policy shortcomings," says Professor Jones. "Maduro gets none of that benefit because he lacks the built-up goodwill that Chavez enjoyed."

"Maduro isn't being cut any slack", he says, "he's being forced to be one hundred percent accountable for the failings under Chavez. This would be difficult for anyone, but it's especially tough for a president who is seen as illegitimate."

Others see little reason to lose faith in Venezuelan socialism simply due to the loss of its posterboy. "Everyone says Chavez was popular because of his charisma," says Mark Weisbrot of the Center for Economic and Policy Research in Washington, D.C., "but he won 15 elections because he delivered on his promises."

"The government needs to stabilize the exchange rate, bring down inflation and handle the shortages," the co-director of the independent think tank continued, "the situation is very fixable. The economy isn't a question of charisma, it's a question of policy."

As Venezuela takes stock following the loss of Hugo Chavez, the country is looking to the man charged with carrying the torch of the firebrand leader's legacy. But lacking the show-stealing, crowd-pulling, blame-dodging charisma that Hugo Chavez exuded, the irony is that having won the election, Maduro must now win the country's confidence if he is to lead his nation forward.

"We don't need jokes, or songs, or dancing politicians," said Enzo Bogatí, a 40-year-old communications technician speaking from an opposition heartland in the district of Altamira in Caracas, "we've had fourteen years of that and look where it got us".

"What Venezuela needs is sound policy and responsible government," he added, "that's something we haven't seen in a long time."

In a recent summit on human trafficking at Johns Hopkins University, kidnapping survivor Elizabeth Smart made some surprising remarks about why victims of rape may not try to escape their captors. Her conclusion? They, like she, may have been raised in a culture that says a woman's worth in rooted in her sexual purity. Recounting an anecdote from a childhood teacher who compared having sex to being chewed like a piece of gum, Smart, a Mormon, tells her audience that she "felt crushed" after being raped: "Who could want me now? I felt so dirty and so filthy. I understand, so easily, all too well, why someone wouldn't run."

Smart might be the most famous figure to speak out against her conservative religious culture's sexual ethos, but she's not alone. Increasingly in recent weeks, prominent evangelical writers and bloggers have also decried the emphasis placed on sexual purity in conservative Christianity. While exposés of evangelical purity culture are hardly new (see, for one, Andy Kopsa's recent article in The Atlantic), what is noteworthy is that these criticisms are beginning to emerge from within conservative religious circles themselves.

The central thrust of these evangelical critiques is a rejection of the "damaged goods" metaphor. On her high-profile website, New York Times bestselling author Rachel Held Evans calls out the "horrific object lessons," like the one described by Smart, which aim to convince young people that "premarital sex ruins a person for good." Sarah Bessey, author of the forthcoming book Jesus Feminist, shares her own story of feeling condemned by the "true love waits" rhetoric of her church, which conveyed the message that she, as a non-virgin, was now "disqualified from true love."

Prodigal Magazine, an up-and-coming online publication that caters to twenty-something evangelicals, recently featured a candid piece on abandoning the concept of virginity. While deliberately keeping her own sexual history private, Emily Maynard, the author of the article, proclaims that she is no longer going to think of herself as a virgin or a non-virgin. "I'm done splitting my sexuality into pieces," Maynard writes, "I'm done with conversations about 'technical virginity' and couples who 'win the race to the altar.'... I'm done with Christians enforcing oppression in the name of purity."

Maynard's piece, as well as Bessey's account of feeling personally targeted and shamed by a "well-intentioned" preacher's sex talk, reveal another problem with the evangelical purity narrative: the assumption that its young Christian audience is a fresh crop of virgins. Research shows otherwise. A 2009 study conducted by the National Campaign to Prevent Teen and Unplanned Pregnancy found that nearly 80 percent of unmarried evangelicals have sex before marriage. Not only, then, is the purity-focused Christian message sometimes harmful; it also appears to be ineffective.

Denunciations of purity culture are beginning to emerge from the evangelical ivory tower as well. Richard Beck, Professor and Chair of the Psychology Department at Abilene Christian University, an evangelical school, expounds on the deeper implications of purity obsession both on his website and in his book Unclean, taking particular issue with the words and metaphors Christians use to frame sexual sin, especially for women. Beck argues that using the metaphor of purity imports a "psychology of contamination into our moral and spiritual lives," and this contamination is viewed as a permanent state, one beyond restoration.

Moreover, while women are subjected to the language of purity and seen as irreparably contaminated after having sex, the same is not true for men. According to Beck, a boy losing his virginity is seen as a "mistake, a stumbling," a mode of behavior that can be changed and rehabilitated. This, he argues, exposes a double standard at work in the language of sexual purity: women who have sex are seen as "damaged goods," but men who have sex are not.

Beck's analysis reveals how evangelical critiques of purity are increasing in nuance and complexity, but what remains all but absent in these accounts is a fleshed-out alternative. While these writers clearly advocate abandoning the language of purity, they seem reluctant to relinquish the abstinence ideal entirely—which creates an interesting tension. What, exactly, does a post-purity sexual ethic look like for evangelicals?

In response to this question, some evangelical writers, such as Anna Broadway and Rachel Held Evans, affirmed the traditional idea of saving sex for marriage. Broadway, author of Sexless in the City, hopes to reframe rather than reject the abstinence ideal. In her writing, she advocates a shift from a boundaries-focused sexual ethos to one that promotes and articulates positive practices, such as unmarried individuals living in community, rather than alone. When asked to describe a post-purity evangelical perspective, Broadway responded, "It's got to be way more holistic. ... We've done a very bad job of connecting single sexuality to married sexuality," despite that fact "both groups of people are called to sexual self-control." Broadway proposes emphasizing an overarching ideal of "self-giving love" rather than abstinence, which would put a positive spin on premarital chastity, as well as cultivate deeper awareness of "unhealthy sexual dynamics within marriage," from sexual selfishness to "outright abuse."

For Evans, the problem with purity is not the ideal of abstinence per se, but rather how it has been packaged and sold to evangelical youth. "So much of the evangelical purity culture focuses on identity," said Evans, "as if having sex with someone changes your very identity forever, making you unwanted and disgusting." In Evans' view, moving beyond the "damaged goods" narrative does not entail abandoning the ideal of premarital abstinence; in fact, Evans finds value in Christians speaking out about the "sacredness of sex" in a "culture that teaches casual sex as the norm." She is optimistic about evangelicals being able to disentangle "a conservative sexual ethic" from "shaming narratives" of purity culture that connect one's identity and worth to virginity.

Other writers appeared more willing to redirect this discussion away from marriage and abstinence to more fundamental concerns about emotional and spiritual health. Richard Beck, for one, asserted that the primary emphasis of a post-purity sexual ethic should be "making sure that sex and love are always united." For Beck, moving past purity involves less emphasis "on the physical act of sex and how that physical act is 'defiling' and more upon issues related to covenant faithfulness, care, and harm. ... God's interest in sex, then, is less puritanical than a concern about how we hurt and damage each other, physically and emotionally, in ways that often leave lifelong scars."

Beck also discussed an additional problem with an evangelical narrative that idealizes the marital benefits of abstinence: Evangelical marriages don't always last, and high-profile evangelical figures are not immune to sex scandals or marital infidelity. "I find the debates about marriage to be both distracting and often wildly hypocritical," said Beck. "My assessment is that until the evangelical culture gets its moral witness together regarding marriage it should forgo broad denunciations about sex."

Dianna Anderson, author of Damaged Goods,a forthcoming book on evangelicalism and purity, has written about evangelical sexual purity narratives for several years. Anderson, who was raised in a conservative Christian tradition, now considers herself "post-evangelical," and much of her book will explore a faith-based approach to human sexuality that echoes the cry for a more holistic narrative, while moving even further away from the abstinence ideal. Anderson's proposed model retains the concept of losing one's virginity, but redefines it as a "personal process determined by the individual" rather than an "event"—a move that recalls Maynard's Prodigal article on deciding to turn in her "V Card." In Anderson's view, sex should not be deemed appropriate by marriage, but by whether it is "mutually consensual, pleasurable, non-exploitative and safe." Although Anderson's sexual ethic emphasizes holism and health, like the other writers discussed here, she pushes these ideas further, and it will be interesting to see whether her alternatives are palatable to an evangelical audience.

If this collection of voices is any indication, the traditional battle lines of the abstinence culture war are beginning to blur. A revisionist evangelical view of sexuality appears to be emerging, one that doesn't revolve around that ultimate youth-group quandary—how far is too far? Although each of these post-purity perspectives diverges from the current evangelical narrative to varying degrees, the common thread among them seems to be a desire for a more holistic sexual ethic, one that remains thoroughly Christian while shifting away from the metaphor of purity to concepts of sexual health and wholeness. What is still unclear is whether these revisions will gain traction within evangelicalism or remain confined to progressive inlets of the evangelical subculture.

The term "hardest job-hunting season in history" has become a buzzword in China recently. According to China's Ministry of Human Resources and Social Security, 6.99 million students will be graduating institutions of higher education this year, a record high since the establishment of the People's Republic of China in 1949.

This intimidating number is inextricably tied with discussion of another pressing issue: the employment rate of college graduates. The latest statistics released by Beijing Municipal Commission of Education show that only 33.6 percent of college graduates in Beijing have signed employment contracts, up 5 percent from April. Meanwhile, a recent report by Tecent-Mycos reveals that college graduates face gloomy employment prospects.

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"I just can't figure out why it's so hard to get a job this year," said Miranda Zhang, who is graduating from a university in Beijing. "I feel desperate --campus recruitment is competitive, with dozens of people competing for one position, while HR offices out in the real world usually disregard graduating students because we do not have any prior work experience."

This has not always been the case. Before the financial crisis in 2008, economic prospects for China and Chinese students were a lot better. Businesses were expanding, new companies were emerging, and thus hordes of new employees were needed. However, as China's growth has slowed to 7.5 percent this year, businesses, especially small- and medium-sized enterprises, are showing signs of shrinking. The numbers show that Miranda is not alone in her worries -- the total number of job openings is down 15 percent from 2012.

As Chinese college students come face to face with these gloomy prospects, complaints or expressions of disappointment have grown in online communities such as Sina Weibo (a Twitter-like service), Renren (a Facebook-like service) and Douban (an IMDB-like website for users with shared interests in movies, books, and music).

One of the most common complaints is the unfairness recent graduates have experienced in the job interview process. In fact, a lack of transparency or the use of guanxi (connections) is particularly evident in competition for jobs at state-owned enterprises or in civil service -- these positions are considered much more stable and better-paying than other jobs in China.

Sara Wang, a journalism student at Wuhan University, described what she thought to be unfair competition for a job at Chinese National Radio. She stated that she made it all the way through the resume selection process and written exams to the last round of interviews, but was eliminated during the physical examination. She speculated that someone else used guanxi to get the job, but was unable to prove that this had been the case. Perhaps that is why Weibo user @我是千里驴 proposed that to solve the problem of unemployment, "the essential thing to do is to ensure the transparency and fairness of the employment process."

Some attributed the large-scale unemployment to the college students themselves. Netizen @穿心莲籽 wrote:

How can you satisfy a bunch of poor college students who have grandiose aims but puny abilities? What they want is a job that does not require much labor, in which they do not need to expose themselves to the elements, one with high social status and a high salary, where they can play games while they are at work and attend social gatherings while they are off work; in other words, a "golden rice-bowl" job within the system. [College students] think that with their educational achievements, they do not belong to the working class anymore and that they deserve a white-collar job at the very least. No wonder they cannot get a job.

While this is true to some extent, a larger proportion of people held the government responsible for the unemployment problem. In fact, the public has long criticized Chinese colleges' blind expansion.

Weibo user @M3MStudio mused:

The Ministry of Education is responsible for maintaining the employment rate -- isn't that ridiculous?" "The Ministry of Education should feel guilty because students nowadays cannot make full use of what they learn in college, and what they learn in college is useless in their careers. Colleges are like companies; teachers are like bosses; and students have become nothing but tools for colleges and teachers to compete for fame and profit. The education system in mainland China has collapsed.

Despite such gloom, Xu Mei, the spokesperson for the Ministry of Education, suggested that the employment rate and the number of graduating students signing employment contracts would increase greatly in June. At the same time, Xu also affirmed that the Ministry would act to ensure that the employment rate of college graduates would not decrease, a statement to which netizens responded with some derision.

Weibo user @寻找LostMyself wrote, "The Ministry of Education's prediction will be realized with 100 percent success, because this is what they are best at. I believe every graduate knows the real deal with the so-called employment contract signing rate!"

School's out, pool's open, and after a long awards season of Very Consequential Films followed by the usual cinematic dead zone known as January, February, and March, the movies are fun again.

Though the summer blockbuster season unofficially started earlier this month with big box-office earners like The Great Gatsby, Star Trek Into Darkness, and Iron Man 3, Memorial Day is when the real festivities begin—and the rest of the season offers some big explosions (Fast & Furious 6, After Earth, and White House Down all arrive in theaters before July), some quieter festival fare (like Fruitvale Station and The Spectacular Now), and a few aftershocks from 2011's female-driven comedy Bridesmaids (like The Heat and Girl Most Likely). And, of course, Superman makes a return to cinemas in Man of Steel, Zack Snyder's ambitious account of the Man of Tomorrow's origins.

So to help you navigate the coming three-month bombardment of sensorial excess (bang-ups and man-boys and space invaders, oh my), here's a week-by-week guide to this summer's promising films. Below are picks for what to see every weekend between Memorial Day and the beginning of September—with a few intriguing alternative options included for when the inevitable June-to-July blockbuster fatigue sets in.

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May 24

Fast & Furious 6
After a Russian military convoy is attacked, Diplomatic Security Service agent Luke Hobbs (Dwayne Johnson) calls on retired criminal Dominic Toretto (Vin Diesel) and enlists his help in bringing the criminals to justice. In exchange, his past crimes will be pardoned—and he'll have help from Hobbs in tracking down his former girlfriend Letty (Michelle Rodriguez), who was presumed dead. [Trailer]

Why you should care
The stylish 12-year-old franchise is about to get a new jolt with the addition of mixed martial artist-turned-actress Gina Carano as Hobbs's partner—whose explosive fight scene with Letty is what her co-star Diesel envisions as a sequel of sorts to his own grand clash with Johnson in Fast 5. And though a sixth installment of the car-smashing series that never really established a name-format rule may seem like a shameless cash grab, critics have praised its "genuinely warm sense of playfulness" and its entertaining "total dedication to badassness."

Or try... Before Midnight
The festival-acclaimed third installment of Richard Linklater's unhurried series—about a couple that first meets on a train and spends one evening together in Vienna in 1995's Before Sunrise then later reunites for one afternoon in Paris in 2004's Before Sunset—finds the pair (Ethan Hawke and Julie Delpy) living together in Paris, 18 years after their first encounter, raising twin daughters and figuring out how to reconcile their past, separate lives with their life together. The Atlantic's Chris Orr writes that the film is "well worth seeing for anyone invested in this particular cinematic relationship."

May 31

Now You See Me
"Ladies and gentlemen, for our final trick, we are going to rob a bank," announce the quartet of magicians known as the Four Horsemen in Now You See Me. Directed by French filmmaker Louis Leterrier (of 2008's Edward Norton-starring version of The Incredible Hulk), the fast-paced caper follows a team of super-savvy young illusionists whose act involves robbing banks all over the world and giving the money away to audience members, and international law enforcement's uphill struggle to stop them. [Trailer]

Why you should care
Consider Now You See Me a showcase for both the old and the new generations of Hollywood talent, as its glitzy lineup boasts both heavy-hitting veterans (like Michael Caine, Morgan Freeman, Woody Harrelson) and some younger actors who have stacked up their résumés impressively in the last half-decade or so (like Jesse Eisenberg, Isla Fisher, Dave Franco, and the mesmerizing Mélanie Laurent).

Or try... After Earth
Will Smith and Jaden Smith play—surprise—a father and son in this galaxy-trotting sci-fi entry from the onetime Sixth Sense wunderkind M. Night Shyamalan. When their spaceship crash-lands on a mission to a long-abandoned Earth, General Cypher Raige and his son Kitai have to fend for themselves against newly evolved species and a deadly alien monster that escaped the crash—not to mention find their way back home to Mom.

June 7

The Internship
After their analog watch company goes out of business, thirtysomething technophobes Nick and Billy (Owen Wilson and Vince Vaughn) must start searching for employment again in a highly competitive digital-age job market they don't recognize anymore. They land unpaid internships at Google, where they compete with the brightest college-age computer whizzes in America for a shot at getting hired. Rose Byrne co-stars as a Google employee, with other supporting cast including John Goodman, Josh Gad, B.J. Novak, and The Daily Show's Aasif Mandvi. [Trailer]

Why you should care
When you add the proven chemistry of Wilson and Vaughn (Wedding Crashers!) to a hyper-topical, almost-too-close-to-home premise (widespread unemployment! Ivy League grads working no-wage temporary stints with no guarantee of future hire!), the result could be comedy catharsis.

Or try... Much Ado About Nothing
After last year's successes The Avengers and Cabin in the Woods, director Joss Whedon looks to keep his streak going—but does an artistic 180 with this text-faithful modern update to Shakespeare's rom-commy 16th-century play. Veteran Whedon collaborators like Nathan Fillion, Alexis Denisof, and Amy Acker star.

June 14

Man of Steel
Starring The Tudors' Henry Cavill as the titular red-and-blue-clad hero, Zack Snyder's Man of Steel presents the DC Comics creation myth of how Kal-El of the planet Krypton fell to Earth and became Clark Kent, and how Clark Kent then became Superman. Amy Adams co-stars as Lois Lane, while Diane Lane and Kevin Costner play Clark's adoptive parents and Russell Crowe appears as Jor-El, Kal-El's faraway biological father. [Trailer]

Why you should care
Early trailers hint that producer Christopher Nolan's trademark high-contrast cinematic vision has seeped into Man of Steel's grand, gorgeous aesthetic—and that Michael Shannon, a journeyman actor who's just recently started to get some well-deserved name recognition, could capably disturb your sleep patterns well into July with his performance as the evil General Zod.

Or try... The Bling Ring
Sofia Coppola has turned her gaze on teenage drama a few times before, with varying degrees of success—from 1999's haunting, acclaimed The Virgin Suicides to 2006's insubstantial powdered-sugar spectacle Marie Antoinette. Come for Coppola's stylish, always-affectionate storyteller's take on the real-life Hollywood Hills crime saga involving a group of wealthy teenagers who robbed celebrities' homes in 2008 and 2009—and stay for Emma Watson's Kardashian-inspired Valley Girl accent.

June 21

Monsters University
The prequel to 2001's heartwarming Disney/Pixar triumph Monsters, Inc. travels back in time to Mike Wazowski and his buddy Sulley's college years. Both majoring in kid-scaring, Mike and Sulley (voiced again by Billy Crystal and John Goodman) start out as roommates and quickly become rivals, but gradually make friends once they've exhausted all possible methods of antagonizing each other. [Trailer]

Why you should care
Remember when Disney/Pixar was virtually synonymous with oohs and aahs? The studio does. So after two less-than-universally-beloved entries in a row (2011's Cars 2 and 2012's Brave), it'll be fascinating to see whether the decision to return to a formula that worked magic in the past pays off.

June 28

The Heat
It's a female twist on the buddy-cop comedy: A high-strung FBI agent (Sandra Bullock) and a rash, ruthless Boston policewoman (Melissa McCarthy) are forced to work together in an effort to bring down a drug lord. [Trailer]

Why you should care
It's director Paul Feig's first feature since 2011's surprise smash Bridesmaids, and with McCarthy on board, it's powered by one of that film's biggest breakout stars. The Heat runs the risk of playing like a Bridesmaids-Miss Congeniality mash-up (with McCarthy cast once again as a bawdy, aggressive tomboy and Bullock once again cast as a gifted yet hapless FBI agent)—but given the runaway successes of those two franchises, that's not a bad pedigree.

Or try... White House Down
Channing Tatum stars in Roland Emmerich's Washington, D.C. thriller as a U.S. Capitol police officer who must rescue the president (Jamie Foxx) and his daughter when a paramilitary group seizes the White House.

July 3

Despicable Me 2
Directors Pierre Coffin and Chris Renaud have reteamed for the sequel to 2010's Despicable Me, and Steve Carell returns as the now-redeemed former villain Gru, who's given up villainy since rescuing his three adopted daughters from the evil clutches of Vector in the first film. But when a new bad guy—Eduardo, now voiced by Benjamin Bratt after a dramatic, late-in-the-game pullout by Al Pacino earlier this month—surfaces and threatens to cause mayhem all over the globe, Gru and his daughters answer the call of duty. [Trailer]

Why you should care
1. Because Gru's burbling yellow minions are just so damn adorable.
2. Because Steve Carell's bumbling, Eastern European-accented doting dad/supervillain is also just so damn adorable.
3. Because Kristen Wiig has a new role as Agent Lucy Wilde of the Anti-Villain League. Though she voiced the minor role of Miss Hattie in 2010's original, she's been recast as the high-heeled know-it-all with a lipstick-tube Taser who enlists Gru's help.

July 12

Dealing With Idiots
Curb Your Enthusiasm alum Jeff Garlin wrote, directed, and stars in this still-mysterious, largely improvised film about a famous comedian who, in search of inspiration for his next movie script, embarks on a quest to get to know the parents of the players on his son's Little League baseball team.

Why you should care
Like many instant-classic improvised comedies of the last few decades, Dealing With Idiots co-stars Christopher Guest.

Or try... Pacific Rim
Guillermo del Toro's latest pits giant piloted robots—known as Jaegers—against giant monsters that have risen from under the sea. When the human forces find their armies on the brink of defeat and their arsenal of robots nearly depleted, it's suddenly up to a pilot (Sons of Anarchy's Charlie Hunnam) and a young trainee (Rinko Kikuchi, an Oscar-nominated player in 2006's Babel) to save the species from ruin. Idris Elba, the gifted, perpetually under-the-radar star of The Wire and the BBC's Luther, co-stars as a military commanding officer. [Trailer]

July 19

Girl Most Likely
After playwright Imogene Duncan (Kristen Wiig) stages a suicide attempt to get back at an ex-lover, doctor's orders force her to move back in with her mother Zelda (Annette Bening)—an irresponsible free spirit who's just as unprepared for her daughter's sudden reintegration into her New Jersey home as Imogene is. Matt Dillon and Darren Criss co-star as Zelda's much-younger boyfriend and the guy renting Imogene's childhood room, respectively. [Trailer]

Why you should care
Girl Most Likely got "big laughs" when it screened at the Toronto International Film Festival (under its original title, Imogene), according to critics like The Hollywood Reporter's Deborah Young—who also praised its ensemble cast and its "intelligent dialogue."

Or try... RED 2
The sequel to RED, the surprise 2010 hit action-comedy about retired CIA black-ops agents who spring back into action when they find themselves the targets of an assassination plot, reunites Bruce Willis, Mary-Louise Parker, Helen Mirren, and John Malkovich—this time without Morgan Freeman. The gruff "Retired, Extremely Dangerous" crew reassembles in Europe to reluctantly save the world when a nuclear device mysteriously goes missing. Anthony Hopkins joins the cast as the bonkers inventor of the deadly weapon, and Catherine Zeta Jones complicates Frank (Willis) and Sarah's (Parker) new relationship as Frank's dangerous ex-girlfriend.

July 26

The Wolverine
Hugh Jackman returns as the adamantium-clawed Marvel superhero in another Wolverine-centric installment of the X-Men film franchise. This time, he's in Japan battling the Silver Samurai and coming to terms with his own conflicted feelings about his immortality. [Trailer]

Why you should care
Consider it an amuse-bouche for 2014's expansive X-Men: Days of Future Past, which combines the ensembles from 2006's X-Men: The Last Stand (like Jackman, Halle Berry, and Anna Paquin) and 2011's X-Men: First Class (like James McAvoy, Michael Fassbender, and Jennifer Lawrence).

Or try... Fruitvale Station
Starring Friday Night Lights and The Wire alum Michael B. Jordan, Fruitvale re-creates the harrowing true story of Oscar Grant, the 22-year-old fatally shot by a police officer in 2009 at the Fruitvale station in Oakland after reports of a scuffle aboard the train. Fruitvale Station took home the Grand Jury Prize and the Audience Award at the Sundance Film Festival in January. Not bad for the first-ever feature film by director Ryan Coogler, who's 26.

August 2

The Spectacular Now
In director James Ponsoldt's follow-up to last year's Smashed, Sutter Keely (21 and Over's Miles Teller) is a hard-partying, impulsive high school senior rapidly headed toward alcoholism. When his girlfriend breaks up with him, he wakes up on a lawn after a bender to find Aimee Finicky—a straight-laced, future-conscious bookworm played by The Descendants' transcendent Shailene Woodley—hovering over him. Though the two lead their lives by radically different philosophies, they form an innocent romantic connection. Kyle Chandler and Jennifer Jason Leigh co-star as Sutter's parents, and Mary Elizabeth Winstead appears as his sister.

Why you should care
Both Woodley and Teller took home acting awards at the Sundance Film Festival earlier this year, and The Spectacular Now has been compared to the works of a filmmaker famous for telling similarly sincere, moving stories about teenagers: John Hughes.

August 9

Elysium
Set 40 years into the future, Elysium finds Earth in ruins and its residents desperate to get aboard the deluxe spacecraft known as Elysium, where the planet's most privileged inhabitants have migrated, by any means possible. Secretary Delacourt, a determined government official (Jodie Foster), vows to block all entryways to illegal immigration. When ex-con Max DeCosta (Matt Damon) agrees to take on a dangerous mission that could bring equality to Earth and Elysium, he finds himself at odds with the Secretary and her enforcers. [Trailer]

Why you should care
It's just one more chance to appreciate the perpetually startling versatility of Matt Damon, who will have been last seen onscreen in a role that couldn't be more different from his sci-fi antihero Max—as Liberace's gentle, feathery-haired young boyfriend Scott Thorson in Behind the Candelabra.

August 16

The Butler
In this generation-spanning historical drama, Cecil Gaines (Forest Whitaker) gets a job as the White House butler in 1952—and works closely with eight different U.S. Presidents before leaving his post in 1986. Oprah Winfrey co-stars as Cecil's wife Gloria. Lee Daniels, of Precious fame, directs. [Trailer]

Why you should care
It's Oprah's return to feature-film acting after a 15-year hiatus—and, lest we forget, she's good enough at it that she got nominated for an Oscar once. But in case you need a few other reasons to be curious about The Butler, take a peek at the cast list: Robin Williams and Melissa Leo appear as Dwight and Mamie Eisenhower, James Marsden and Minka Kelly as the Kennedys, Liev Schreiber as Lyndon Johnson, John Cusack as Richard Nixon, and Alan Rickman and Jane Fonda as Ronald and Nancy Reagan.

August 23

The World's End
British comedy actors Simon Pegg and Nick Frost star in this sci-fi comedy about five childhood friends who reconnect and set out to re-create a pub crawl they attempted 20 years before. Over the course of their drunken evening, however, they realize the Earth is being taken over by robot invaders. Rosamund Pike and The Hobbit's Martin Freeman co-star. [Trailer]

Why you should care
The last two times these guys teamed up with writer-director Edgar Wright—for 2004's horror send-up Shaun of the Dead and for 2007's police-thriller parody Hot Fuzz—their absurdist genre-busters won over critics and built something of a cult following. Now, the trio's back together again for the third film in the so-called "Cornetto trilogy."

August 30

Drinking Buddies
Luke and Kate (New Girl's Jake Johnson and Olivia Wilde) meet cute when they become co-workers at a brewery in Chicago and form a flirty-friends bond over daily drinking at work. There's just one problem: They're both in relationships, Kate with Chris (Ron Livingston) and Luke with his longtime, marriage-minded girlfriend Jill (Anna Kendrick).

Why you should care
Both Kendrick and Wilde have recently shown promise as they've turned toward comedic roles—Wilde's first film this year was March's Steve Carell vehicle The Incredible Burt Wonderstone, and Kendrick proved her funny-girl mettle in last year's sleeper a cappella comedy Pitch Perfect. Drinking Buddies could be a valuable opportunity for both to step into the comedy limelight a little further.

Oh, god, Science Channel! What are you doing to us?

As if a continental-scale INSECT INVASION was not enough.

As if the fact that the cicada invasion is a "frenzy of sex and death" was not enough.

As if widespread interest in eating these insects was not enough.

Now, the Science Channel has created a livestream of of a terrarium filled with cicadas crawling and sitting and flapping their wings and crawling some more.

Yick, ack, ugh! It is gross. But it is also impossible to stop watching. I warned you.

H/t Mashable

In the meantime, you can still participate in conversation on The Great Gatsby or the parallel conversation on Sherman Alexie's Blasphemy.

We posed the question to Twitter, too. This is a small collection of the best answers we saw.

What was the most influential TV show ever? Tell us your answer with the hashtag #BigQuestion theatln.tc/10y7efs

-- The Atlantic (@TheAtlantic) May 23, 2013

NPR host Scott Simon (and many more) looked back to the early days of television.

Most Influential TV show? #BigQuestion Lucy invented sit-com. JFK assassination coverage invented living history through TV

-- Scott Simon (@nprscottsimon) May 23, 2013

Answer has to be Twilight Zone: revolutionized TV writing and inspired a generation of scientific exploration and scifi writers #BigQuestion

-- Gregory Winger (@ghwinger) May 23, 2013

@theatlantic #bigquestion : The Milton Berle Show. Kickstarted TV. And Howdy Doody. Kickstarted Children's TV.

-- roslyn pall (@pall_com) May 23, 2013

Most influential TV show lasted 1 ep: Nixon's Checkers speech. Saves him on Ike's ticket, changes next 20 years #bigquestion

-- Justin Miller (@justinjm1) May 23, 2013

Some considered how television affected their lives.

#CarlSagan's Cosmos. His passion for the beauty & mystery of our universe made him a hero for me. ow.ly/lkurd #BigQuestion

-- Brett Norman (@BrettSNorman) May 23, 2013

While others celebrated recent revolutionary ideas on the small-screen.

@theatlantic The Wire. An incredible look at sociopolitical themes through the realistic portrayal of urban life in America. #BigQuestion

-- Britten Wolf (@brittenwolf) May 23, 2013

@theatlantic It's gotta be the Sopranos. Show that opened the flood gates for dramatically improved TV. #BigQuestion

-- Andrew Sweet (@AndrewSweet) May 23, 2013

@theatlantic Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Just look at @josswhedon today. #BigQuestion

-- Lauren Seidman (@UpperWestSeid) May 23, 2013

.@theatlantic seinfeld. making nothing cool was pretty revolutionary. #BigQuestion

-- liz preza (@lizicisms) May 23, 2013

@theatlantic The Real World. It changed our perception of what a TV show was & redefined concepts of celebrity and privacy. #bigquestion

-- Archie Mckinlay (@archiemck) May 23, 2013

We even saw a few suggestions based on financial influence.

@theatlantic could be Baywatch. Because it bypassed the networks which changed the whole business model. Changed everything. #Bigquestion

-- Daniel Halem (@WalkaboutJones) May 23, 2013

@theatlantic Family Guy.First show that returned from the grave thanks to dvd sales and good ratings in syndication #BigQuestion

-- Andrew Bedsole (@Faraway674) May 23, 2013

But naturally, nothing beats a classic.

@theatlantic The Cosby Show. #BigQuestion

-- Linda Holmes (@nprmonkeysee) May 23, 2013

@theatlantic No one has said Cheers yet? How is that possible? #BigQuestion

-- Austin Waters (@Austin_H2O) May 23, 2013

If you're not paying for a product, the saying goes, then you're the product being sold.

Another way of saying this is that you and Google -- and you and Twitter, and you and Facebook -- do not enjoy an egalitarian relationship. The digital world, given its crazy capacity to scale, inverts the core, crusty logic of the consumer/producer relationship -- the customer is always right -- and turns it on its head. It puts the power almost singularly on the side of the product-providers. 

For the most part, we consumers have very few modes of recourse when it comes to dealing with the companies that feed our digital addictions. It's either shut our accounts or shut our mouths. There aren't many options in between.

There may be a way to change that, though. In an essay in The Nation, the philosophy professor Evan Selinger and the legal scholars Ari Melber and Woodrow Hartzog make the case for re-imagining the digital contracts that govern our relationships with the companies that provide so many of our experiences of the Internet. A "People's Terms of Service," they argue, would attempt to reframe standardly opaque TOS agreements -- arrangements that often amount, the scholars say, to "contract abuse" -- in order to make them more equitable to consumers.

One thing a "People"s Terms of Service" would challenge is the Objective Theory of Contract, the doctrine that attempts to ignore the context in which contracts are negotiated and agreed upon. "The law currently protects one-sided contract arrangements," the authors write, "by assuming they were fairly negotiated, and thus reflect a 'meeting of the minds' by equal parties." Yet that assumption, in a world of boilerplate jargon and pages-long disquisitions, is no longer a fair one to make. "After all," they argue, "these contracts are usually created through user confusion and one-sided demands. How can citizens even bargain with a standard, take-it-or-leave-it form?"

The People's Terms of Service Agreement, instead, would be informed by consumers' desires as well as corporations'. It would be user-friendly. It would "use plain English, not legal jargon." It would be short enough for people to realistically be able to read it. Most of all, it would embrace five values: security, confidentiality, transparency, permanency, and respect for intellectual property.

Permanency: The contract cannot be unilaterally altered, period. This seemingly obvious rule, which applies to most contracts, has been undermined by technology companies that attempt to reserve the right to alter their terms of service without meaningful consent from users. A People's Terms of Service would require meaningful opt-in from users for any material changes. Users would also retain the right to have all their materials permanently deleted if they choose to leave the site, and that provision could never be altered.

Transparency: Companies promise to be transparent and provide meaningful notice to the individual regarding its collection, use, dissemination, and maintenance of personal information.

Intellectual Property: Companies respect the value of an individual's name or likeness and the copyrights of user information and work posted on the sites by taking minimal licenses for administrative use, or provide some profit-sharing for advertisements other commercial use of a user's name or likeness. (This is an important option for companies building a business model on monetizing user-generated content).

Confidentiality: Companies promise not to disclose personal information to third parties, unless users meaningfully opt-in to such disclosure for each party. (As always, they would still respond to government and legal requests.) Facebook itself makes a similar promise. To ensure protection, companies also promise to contractually ensure that recipients of personal information are obligated to respect the anonymity of any transferred data sets, and to provide users with control over data portability so it's easier to leave a given service.

Security: Companies promise to use appropriate and industry standard security safeguards protect all media against risks such as loss, unauthorized access or use, destruction, modification or unintended disclosure.

Those core ideas, the scholars say, are a starting point -- values that interested users and consumer advocates could debate and then, perhaps, draft into a model contract. The goal would be to leverage the force of collective action to counter the power enjoyed by digital behemoths. "The power of even a few million social network users, when coordinated," the authors write, "could push companies to offer more consumer rights as a good business decision." (The idea was inspired, in part, by recent class-action suits against Google and Instagram and Facebook -- the last of which accused the company of co-opting their identities in online ads. In response to that action, Facebook revised its "Statement of Rights and Responsibilities," in addition to offering the plaintiffs a $20 million settlement.)

And while the authors acknowledge that consumer power won't be easy to leverage -- you'd need an enormous community even to come close to matching Google's clout -- they believe people have to try. "We're finally moving past the simplistic notion," they argue, "that one-sided corporate agreements are an unavoidable 'cost' of using social media -- as if every company's corporate policy must be accepted as the automatic baseline." That's not how we regulate powerful companies like BP, they point out. "Why should our attitudes be more lax towards Google?"

A woman takes a break from her afternoon work in the fields to pray.(Eleanor Moseman)

The Shanghai-based photographer Eleanor Moseman became fascinated with the Uighurs during a visit to Xinjiang. In these portraits, she portrays a people going about their daily lives, showcasing a people with a rich cultural and culinary tradition wholly unique in the People's Republic.

A Tuesday afternoon at the weekly bazaar in a small town south of Kashgar. Uighur men traditionally have beards, although among younger men,mustaches are more fashionable. Shaves in Xinjiang typically consist of a face massage and straight razor.

A Uighur couple rides an electric scooter through the rubble of Kashgar's Old Town. One of Xinjiang's most historic cities, Kashgar has been subject to extensive infrastructure development in recent years, a process that has pushed out many local residences and shops.

A Uighur mother rocking her newborn to sleep. Because they are one of China's 55 officially recognized ethnic minority groups, Uighur women are exempt from the one-child policy.

 

An afternoon tea in the countryside concludes with gifts of bread, naan, lamb, and dried fruit for the guests. The youngest woman residing at the home will prepare the gifts, beginning with the highest ranking man.

A typical Uighur breakfast of naan and milk.

A traditional Sufi burial ground in the Taklamakan desert roughly 120 miles south of the South Silk Road. Burial grounds can range from one shrine to nearly two dozen, and are found in the desert away from villages and cities. They are decorated with flags, embroidery, animal bones, small wooden cribs, and hand written notes and poetry.

During its three-season run on Fox, Arrested Development greatest strength and ultimate downfall was that there was nothing else quite like it. Its deft wordplay and layered plotting helped galvanize its devoted fans, but those things also meant that lots of people didn't get it.

This Sunday, the show is returning with 15 new episodes debuting simultaneously on Netflix. It's been more than seven years since Arrested Development ended its broadcast run, but the most important element that made Mitchell Hurwitz's celebrated creation unique back then has continued to be rare—the fact that it's a comedy solely concerned with being funny.

It seems appropriate that Arrested Development is returning the same month that How I Met Your Mother finally unveiled the titular maternal parent after eight full seasons, and just a little more than a week after the teary series finale of The Office. Both of those shows overlapped with Arrested Development's time on air, and represent the shape of most sitcoms in the interim period before its return: Funny, yes, but also asking the viewers to invest emotionally in their characters and their sometimes very dramatic situations.

That's not a bad thing. Both HIMYM and The Office have managed some genuinely poignant moments over their long runs. But Arrested Development is enduringly refreshing since it wasn't concerned with that. One of the biggest reveals in the show's history was that the mysterious "Mr. F" was actually an acronym for "Mentally Retarded Female," and it's a safe bet that none of the 15 new episodes include the characters reflecting about how much they like one another, as The Office finale did.

In the second season of Arrested Development, youngest son Buster Bluth gets his hand bitten off by a loose seal—wacky, yes, but also arguably one of the most severe things a sitcom has ever done to a main character. Yet the question wasn't, "How will this character we've grown to know deal with such a devastating setback?" It was, "What kinds of great gags will we get from this?" (And the show absolutely delivered, with Buster's signature back rubs becoming even more unwelcome.)

Even on something as light as The Big Bang Theory, a character losing a hand would be horrifying. In Arrested Development, it only raised the comedic stakes.

The delightful second season of New Girl won over many of its adorkable-phobic critics, and while it was frequently hilarious, it got the most attention for the burgeoning relationship between roommates Jess and Nick. The closest thing that Arrested Development had to a "will they or won't they" was between two underaged cousins, a relationship built for uproarious awkwardness rather than sappy YouTube montages. Even 30 Rock, Arrested Development's spiritual successor in many ways, ended things on an earnest note, with Liz Lemon finally starting a family.

Arrested Development is far from the first show to be so joke-centric. Seinfeld is a prime example of this approach, as it famously had no use for morals or melodrama. Plenty of cable shows are in a similar category—like Seinfeld offspring Curb Your Enthusiasm, and FX's It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia and The League—but tend to play out more like madcap live-action cartoons compared to the complex mythology of Arrested Development.

The closest thing that "Arrested Development" had to a "will they or won't they" was between two underaged cousins, a relationship built for uproarious awkwardness rather than sappy YouTube montages.

Seinfeld and its ilk set things up and pay them off to great effect at the end of an episode, but Arrested Development admirably took things even further, stretching out jokes over whole seasons and beyond ("Annyong"), and rewarding repeat viewings with foreshadow-y jokes and subtle callbacks. It bent the rules of the insane world it inhabited, but it never truly exploited them. (See: "Saddlesore Galactica," the infamous 2000 Simpsons episode that revealed that jockeys are secretly murderous elves.)

Though little has been released to the public of Season Four so far—a quick trailer and a short scene between Buster and his boozy mother, Lucille—it looks very consistent with what has come before, which is likely exactly what the majority of its audience wants. Fans aren't wondering what's going to happen to the characters or whether or not they'll get a dramatically satisfying conclusion, they're wondering how funny it will be. Rather than encouraging Breaking Bad-esque marathons, Hurwitz has already advised fans to take their time with the new episodes, telling Vulture, "Don't feel obligated to watch it all at once. It's a comedy! It's not like Lord of the Rings. Comedy takes a lot out of you."

While Arrested Development wasn't a hit in its lifetime, it's surprising that networks haven't tried to borrow more from its formula. Its ratings, while considered abysmal back in 2003-2006, would actually be decent-ish by today's standards, and the show has only become more popular as viewers have discovered it through DVD and Netflix. Heart-on-sleeve sitcoms like Go On and The New Normal didn't work out this past season, though NBC's replacing them with upcoming fare that appears to be of a similar tone, like About a Boy and The Michael J. Fox Show.

Arrested Development wasn't a one-dimensional catchphrase-factory—if it was, it wouldn't have been nearly as embraced or remembered as fondly. And that's maybe its greatest accomplishment: It made you care about a family that could have been thoroughly unlikeable, but it didn't achieve that through the usual means. George Michael and Maeby's potentially incestuous relationship may not have been something audiences rooted for in a traditional sense, but it had its own twisted sweetness to it, and as a result felt more earned than something more calculated to tug at heartstrings. When Gob showed his brother, Michael, that he really cared, it was through a singing, racist puppet. Such was the power of Arrested Development's multifaceted approach to humor: It not only furthered the plot and fueled the characters, it also conveyed a subtle sincerity without being maudlin.

As fans who discovered the show post-cancellation know, Arrested Development has aged very well. Sure, major plotlines in the first three seasons revolve around Saddam Hussein and the Iraq War, but they're presented in such an absurd way that they might as well not have been real things. If these new episodes embrace what always worked about the show, its considerable legacy will remain intact.

If you can't afford food, there's really nowhere to go but up. That's why it's so shocking just how many more hungry people there are now in what were formerly known as the world's well-off nations. According to a new Pew report released today, almost a quarter of people (24 percent) in the United States and Greece answered "yes" to the question, "Have there been times during the last year when you did not have enough money to buy food your family needed?"

The levels in other Western countries weren't quite that high, but the rate at which hunger has swept the eurozone since 2007 is still really dramatic:

Germany, which has been relatively sheltered from Europe's economic woes, bucks the trend: only 8 percent of Germans can't afford food, fewer than the 10 percent who said so in 2007.

Some Eastern European countries also seem to be doing better: Hunger plummeted in Poland from 35 percent in 2002 to 16 percent this year, and in Russia from 50 to 23 percent in the same timeframe. (We've written before about how currency depreciation had a big role in Poland's relative economic success .)

These numbers are particularly stark when you think about them in terms of countries that are historically not as wealthy. In Lebanon, only 1 percent of the population said they couldn't afford food (down from 12 percent in 2007), and in China, it was just 8 percent.

Of course, Europe obviously does not have it as bad as most of Africa and parts of the Middle East. In Uganda, Kenya and Senegal -- some of the poorer countries surveyed -- the majority of respondents said food is hard to come by.

Still, the data shows just how severely the Great Recession and the implosion of the eurozone has blighted some of the world's richest economies (and, ironically, some of its most-renowned food cultures.)

Coincidentally, these are the same developed countries where fewer and fewer people think the economy is "good" -- a statistic that fell from 65 percent in Spain in 2007 to just 4 percent in 2013.

Even though Greece has the worst hunger statistic in Europe, it's not the most pessimistic about its economic future. That dubious distinction goes to France, where just 11 percent of respondents said they thought the economy would improve. That could be a marker of national sentiment, a sign that Greece has simply hit bottom, or it could be related to the fact that unemployment in France recently reached a 15-year high. Either way, it's yet another terrible sign for Europe.

During the past two weeks, much outrage has arisen over former Heritage Foundation staffer Jason Richwine's Harvard doctoral dissertation, which speculated that IQ differences between "Hispanic" and "non-Hispanic' populations were genetically rooted. The claims mirrored those of Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray's scurrilous The Bell Curve: Intelligence and Class Structure in American Life, which made similar claims about the intelligence of blacks. (Murray receives thanks in Richwine's dissertation acknowledgments and wrote recently in National Review Online in defense of Richwine.)

The fury continues. In the past couple days, a group of scholars has circulated a petition excoriating Harvard for approving the dissertation and condoning scientific racism in the process. Their petition situates Richwine within an odious lineage stretching back to the era of eugenics and charges that his work rests on shoddy intellectual foundations. (These scholars are right: the late J. Phillipe Rushton, best known for claiming associations among race, brain size, and penis length, is cited by Richwine.) A group of 1,200 Harvard University students has also put together their own petition.

Medical literature (and uncritical reporting about it) is replete with other examples that perpetuate the notion of biological race as a key factor in disparate disease outcomes.

But the attacks on Richwine are missing something far more insidious than neo-eugenic claims about innately inferior intelligence between races. The backlash against Richwine and Murray, after all, gives some indication that their views are widely considered beyond the respectable pale in the post- Bell Curve era. Richwine and Murray are really extreme branches of a core assumption that is much more pervasive and dangerous because it isn't necessarily racist on the surface: the belief in biological "races." This first assumption is required to get to claims like Richwine's, which argue that between Race A and Race B, differences exist (in "intelligence" or whatever else) that are grounded in the biological characteristics of the races themselves. Public outcry always greets the second Richwine-Murray-esque claim. But the first assumption required to reach it is more common and based on as shaky an intellectual foundation, even as it continues to escape equal scorn.

Even so, the critique of biologically innate race is hardly new. In 1972, the Harvard biologist Richard Lewontin famously observed more genetic variation within populations than between them, undercutting the case for fixed and timeless genetic boundaries that demarcated "races." A basic grasp of American racial history shows that today's commonly accepted racial categories -- what the historian David Hollinger calls the "ethno-racial pentagon" - have hardly looked that way during the nation's history. As I wrote in a 2007 piece, "the numbers, names, and members of respective races are always in flux. Go somewhere else on the planet or step back a century, and you'll likely encounter a different racial schema all together," pointing to the Dillingham Commission of the United States Congress, which wrote a century ago: "Some writers have reduced the number of such basic races to 3, while others have proposed, 15, 29, or even 63." The Commission went with five."

But since that piece, the belief in the intellectual validity of racial biology has persisted, along with claims about specific outcomes allegedly associated with distinct "races," including disease rates, physiological abilities, or intelligence. ("Intelligence" is the only one of the outcomes, it seems, to land one in trouble, as Richwine learned.) Disease information sheets available online and in physicians' offices are one common means of reinforcing the notion of biological races. For example, the popular site WebMd.com notes that "Caucasian and Asian ancestry" is a risk factor for developing osteoporosis, which elides the enormous heterogeneity (genetic and otherwise) that actually exists within the "Caucasian" and "Asian" classifications. Another WebMD fact sheet on hypertension similarly declares that "high rates of high blood pressure in African-Americans may be due to the genetic make-up of people of African descent." Just last week, in a news story accompanying actress Angelina Jolie's op-ed detailing her preventive mastectomy, three New York Times reporters wrote: "Mutations in BRCA1 and another gene called BRCA2 are estimated to cause only 5 percent to 10 percent of breast cancers and 10 percent to 15 percent of ovarian cancers among white women in the United States.

The mutations are found in other racial and ethnic groups as well, but it is not known how common they are," unintentionally accepting the premise that traits and characteristics of bounded racial and ethnic groups might contribute to differences in disease incidence among them. The medical literature (and uncritical reporting about it) is replete with other examples that perpetuate the notion of biological race as a key factor in disparate disease outcomes. (Elsewhere, NYU sociologist Ann Morning, in her fascinating The Nature of Race: How Scientists Think and Teach about Human Difference, has documented other channels through which biological notions of race are disseminated.)

In the past decade, a small but growing sub-field, anchored in multiple disciplines, has begun criticizing the unthinking racial essentialism that finds its way into scientific research more frequently than one might think, especially in medicine and public health orbits. One exemplar is the article " "Racial Categories in Medical Practice: How Useful Are They?" which appeared in PLOS Medicine. Its authors first review the degree to which common conceptions of race have in fact historically shaped by administrative imperatives (not biological reality). They then issue a warning on the use of race as a proxy, writing that "once race is presumed, the ways in which multiple genetic inheritances interact with the environment within that individual seem to disappear. Clinical clues can become invisible."

The dangers are not hard to see. Belief in innate racial predisposition to a disease may short-circuit examination of non-genetic factors behind a racially classified individual's condition, or in the population at large, health disparities between commonly understood racial groups. At its worst, it may lead to compromised patient care. The PLOS Medicine writers warn that for clinicians specifically, "rapid racial assessment is an attractive means to figure out what to do with a presenting patient. But we argue that even if there are short cuts for the medical interview, race is not a good one. There is, in the end (in addition to noting physical symptoms), no substitute for an inquiry into family history, an assessment of current circumstances, and knowledge about the biological and cultural histories of specific populations serviced by a particular treatment center."

The critique has not been easy to mount as biological notions of race are embedded in American thought. Drexel University's Michael Yudell and Brown University's Lundy Braun (one of the authors of the PLOS article) have completed two important forthcoming books showing just the extent. Yudell traces the notion throughout the twentieth century, demonstrating its remarkable resiliency even in the face of periodic challenges inside and outside formal scientific worlds. (A distilled article version of his book is here). Braun's work, meanwhile, examines a specific case: the history of lung function measurement and the entrenchment of different diagnostic criteria for different "races" - a practice called "race correction," in turn premised on the belief in biological race. In a recent disturbing review of almost a century's worth of pulmonary research, published in the European Journal of Respiratory Research, Braun and her colleagues found that biological-racial explanations for differences in lung faction are common, though they also found a fair share of articles with environmental explanations as well. The biological-racial strand of explanation, they note, is not just history:

While the view that races and ethnic groups differ in the capacity of their lungs is widely accepted in pulmonary medicine, the continued practice of explaining racial and ethnic difference in lung function as rooted in inherent and fixed anthropometric difference has important health policy implications. Importantly, it could divert attention from much-needed research into the physiological mechanisms by which specific social and physical environments influence lung function.

In the end, calling Jason Richwine a scientific racist may be morally satisfying and justifiable intellectually. But it doesn't begin to touch on the wider and much more common commitment to biological race that is necessary in the first place before one argues for "racial" superiority or inferiority. Scientific racism, in other words, requires scientific race.

In and of itself, the biological race concept does not necessarily lead to claims of racial superiority or inferiority. But it certainly can lead there, or less malevolently, can obfuscate a complex litany of explanations for explaining observable population differences. Those condemning Harvard over Richwine would do better to avoid low-hanging fruit and instead turn their attention to those around them who accept common assumptions about race and biology. The latter have much more in common with Jason Richwine than might appear at first glance. And given the pervasiveness of talking in terms of "race," we all may be more complicit than we think.

Business profits are escaping U.S. corporate income taxes in three big ways. First, business is literally moving away from the U.S., as multinational companies have expanded abroad.  Second, large companies are wise to the tricks they can use to move income through foreign subsidiaries that avoid America's high statutory rate. Third, smaller companies are finding ways to avoid corporate taxes, altogether.

Let's flesh each of those out, briefly.

First, global companies are still globalizing. At large multinationals, the share of income from overseas increased from 37.1 percent in 1996 to 51 percent in 2004, according to one report. After the recession, nearly 75 percent of new jobs at 35 large U.S. multinationals were created overseas, according to a Wall Street Journal analysis.

Second, as the business has traveled overseas, multinationals have benefited from lower tax rates and credits against American taxes. "The US combined federal and state corporate tax rate has been stuck at 39% since 1986, while nearly all other countries have cut their rates. Canada, for example, is now down to around 20 percent," said Gary Hufbauer at the Peterson Institute for International Economics. So global corporations will "do their best to report earnings anyplace but in the U.S." What's more, corporate tax lawyers have predictably responded "by devising more ingenious ways to route income abroad." This is the sort of ingenious that leads to the Dutch Sandwich, the Double Irish, and other clever tax-loophole nicknames that when lined up, look like the menu for a European continental breakfast.

Third, the most important reason why corporate taxes are falling while corporate income is rising might be that the government no longer taxes most corporations as Corporations, with a capital C. Sole proprietorships (like any one-man biz), partnerships (like law firms), and S-corporations (like a small real estate company) are examples of "pass-through" businesses, where income is only taxed once. In other words, the income "passes through" the corporate tax code and goes straight to the owners.

"The explosion of pass-throughs" is the main reason for the forking of corporate income and corporate taxes, said Howard Gleckman at the Tax Policy Center. Look at the chart above, one more time. Between the 1960s and today, the percentage of overall business activity conducted by plane-old "C corporations" has declined from about 85 percent to 50 percent. So even as corporate income has increased, "C-corp" revenues have actually fallen as a share of the economy, Hufbauer said.

Lower-c corporations don't mean poor corporations, just smaller ones. Four in five dollars of all pass-through income is earned by taxpayers with earning more than $100,000; and more than a third of all pass-through income goes to millionaires, according to the Congressional Research Service.

The corporate income tax has eroded both because globalization happened and because we let it happen in the way we tax business income. We can't change the first. We can change the second.