Huffington (Issue #01)

Cheap Shot Artists

Hollywood Rehab Foretold

THE HUFFINGTON POST MAGAZINE

Q&A: Aaron Sorkin

PREMIERE ISSUE . JUNE 17, 2012

END OF THE AFFAIR? How Young Voters Soured on Obama

06.17.12 #01 CONTENTS

Enter POINTERS: Cameron’s Parenting Gaffe, Boxing Match Outrage, Spain’s Bailout Woes MOVING IMAGE DATA: The Great Divide Q&A: Aaron Sorkin

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END OF THE AFFAIR? WARD SUTTON (OBAMA); ALIYA NAUMOFF (JAY VAN HOY AND LARS KNUDSON); DAVID BUNDY (UNIONTOWN)

BY PETER GOODMAN

MOHAMED A. EL-ERIAN: The Economy Will Do More Than Define the Elections LISA BELKIN: The Daddy Track HOWARD FINEMAN: Our Political Ringmaster, Large and In Charge QUOTED

Exit

CINEMA VÉRITÉ

BY MICHAEL HOGAN

OLD KING COAL

BY TOM ZELLER JR.

CELEBRITY REHAB: The Law of Lohan FOOD: The War Against Foie Gras APPROVAL: Summertime... And The Conversation Ain’t Easy GREATEST PERSON OF THE WEEK: Missouri Mom on a Mission TFU: Chinese Food Gross-out, Stressful Birthing Story, Awful Rove Group Accusation FROM THE EDITOR: Same DNA, Perfect Setting ON THE COVER: Illustration for

Huffington by Christoph Niemann

LETTER FROM THE EDITOR

Same DNA, Perfect Setting ’M DELIGHTED TO introduce you to our new iPad magazine. At HuffPost, we now have nearly 500 editors and reporters who produce between 70 and 80 original reported stories each day. Our team is constantly crafting an array of narrative jewels, and Huffington is our way of putting the very best of them in the perfect setting.

That means sophisticated design, stunning photographs and video, typography that’s sharper than any print publication, and ART STREIBER

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rich, colorful full-screen ads that are far away from the maddening crowds of banner ads, pop-ups, and drop-downs. It’s these features that make Huffington a great way not only to preserve but to enhance the reading experience in our hyper-connected world.

Far from merely importing material from HuffPost, Huffington will bring the qualities that define HuffPost — storytelling, engagement, community — to this

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LETTER FROM THE EDITOR

uniquely expressive medium, designed and produced by our iPad magazine’s team of editors and designers. Think of Huffington as HuffPost’s more stylish offspring.

Same DNA, different presentation.

Huffington’s content will emphasize the rich — and richly rewarding — interactions that come from uninterrupted time spent in the company of creative minds. Within these pages are stories to be savored, passed among friends and family, read — and re-read — in bed or in sunny rooms over a late breakfast and multiple cups of coffee. Because, as with books and print magazines, there’s something about tablet reading that frees you from the push and pull of the news cycle.

Our inaugural issue features Peter Goodman on young voters’ disillusionment with President Obama; Mike Hogan on the indie filmmakers responsible for the cult hit Beginners; Lisa Belkin on fathers in the workplace; Howard Fineman on Karl Rove; and Tom Zeller’s devastating profile of the effects of a coal-ash landfill on a small, impoverished Alabama town. There’s also a Q&A with Aaron Sorkin, whose series The

Newsroom premieres later this month. And, playing off HuffPost’s Greatest Person of the Day, Huffington will spotlight a Greatest Person of the Week. We start off with Natalie Blakemore, a Missouri mother who set out Our team to build playgrounds is constantly safe for disabled crafting children, including an array of her own young son. narrative And since jewels, and engagement is a big Huffington part of everything is our way we do, stories can be of putting shared by Facebook, Twitter, and email, the very best and they end with of them in a comment bubble; the perfect you can tap it, share setting.” your comment, and continue the conversation. We’ve worked to make Huffington engaging without going overboard on the bells and whistles.

So, welcome to Huffington, and as you page through and immerse yourself in its array of features, please let us know what you think.

ARIANNA

ADRIAN DENNIS/WPA POOL/GETTY IMAGES

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DAVID 1 CAMERON TAKES HEAT FOR FORGETFUL FATHERING

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After enjoying a recent Sunday lunch, British Prime Minister David Cameron left something important behind at the pub — his 8-year-old daughter, Nancy, his office confirmed Monday. Cameron and his wife, Samantha, were traveling home in two different cars with bodyguards and didn’t realize Nancy was missing until they got home and called the pub to learn she was safe with the staff. Critics were quick to attack Cameron’s parenting skills, as just a few weeks ago the British government set up a program to provide classes for parents of young children. A biography of the prime minister by Francis Elliott and James Hanning asserts that he unwinds over “three or four glasses of wine with lunch.”

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POINTERS

SPLIT DECISION TAKES DOWN BOXING CHAMP Manny Pacquiao’s seven-year winning streak came to an end marked by booing and outrage after a split decision among the fight’s judges handed the match to his opponent, Timothy Bradley. The Filipino fighter appeared to be winning when two of the three judges scored the match in Bradley’s favor. Boxing promoter Bob Arum, who represents both fighters, called for an outside investigation into the results. “I have never been ashamed, as much, to be associated with the sport of boxing as I am tonight,” he said.

AP PHOTO/CHRIS CARLSON (BRADLEY AND PACQUIAO); AP PHOTO/RAJANISH KAKADE (BRYSON); SHUTTERSTOCK (EUROS)

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COMMERCE SECRETARY CITED IN HIT-AND-RUN

U.S. Commerce Secretary John Bryson suffered a seizure that led to a felony hit-and-run citation after he allegedly crashed his Lexus into two other vehicles near Los Angeles. Bryson allegedly rear-ended a car stopped for a passing train, spoke briefly with its occupants, then hit the car again as he drove off.

Minutes later he allegedly caused another accident before he was found unconscious behind the wheel.

Only minor injuries were reported.

SPAIN BAILOUT RAISES CONCERNS

After European finance ministers agreed on a $125 billion bailout for Spanish banks last weekend, market prognosticator “zerohedge” noted on Twitter on Monday morning that not everyone was ready to believe that the country’s (and Europe’s) financial woes were resolved. “Spain 10-Yr Yield Rises to 6.5%, Biggest Increase in a Month. Did the market not get the bailout memo?” he noted.

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HIGH COURT REJECTS GUANTANAMO PRISONER APPEALS The Supreme Court declined on Monday without comment to consider appeals from seven detainees held for the past decade at Guantanamo Bay. Four years ago, the Court ruled that military prisoners have the right to challenge the legality of their detention before a judge, but has since left the question of indefinite detention to the Obama administration. President Obama has yet to make good on his campaign promise to close Guantanamo, where 169 detainees remain.

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AP PHOTO/J. SCOTT APPLEWHITE (PRISONERS); MTV (CORTESE)

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JERSEY SHORE STAR ARRESTED ON THE JERSEY SHORE

THAT’S VIRAL VENUS GETS BETWEEN THE EARTH AND THE SUN

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Unfortunately the cameras weren’t rolling for Deena Cortese’s latest assault on New Jersey. “Deena walked out of a bar by herself and started to dance in traffic,” a policeman told E! The 25-year-old reality star was charged with disorderly conduct and released to her parents, who escorted her from the police station.

A selection of the week’s most talked-about stories.

TAP HEADLINES TO VIEW FULL STORIES

BRAZILIAN BOY BRIEFLY COMES BACK FROM THE DEAD, ASKS FOR WATER, DIES AGAIN

DOES MORGAN FREEMAN THINK HE’S GOD?

TERRY JONES HANGS OBAMA

GIANT TURTLES DIVORCE AFTER 115 YEARS TOGETHER

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Diving for Delicacies Just off the coast of the island of Jeju, South Korea, divers known as Haenyeo, or ‘Sea Women,’ take to the ocean each day to fish. Often working shifts that can span more than 45 hours, the Haenyeo scour seabeds for Abalone — a highly lucrative type of sea snail that is viewed as a luxury item among seafood enthusiasts.

PHOTOGRAPHS BY DAVID HØGSHOLT/ REPORTAGE BY GETTY IMAGES

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A Haenyeo waits on a boat bound for the fishing grounds off the coast of Jeju Island. Each group is assigned a diving area, where each of the Haenyeo will pick her preferred spot to begin a day of diving.

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Hyeon Eun Yeol, a 55-year-old Haenyeo who has been diving for conch, catches a breath of air just feet above a large jellyfish.

After surfacing, she stores her catch in a buoy and continues to dive. Once she’s exhausted her current location, a boat will take her to a new fishing site.

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Kang Choon Ja, 67, poses for a portrait in herJeju Island home. She has been diving since begging her mother to let her begin as a young teenager. Before a recent motorcycle accident, she used to be one of the best divers among the Haenyeo.

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A Haenyeo steps off her boat and plunges into the water.

In addition to Abalone, many of the Haenyeo fish for conch and other types of sea snails.

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Two Haenyeos grab the ocean floor while using metal hooks to pry Abalones and conchs from rocks.

Though their work isn’t always dangerous, its long, taxing hours and short-lived rest breaks make it a physically demanding job.

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After a long day at sea, the Haenyeo step from their boat onto dry land. For many of them, though, the day isn’t over. Many Haenyeo will continue their work on land by farming potatoes, garlic and other crops to supplement their earnings from the sea.

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On the shores of Jeju Island, a Haenyeo washes a freshly-caught octopus in the sea. While many Haenyeo take to the sea each day to fish, other groups choose to work directly from the shore.

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A group of Haenyeo gather to watch as their catch is weighed on scales. Some large Abalones can sell for around $80 USD.

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As a large net is pulled onto the group’s boat, a Haenyeo dives into the sea in search of seaweed.

Though the Haenyeo tend to favor Abalone and conch fishing, many of them also scour the ocean floor for the salty plant.

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Back on the island, hundreds of squid are hung out to dry on large, wooden racks. Not far from diving sites preferred by Haenyeo, Jeju Island is famous for its expansive selection of small seafood restaurants.

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A Haenyeo pulls herself up from the water and onto her group’s boat after a dive. In her right hand, she holds a metal hook that’s used to pry smaller Abalones and conchs from rocks on the seabed.

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The Great Divide

Each week, a News Coverage Index by the Pew Research Center’s Project for Excellence in Journalism identifies the top stories across newspapers, network and cable TV, radio and the Internet and measures the percentage of news coverage devoted to those stories. A News Interest Index by the Pew Research Center for the People & the Press asks people to state which story they followed most closely each week. At right, we show the differences in the indices on a weekly basis since the beginning of 2012. At left, we’ve placed each week’s stories into broader categories to show which index has been higher overall. A positive number indicates news coverage has been higher; a negative number indicates news interest has been higher.

This graphic was created by calculating the difference in news coverage and news interest for each story on a weekly basis, and then assigning each story to a general news category. The differences between coverage and interest were then totaled for each category. A subjective decision was made for placement of stories that fell under more than one category. If a story received less than 1 percent of news coverage, it was treated as having received zero for the purposes of this graphic.

All data used is from Pew. The News Coverage Index is based on top stories covered Monday to Sunday each week.

The News Index Survey is based on a telephone survey conducted among a sample of about 1,000 adults in the U.S. from Thursday to Sunday each week, and its sampling error ranges from plus or minus 3 to 4 percentage points. The two indices are comparable, but not strictly equivalent.

NEWS NEWS COVERAGE INTEREST

JAN

FEB

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APR

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Q&A

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TURE LILLEGRAVEN/CORBIS OUTLINE

Aaron Sorkin returns to TV with another series about TV

Aaron Sorkin Talks TV News, Women and Whether He’s an InternetHater

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FROM LEFT: TOUCHSTONE TELEVISION/COURTESY EVERETT COLLECTION; MITCH HADDAD/WARNER BROS./ GETTY IMAGES; MITCH HAASETH / © WARNER BROS. TELEVISION / COURTESY EVERETT COLLECTION

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Q&A

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ARON SORKIN HAS returned to television. After several years away from the tube — he was busy writing Oscar-winning screenplays, apparently — the man behind The West Wing has a brand new HBO series, The Newsroom. ¶ For the third time in his career, Sorkin is making TV his subject as well as his medium. The Newsroom relocates Sorkinville to the world of cable news, which feels like a natural fit. Both realms, after all, feature brilliant but tormented characters, big world issues and everyone interrupting each other all the time. ¶ Over email, we treated Sorkin to his own cable news-style interrogation. He gave as good as he got.

—Jack Mirkinson

The opening credits of The Newsroom show Edward R. Murrow, Walter Cronkite, David Brinkley and Dan Rather.

Is it fair to assume these are your news heroes? Those are four of them — we didn’t have enough space for all the others.

The fact that all but one those men are long off the scene is telling. Ever get the sense that the show is chronicling an industry’s death spiral? The idea behind the main title sequence is that the past is handing the baton off to our characters, who, in turn, refuse to believe that the industry is in a death spiral.

Were you concerned with making a hyperaccurate portrayal of our current cable landscape, or did you have broader things in mind? Typically, when you’re writing fiction, you’re not writing about something typical. It’s important to me that the fictional show, News Night, feel real but through a romantic and idealistic lens. It’s the opposite of Network.

This group of people are reaching unrealistically high and so they’ll fall down a lot but hopefully we’ll be rooting for them to get back up.

From Left: the cast of Sports Night; Allison Janney and Martin Sheen on The West Wing; Bradley Whitford and Matthew Perry on Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip.

Enter You mention writing romantically and idealistically, but The Newsroom feels slightly more jaded than The West Wing. Has the past decade chipped away at your optimism? Not on paper it hasn’t.

MACKENZIE: You know what you forgot to mention in your sermon?

That America is the only country on the planet that since the beginning has said over and over, “We can do better.” It’s part of our DNA.

How’s that for romantic optimism?

What’s your regular media diet? I read the New York Times, the L.A. Times and The Huffington Post, and in the last year or so, writing The Newsroom, I’ve been watching CNN, Fox, MSNBC and the networks as much as I can.

What do you make of the state of our modern media world? With the exception of Fox and MSNBC, I haven’t noticed an ideological bias. What I see is a bias toward fairness — a bias toward phony balance and false equivalency.

Did you and your actors go to any of the real TV networks for research? I spent time in a number of news-

Q&A

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rooms being a fly on the wall. I think if you asked anyone who’s worked in the real White House, they’d tell you that The West Wing was nothing like the real White House but that there was something about it that felt like the real White House. At the risk of sounding too cute, it’s not important to me that something be real, but it’s very important to me that it feels real.

I was once quoted as saying that nothing has made us nationally dumber and meaner than the anonymity of the Internet and I still believe that.”

You have something of a public persona as an Internet-hater. Is it true? Of course I don’t hate the Internet.

I was once quoted saying that nothing has made us nationally dumber and meaner than the anonymity of the Internet and I still believe that. I recognize that in some situations anonymity is helpful — even necessary — but those situations are rare. Anonymity in a comments section of

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Q&A

Tom Sadoski, Sam Waterston and Jeff Daniels in The Newsroom, which premieres June 24 on HBO

HBO

an Internet piece seems cowardly to me and tends to lead to a mob mentality. But I have the option of not reading comments sections, and so I don’t.

Your shows tend to revolve around powerful men — first Martin Sheen, now Jeff Daniels. Have you ever considered building a show around a female lead?

There are powerful men on this show — not just Jeff’s character but also John Gallagher, Tom Sa-

doski, Dev Patel and Sam Waterston’s characters — but I think you’ll see that the women played

by Emily Mortimer, Allison Pill and Olivia Munn are every bit their equals. (And I wouldn’t mess with Jane Fonda, Hope Davis or Kellen Coleman either.)

How did you wrangle all of these people?

Half of them were stolen off of movie sets and the other half were kidnapped off of Broadway stages.

They woke up in a stupor at Sunset Gower Studios and the rest I’m not allowed to tell you.

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MOHAMED A. EL-ERIAN

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The Economy Will Do More Than Define the Elections MOST POLITICAL OBSERVERS agree on two things: The economy will be one of the major defining topics in this year’s presidential campaign, and probably the overwhelming one; and to boost his re-election prospects, President Obama needs it to stop weakening ­— if not improve (as reflected in robust job creation, higher labor income, and enhanced consumer and business confidence).

It should therefore come as no surprise that the recentlyreleased monthly employment report, which disappointed across the board, generated such opposing political narratives.

For the Republicans, it was yet another indication that the Obama administration is unable to deliver a robust recovery despite trillions of dollars of deficits, debt and money printing. For

ILLUSTRATION BY MATTHEW HOLLISTER

the Democrats, it was yet another reminder of the deep mess that Obama inherited back in January 2009 from his Republican predecessor, and the related inevitability of a protracted recovery.

Looking forward, both parties are asking the same question: Was the May jobs report an aberration or does it point to a renewed slowing of the US economy that could even reignite talk of another recession?

While volatile monthly numbers should never be taken as unambiguous signals, recent data do suggest that America’s employment machine has lost substantial

Dr. El-Erian is CEO and coCIO of PIMCO

Voices momentum and, more generally, the economy is having problems maintaining the growth vigor required to attain escape velocity and thus overcome the downward drag of too much debt accumulated over too many years.

After three encouraging monthly employment reports (December 2011 to February 2012, where average net monthly job creation exceeded 200,000 in the context of generally improving economic data), the economy added fewer than 100,000 jobs per month in the next three-month period; worst of all, net new jobs in May came in at a disheartening 69,000. Taking into account those not counted because they have dropped out of the labor force altogether, the proportion of the adult population with jobs today is stuck at around 58 percent. This compares to the mid-60s-percentile numbers that prevailed in the years prior to the 2008 global financial crisis.

All this speaks to both the extent of the economic and financial mess inherited by Obama and the inevitable difficulty of engineering a “normal recovery.”

Whoever had come into the White House in January 2009 would have been challenged by an

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economy that faces unusual and significant impediments in gaining the cyclical traction that has been “typical” in the past – what we labeled back in May 2009 as the “new normal.” Indeed, even the unprecedented amount of fiscal and monetary stimulus that has already been applied — an extraordinary turbocharge if you like — has not enabled the economy to attain escape velocity.

The message is clear. There are multi-year supply and demand problems that speak loudly to why the economy’s recovery This is remains disappointnot the time ing. No wonder it has to risk yet proven so inadequate another mid– especially in light of year economic all the Americans that slowdown are out of work, those that could that are having enoreven risk a mous difficulties makrecession.” ing ends meet, those that have already slipped into the poverty trap and the too many that have insufficient savings for their retirement years.

And all this in an economy that, under Obama’s predecessors, got significantly more unequal in its distribution of income and wealth and, therefore, its social compact.

ALEX WONG/GETTY IMAGES

Voices Regardless of where we are in the election season, more needs to be done now to maintain forward progress.

This is not just about battling the internal headwinds created by the triple legacy that Obama inherited: too much debt; too little investment in education, job training and infrastructure; and too great a loss of competitiveness vis-à-vis other countries. It is also about building better defenses against the additional collateral damage that will hit us in the next few months from Europe’s ever-deepening debt and growth crises – especially at a time when the usually-buoyant emerging economies seem to be hitting their own soft patch.

This is not the time to risk yet another mid-year economic slowdown that could even risk a recession. And Washington must realize that the urgency of the situation is heightened by what is happening beyond this country’s borders.

Now I recognize that the extreme polarization of Congress will stand in the way of a proper policy response out of Washington. Indeed, realism dictates that, unfortunately, we should not expect to see a “first best” policy response. It will certainly not materialize in the run-

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President Obama inherited a deep mess that won’t help him in November.

up to the November elections.

Fortunately, there are steps that the administration can implement, and do so with or without the cooperation of the highly divided and divisive Congress. And while White House officials are only in a position to kick the can down the road for a while, this would avoid us tipping into an even worse situation.

Whether or not the administration succeeds in maintaining the growth and job momentum over the next few months is clearly an important question. And it is one that can only be answered if the administration shows greater resolve and if Congress stops standing in the way of virtually every policy proposal, big or small. Yet

Voices we should also realize that this is not the end of the challenges facing the American economy.

You see, the May employment report also demonstrated again the deep-seated nature of our unemployment crisis — from the shockingly high and persistent number of long-term unemployed (stuck at 5.4 million Americans or 43 percent of officially-recorded unemployment) to the disastrous incidence of joblessness among the young (e.g., a 24.1 percent unemployment rate for 16-19 year olds in the labor force) and those that did not complete their high school education (a 14.6 percent unemployment rate relative to 4.5 percent for those with at least a bachelor’s degree). Here, there is an unacceptably high risk that unemployed citizens can become unemployable if they remain out of work much longer.

For the economy to grow robustly for a number of years — which is the only way that unemployment would come down properly, spreading poverty would be reversed, and the country would stand a chance of “safely de-levering” after the many years of excessive debt creation and credit entitlements — Washington needs to move simultaneously and

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boldly on a number of different policy fronts. Otherwise, actions taken in any one area would be quickly undermined by lack of progress elsewhere. This is especially true for the long list of required but repeatedly delayed reforms in housing and housing finance; federal, state and local budgets; the labor market; education; regulation; lending; infrastructure and more.

Anything Success here speaks short of this to much more than would entail whether it is Obama something or Romney who wins that America the November presiis yet to dential elections. It experience also relates to whethin its proud er our political system history.” as a whole can regain over time the ability to agree on a common economic vision, and to pursue it with the proper sense of shared responsibility, adequate seriousness and focused implementation.

Anything short of this would entail something that America is yet to experience in its proud history: the highly unsettling prospect that our children’s generation may end up worse off than ours. We should certainly not go there.

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LISA BELKIN

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The Daddy Track T A CONFERENCE in Austin, Texas, last month the discussions sounded more than a little familiar.

The 200 parenting bloggers shared their fears: that ratcheting down their work aspirations while their children were young would hurt their careers in the long run; that employers preached balance but did not really allow for it; that they were looked down upon by those who had chosen more ambitious paths.

It was a time-worn, and predictable, conversation about work and parenting. Except for the fact that all 200 of these bloggers were fathers, and they were attending a conference called “Dad 2.0.”

“Fathers today are where mothers were 20 years ago,” says Brad Harrington, the executive director of the Center for Work & Family at the Carroll School of Management at Boston College. Women, he says, “have always had legitimacy in the home, and in the 80s they ILLUSTRATION BY MAREK HAIDUK

Lisa Belkin is a senior columnist at The Huffington Post

Voices began to struggle for legitimacy in the workplace. Now men, who have always had legitimacy in the workplace, are struggling for legitimacy in the home.”

Or, as Charles E., a political science professor, father of four, and “trailing spouse” to his wife’s new political career put it: “My job is the ‘second’ one, so if I work less we have less money, but if I work more then the kids get less parenting. What I am feeling is Mommy Guilt.”

Yes, it is. And the data show that other men are discovering the many versions of it, too: n In 1977, 41 percent of women

reported feeling torn between home and work, a number that inched up five percentage points over the next 30 years. Men, on the other

hand, were at 31 percent back in the 70s, and at 59 percent today.

In other words, men are more stressed about balancing life and work right now than women. n The number of conflicted men is growing. Depending on how you define “stay-at-home-dad,” there are 157,000 fathers at home full time according to the last census, but up to two million who are primary caregivers and whose work

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LISA BELKIN

is purposefully flexible. And these figures do not include the millions of men who lost jobs during the worst of the recession and are home involuntarily. n Increasingly women are outearning men. Almost 40 percent of women are the bigger breadwinners, according to Liza Mundy’s new book, The Richer Sex: How the New Majority of Female Breadwinners is Transforming

Daddy Guilt

Percentage of men reporting to be torn between home and work:

31% 59% 1977

Sex, Love, and Family, compared to 25 percent in the 90s and five percent in the 70s. Meaning if one parent is to become the primary caregiver, it is no longer, de facto, the mother. n At the same time, men are more

2012

willing to entertain the thought of themselves as primary parents. One

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CARIN BAER/EVERETT COLLECTION

survey found that 53 percent of men would like to be stay-at-homedads if their wives could earn enough to make that possible and two-thirds of fathers agreed with the statement “To me, my work is only a small part of who I am.”

SO, PROBLEM SOLVED, right? After all, women have always vaguely assumed that if men just “got” it — if they felt the helplessness of wanting to be at home and at work at the same time — then that would “fix” it, or, at least, make it a badge of honor. As Gloria Steinem famously jabbed, “if men could menstruate (they) would brag about how long and how much.”

But while there is some reason to believe empathy from men will bring attention to women’s problems (gender pay gaps tend to close at companies where the CEO has a daughter, for instance) it’s not looking like this new yearning by men will topple the old paradigm any time soon. In fact, rather than being able to bring balance

where women could not, it’s looking like men might paradoxically have less success.

To wit, take Charles and his wife, Sonia. The couple married two weeks after her college graduation and the first of their four children was born less than a year later. That’s when Sonia shelved a full scholarship to law school in order to spend the next seven years either pregnant or nursing while Charles got his PhD and entered academia. This year they decided it was her turn. She nabbed a prestigious, demanding fellowship at a Midwestern statehouse while he works as a visiting professor, which provides needed income but no real possi-

Man Men’s Don Draper has few qualms about leaving the house.

Voices bility of advancement.

Their patchwork of teachers and caregivers all know “to call ME,” Charles says, on the theory that his wife “can’t be getting kid calls at work. She is really setting her reputation right now and you don’t want that reputation to be someone who drops the ball because of children.”

But what about his reputation? Data suggest that a man who admits his attention is not 100 percent at work pays a higher penalty than the one women have complained about all these years.

The reason, explains Harrington, is that a woman is assumed to give less of herself at work once she has children, so if she ratchets down or seeks flexibility she’s simply doing what everyone expects. (Insulting, yes, but I’m just the messenger here.) A man, on the other hand, is expected to work even harder, because “he is now the breadwinner.” So as men become increasingly likely to put “breadwinner” well down on the list of ways they see themselves, it creates a circular tension between what they want and what society wants them to be.

And that, in turn, leads to much of the musing, philosophizing and

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longing that so many researchers are hearing lately from men — conversations that sound like echoes of yesteryear, but with a baritone twist.

It also leads Charles to ask that I tweak his name a bit in this article, so that a future employer doesn’t Google him and question his work ethic.

Fathers today are where mothers were 20 years ago.’”

—Brad Harrington

Executive Director of the Center for Work & Family at the Carroll School of Management at Boston College

“It all boils down to having to conceptualize trade-offs,” Charles says, “and realizing that all my hopes and wants were not going to be met at the same time. If two things are mutually incompatible it comes down to ‘if this, then not this.’”

Quite a few frazzled working mothers could have told him that a long time ago — though it is nice, if sobering, to have him onboard.

Voices

HOWARD FINEMAN

HUFFINGTON 06.17.12

SAUL LOEB/AFP/GETTY IMAGES (ROVE)

Our Political Ringmaster, Large and In Charge KARL ROVE TOLD ME that he was going to be too busy to talk much.

It was true. He had a hit on Fox to prepare, and a piece to write for The Wall Street Journal (“Due in 35 minutes,” he said.) The Super Pac he had founded was airing a new ad, featuring shattered glass and a list of the president’s “failed” promises. Rove had two speeches to give, traveling to do, Pac donors to woo and calls with friends throughout the Republican realm, including folks at party committees and in Romney headquarters.

Once known as “Turd Blossom,” later as “the Architect,” Rove, at 61, is more powerful than ever: a

ILLUSTRATION BY JULIEN PACAUD

multi-dimensional, 21st century version of a 19th century Party Boss. Specifically, he is the reincarnation of Mark Hanna for our own corrupted, McKinley-style era, in which Gargantuan Money again is paralyzing our politics.

“Karl has a lot of sway,” says former RNC Chairman Michael Steele. “Not swagger, but sway.

He’s Svengali.”

Long ago, a party boss operated in the shadows. But now, in the age of Twitter, cable television and Super Pacs, a party boss operates

Howard Fineman is editorial director of the Huffington Post Media Group

Voices in plain sight – the plainer the better. Federal election laws are laughably weak, but they are supposed to bar a candidate’s campaign from “coordinating” with “independent” Pacs, among them Rove’s own American Crossroads and Crossroads GPS. Rove’s prominence is the easiest and most deliberately obvious way around the law. Deeply respected (as well as feared and despised) within the party for his 40-year track record – not to mention his access to Texas and Texas-size donors — he acts publicly as a Bat Signal in the media sky and privately as a clearinghouse of tactics, information, advice and fundraising intel.

This year, Svengali wanted Mitt Romney to be the Republican nominee. The former governor of Massachusetts was well liked by the Bush Family, Rove’s ultimate patrons and longtime employers.

Ostensibly but not actually neutral, Rove used his perch on Fox News (run by his old Bush Family friend Roger Ailes) to trash Mitt’s GOP primary foes (Newt Gingrich was a “whiner) and offer on-air counsel to Romney. “My responsibility as an analyst was to call them as I see them,” Rove told

HOWARD FINEMAN

HUFFINGTON 06.17.12

me coolly, “and that naturally invites disagreement.”

Now, in the general election, Rove can exert even more influence. Top Romney aide Beth Myers, who is in charge of vetting veep contenders, got her training under Rove in the 1980s. Campaign manager Matt Rhoades served as Rove’s key “opposition research” person in the 2004 election, helping Once frame John Kerry as a known flip-flopping, French as ‘Turd fry loving, fop.

Blossom,’ To ensure that later as ‘the things go smoothly at Architect,’ Romney headquarRove, at 61, ters, the campaign is more recruited as a senior powerful advisor Ed Gillespie, than ever.” a likable and effective GOP operative and long time Rove friend who helped found Crossroads.

Rove’s career is a testament to Nietzsche’s dictum that whatever doesn’t kill you makes you stronger. He learned as a teenager that he was adopted. His stepfather was gay. His mother committed suicide when he was 20. He was banished from President George H.W. Bush’s 1992 campaign for leaking an attack on a rival aide.

Voices He was blamed for vicious personal attacks in 2000 on John McCain, but never directly tied to them. In 2006, after a lengthy investigation, he was cleared in the Valerie Plame CIA leak case.

In 2009, a congressional committee invesigated — and blamed — him for politicizing the firing of U.S. attorneys, but he escaped any legal consequences.

Now, in a way, a lifetime of work is coming together. He’s always pushed envelopes. Fundraising is one. With Sen. Mitch McConnell, a close ally, he successfully spearheaded a decadeslong attack on campaign laws; now “independent” Pacs, such as Rove’s, can raise unlimited sums from corporate treasuries and, for long periods, keep wealthy donors’ names under wraps. He has taken cultural attack tactics he learned as a boy in the Nixon days and industrialized them. His current enemy of convenience: public employees.

Shrewdly, Rove has eschewed attempting to make money as a political consultant. (Others handle his original expertise, direct mail.)

Instead he can recommend other “vendors” for them to use – yet another way for him to consolidate his

HOWARD FINEMAN

HUFFINGTON 06.17.12

power. He makes his money these days from speeches and media.

Though Rove co-founded Crossroads, he has no title and isn’t on the board. Crossroads’ twin entities – American Crossroads and Crossroads GPS – hope to raise at least $300 million, according to CEO Steven Law – which is more than the Obama and Romney campaigns have managed to collect so far.

Expect the Rovean messaging to be harsh. In 2005, when a still largely united country was He was debating what to do blamed for next in Bush’s “Global vicious War on Terror,” Rove personal came forth to define the battle for his boss. attacks in “Conservatives saw 2000 on the savagery of the John McCain, 9/11 attacks and prebut never pared for war,” Rove directly tied declared. “Liberals to them.” saw the savagery of the 9/11 attacks and wanted to prepare indictments and offer therapy and understanding for the attackers.”

It was Rove at his best, or worst.

But it was a typical moment of our time and we’re bound to see more of it from a political discourse that Rove now dominates.

ANDREW H. WALKER/WIREIMAGE FOR TONY AWARDS PRODUCTIONS (HARRIS); PAUL DRINKWATER/NBCU PHOTO BANK (HUCKABEE)

Voices

QUOTED

HUFFINGTON 06.17.12

“ Until Mexico can pay their police more than a cartel can pay, there is always going to be violence.”

— HuffPost commentor aquarius2

I mean, it’s not going to be like, ‘Hey guys, we’ve been out looking for a black friend or a friend in a wheelchair or a friend with a hat.’ The tough thing is you kind of can’t win on that one.

I have to write people who feel honest but also push our cultural ball forward.

— Lena Dunham to NYT Magazine

on whether Girls might cast “friends of color” next season

“ I think there’s a greater likelihood that I’ll be asked by Madonna to go on tour as her bass player.”

— Mike Huckabee

to ABC’s This Week on his VP prospects

“ Welcome to the 66th annual Tony Awards, or as we like to call it, 50 Shades of Gay.”

— Neil Patrick Harris

while hosting the Tonys

“ Don’t let big money drown out our say.

This influx of nonprofit funneling of funds is for that exact purpose, unchecked, free-reign of funds towards making sure they get the result THEY want, regardless of what the rest of us, the voters, have to say.”

— HuffPost commentor Thor Halvorsen

Voices

QUOTED

It’s voodoo economics.

It is not going to work and it’s not working.

— Joseph Stiglitz, economist, on Spain’s bank bailout

HUFFINGTON 06.17.12

“ I didn’t get why I was wearing a mask.

But I understand it now — why my dad would want our faces to be covered. When we went out without him we wouldn’t be recognized.”

— Paris Jackson

TOP TO BOTTOM: AP PHOTO/HARPO INC., GEORGE BURNS; AP PHOTO/RICK BOWMER

in an interview with Oprah

“ I hope that things change in this country, especially for those of you who suffer everyday.”

— HuffPost commentor LILLYPUTT on medical marijuana

“ In an era where teens constantly commit suicide because the Internet makes it impossible to go home and escape school bullies, is it wise to introduce even younger children to this arena?”

— HuffPost commenter allerleirauh

on Facebook developing technology for kids under 13

PHOTO: ALIYA NAUMOFF

06.17.12 #01 FEATURES

END OF THE AFFAIR? CINEMA VÉRITÉ OLD KING COAL

END OF THE AFFAIR?

PHOTO OR ILLUSTRATION CREDIT TK

OBAMA’S PERILOUS RELATIONSHIP WITH YOUNG VOTERS

BY PETER GOODMAN

a

ILLUSTRATION BY WARD SUTTON

Obama & Young Voters

ICON: MICHAEL MYERS

t the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in the fall of 2008, the spectacle of Barack Obama’s presidential campaign dominated Meghan Gilliland’s sophomore year. Going to the library, traversing the quad, or passing through a campus gathering place known as The Pit entailed running a gauntlet of clipboard-wielding Obama volunteers beseeching students to vote. A surge of enthusiasm among young voters would prove decisive in delivering North Carolina to Obama.

Nationally, he would capture two of every three ballots cast by voters under 30, a crucial component of his victory.

Obama inspired Gilliland, and she urged her friends to vote for him. He was vowing to pull troops out of Iraq and close the military detention facility at Guantanamo Bay. She felt certain he would repeal the military’s “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” policy for gay soldiers, and embrace marriage equality for all gays and lesbians, a major issue among younger voters.

ELECTION 2012

Obama’s ascendance as the nation’s first African-American president held special resonance for Gilliland, a white woman who had grown up in a North Carolina town she describes as “pretty redneck.”

“A lot of people still use the N-word there,” she says. “They know it’s wrong, but they still use it.”

On the November night when

HUFFINGTON 06.17.12

Obama secured his victory, Gilliland and her husband, Matt, sat on a couch in their rented townhouse in Raleigh and watched the returns come in on television with a mixture of astonishment and joy. When Obama was declared the winner, they shouted and hugged. In Chapel Hill, students rushed Franklin Street, the main drag through town, blocking traffic in both directions and lighting bonfires — a ritual ordinarily reserved for Carolina basketball victories over the school’s despised rival, Duke.

“I was ecstatic,” she says. “I really felt like things were going to change in the country and be more positive. We were going to close Guantanamo. We were going to get out of Iraq. I had hopes that same sex marriage was going to become legal all across the country. I had hopes that the economy would get better.”

Today, with Obama in the midst of a tough reelection campaign, he can no longer count on the same level of support from young voters like Meghan and Matt Gilliland. Both are disappointed and bitter about his presidency, so much so that they are backing the fringe Republican candidate, Ron Paul.

Their disillusionment represents a marginal yet potentially

decisive shift among younger voters, one that could make Obama a one-term president: A slice of the youth electorate has soured either on the president or on politics in general to an extent that could see lower participation at the polls in November – an outcome that could put the White House in play.

Obama’s failed promises, particularly on civil liberties, have turned off some 20-something voters, according to interviews with scores of young people in four states and political analysts. The struggle to find jobs in a lean economy while grappling with student loan debt has so consumed others that politics has come to feel like a sideshow to them. Obama’s tenure sits atop those fault lines.

“He’s in danger,” says Peter Levine, director of the Center for Information & Research on Civic Learning and Engagement at Tufts University. “It’s not over. It’s a long way until November. You can easily imagine things shifting, but they have their work cut out for them.”

Few expect Obama’s Republican challenger, Mitt Romney, to make significant inroads among young voters. Eighteento 29-year-olds favor Obama over Romney by 28 percentage

ELECTION 2012 Obama & Young Voters HUFFINGTON 06.17.12

FOR OBAMA, THE YOUTH VOTE IS INCREDIBLY IMPORTANT, THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN A POTENTIAL WIN AND LOSS.

points in a recent Pew Research Center poll. Many young voters aren’t enamored of the laissezfaire economic positions Romney champions, with roughly seven in 10 favoring increased taxes for wealthy Americans and government policies aimed at narrowing the gap between rich and poor, according to a recent survey of 18- to 24-year-olds by the Public Religion Research Institute and Georgetown University’s Berkley Center for Religion, Peace & World Affairs.

Still, the key factor determining who will occupy the White House is likely to be turnout: Young voters went to the polls in relatively large numbers four years ago, and signs suggest turnout will be lower this time, potentially spelling fewer votes for Obama. In the estimation of some experts, that could be enough to cost the president crucial battleground states like

— John Della Volpe

Director of Polling, Harvard University Institute of Politics

North Carolina, Virginia and Ohio, perhaps tipping the election to Romney.

“For Obama, the youth vote is incredibly important, the difference between a potential win and loss,” says John Della Volpe, director of polling at Harvard University’s Institute of Politics. “On almost every single attitudinal measure we have that would help predict turnout, all those attitudinal measures are down or depressed.”

As some of Meghan Gilliland’s friends graduated from UNC in the spring of 2009, most failed to find jobs in their fields. When Matt graduated from North Carolina State University the following May, carrying $8,000 in student loan debt, he, too, confronted slender prospects.

He had hoped to find a position at a non-profit, but he settled for part-time delivery work at Pizza Hut and Jimmy John’s, the

sandwich chain. Once, he found himself delivering a sandwich to a former college professor who had previously guaranteed Matt would get a good job. (“He didn’t tip very well,” Matt recalls.) He eventually took refuge in law school, adding $30,000 to his pile of debt.

As he drove around in his 1999 Taurus, the exuberance of his student years yielding to the grim reality of low-wage service-sector life, Matt listened to audio books about the economy, many offering a libertarian perspective. He had previously supported Obama’s economic policies, and particularly his efforts to stimulate growth through increased government spending, but he began to view those measures as exacerbating the problem – by forcing the government to become just as dependent on borrowing as an overzealous credit card holder.

“He was doing exactly the opposite of what I thought would be best,” Matt says.

He was particularly put off

by Obama’s continuation of the taxpayer bailouts of Wall Street begun by President Bush.

“Virtually everyone hired by the Obama administration was brought in from the upper echelons of business, and they

brought enormous conflicts of interest,” Matt says. “It’s cronyism. I just became very disillusioned with the entire system.”

Matt’s reading and thinking influenced Meghan, for whom economic concerns were about to become paramount: Last month, she graduated from UNC with about $15,000 in debt and deep worries about her own job prospects.

By then, Meghan was also souring on Obama, whom she once embraced because of his unequivocal stance against the Iraq War — a war that was personal for her. A friend who had served as a Marine in Iraq, someone she remembered as “a really good guy,” had seemed transformed by combat.

“He was just very, very angry about everything,” she says. “He cursed constantly. He wouldn’t really talk about his experience, but he was talking about people in the Middle East, like they were all the enemy. He was really into playing violent video games.

It was uncomfortable and tense.”

As Obama expanded the war in Afghanistan, she found herself questioning his integrity. As he declined to shut Guantanamo in the face of Congressional opposition, she felt betrayed.

“The whole situation is com-

ELECTION 2012 Obama & Young Voters HUFFINGTON 06.17.12

COMPILED BY TIMOTHY WALLACE/THE HUFFINGTON POST; SOURCE: CIRCLE; NATIONAL ELECTION POOL STATE EXIT POLL VIA CNN

pletely disgusting and frightening,” she says. “I definitely knew hope and change was not really happening. I’ve had to ask myself, ‘And I voted for this?’ I felt kind of hoodwinked, but he was our anti-war choice in ‘08.

Maybe I was just naive.”

By the time Obama endorsed same-sex marriage last month — a step that should win favor among many young voters — Meghan was unimpressed.

“Too little, too late,” she says.

THE SYSTEM ISN’T WORKING The Obama campaign is counting on contrasts with the other guy to carry the day, crafting plans to portray Romney as an artifact of the failed policies that delivered the Great Recession, while emphasizing his support for restrictions on contraception and abortion, and his professed skepticism about climate change — issues that would seemingly make it hard for him to gain traction among younger voters.

“This guy is going to have real problems,” says Obama’s campaign manager, Jim Messina. “They are just not going to have an easy time having a fertile conversation.”

The president has been sparring with Republicans in Congress to prevent the interest

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rates on federal student loans from doubling. He has been emphasizing how his health care reform allows people under 26 to

ELECTION 2012 Obama & Young Voters HUFFINGTON 06.17.12

Joseph Terrell worked for the Democratic party in the 2008 elections, and even though he is somewhat disillusioned with the Obama presidency, will vote to reelect him in 2012.

PORTRAITS BY JEREMY LANGE

remain on their parents’ health insurance policies. Despite the baggage of incumbency, Obama retains a singular ability to forge connections with his audiences — particularly young people.

And the Obama team is counting on a core asset, its vaunted on-the-ground operation, featuring an army of volunteers dedicated to identifying supporters and getting them to the polls.

“The youth vote is an absolutely important part of our winning strategy,” Messina says.

“Turnout is the question. That’s why a ground game matters.”

Yet in the estimation of Democratic strategist Hilary Rosen, one of the founders of the youth voter registration campaign, Rock The Vote, and a confidant of Hillary Clinton, the Obama campaign should be concerned about turnout. Four years ago, a trio of factors worked in Obama’s favor. “You had a next generation leader who was younger, and who appealed to younger people,” Rosen says. “You had a kind of foreboding sense about the state of the world that they were entering post-college. You also had the threat of war.”

The foreboding is still here, yet it may be working against Obama this time, given that he has been in charge for three-plus

years — a point emphasized with vigor by Romney. In a recent survey of 18- to 29-year-olds conducted by Harvard’s Institute of Politics, 58 percent said they disapproved of how Obama has handled the economy. The Iraq war is officially at an end, but the fight in Afghanistan now belongs to Obama, an issue on which the Harvard survey found a 48 percent level of disapproval.

“Obama now has only one of the three things working for him,” Rosen says. “He’s still younger, more relatable and more energetic than Mitt Romney.”

Last time, Obama unspooled a narrative of deliverance from traditional politics while running as an outsider. This time, he has to account for a disturbing present while selling young voters that he can improve things. Last time, he could build support by diagnosing problems. This time, he has to appeal for patience as possible solutions arrive.

“That’s exactly what they’re struggling with,” Rosen says.

“It’s a very significant culture of immediate gratification. For a guy who’s been around now for a few years, he says it himself: He’s not as fresh.”

Obama’s campaign operatives describe multiple pathways

ELECTION 2012 Obama & Young Voters HUFFINGTON 06.17.12

leading to reelection. Obama might compensate for soft support among men by boosting his showing among women.

He could lose Florida, which he won narrowly last time, but still win Ohio, where the auto bailout has generated jobs. He might lose Ohio and Florida, but still ride to victory via a strong performance in Western states such as Colorado, Nevada, New Mexico and Arizona.

But most of the available pathways share one essential component: Obama needs a dominant showing among young voters.

“The youth vote is incredibly important, and particularly for Obama,” says Mark Penn, the pollster who served as Bill Clinton’s data guru, and Hillary Clinton’s chief strategist on her bid for the White House. “It was his core base in 2008.”

In three states, Virginia, Indiana and North Carolina, voters under 30 decisively tipped the scales in Obama’s favor, turning what would have been defeats into victories. North Carolina presents the clearest case. George W. Bush carried the state by more than 12 percentage points in both 2000 and 2004. Among voters 30 and over, Obama lost to the Republi-

can nominee, Sen. John McCain, according to exit polls. But he took 73 percent of the under-30 electorate, and that gave him the state by a mere 14,000 votes.

According to the consensus view among political strategists, 11 states now considered tossups will determine the outcome of the 2012 race: North Carolina, Virginia, Pennsylvania, New Hampshire, Ohio, Florida, Colorado, Arizona, Nevada, Iowa and Missouri. These states collectively hold more than half of the 270 electoral votes needed to claim the presidency. Obama

ELECTION 2012 Obama & Young Voters HUFFINGTON 06.17.12

[ROMNEY] IS GOING TO HAVE REAL PROBLEMS. THEY ARE JUST NOT GOING TO HAVE AN EASY TIME HAVING A FERTILE CONVERSATION.

— Jim Messina

Campaign Manager, Obama for America

lost only two of these states last time — Missouri, where he came within one percent, and Arizona, home to McCain. In seven of the

nine states he won, he took at least 60 percent of the under-30 vote, according to analysis by CIRCLE. In an eighth state, Virginia, he narrowly missed the 60 percent mark.

Evidence of discontent among young voters has pollsters seriously questioning whether Obama will be able to engineer a similar showing this time.

Obama’s heavy dependence on youth votes in battleground states explains why the Romney campaign is expending resources, including appearances at universities, on courting younger voters. On its face, this strategy might seem like a waste of energy and money: Romney not only trails badly in polls among young people, but Democrats tend to have a much easier time winning younger voters, given their liberal proclivities on social issues, environmental regulation and foreign policy. But for Romney, the objective is not to win a large share of votes. It is to deprive Obama of a smidgen of his base — a potentially decisive smidgen.

“He needs to replicate what he did in 2008,” says Ryan Williams, a spokesman for the Romney campaign. “Young voters generally vote for Democrats, but we think Governor Romney’s message of fiscal responsibility

and pro-job growth policies will appeal to them and bring some of them over to our side.”

Pollsters suggest Romney has legitimate reason for optimism.

Last time, Obama had the benefit of running against McCain, whose lengthy Senate tenure and sometimes-befuddled debate performances provided an inexhaustible source of age-related hilarity for late night television. McCain compounded his troubles by attacking Obama as inexperienced, a tack that merely enhanced their generational differences. McCain suffered the worst drubbing among young people since 18-year-olds got the right to vote in 1972.

Romney has his own problems, including unscripted and explosive utterances that have made him look detached from economic reality. But merely trying to do a little better than McCain may prove a low bar.

Though Obama is still running strong among youth voters in the polls, the details reveal sharp differences across racial lines. The Harvard survey found Obama leading Romney among young voters by 43 percent to 26 percent, with 30 percent undecided. Young black and Hispanic voters favored Obama by spreads of

ELECTION 2012 Obama & Young Voters HUFFINGTON 06.17.12

AP PHOTO/MANUEL BALCE CENETA, FILE

79-1 and 50-12 respectively.

But among young white voters, Obama trailed Romney by 37 percent to 34 percent.

The Obama campaign is counting on two key demographic trends: Between election day in 2008 and this year, the number of Americans between 18 and 29 years old will have swelled by more than a million; much of that growth skews African-American and Latino.

“The pie is now bigger,” says

Messina. “That’s what people keep missing. This has long been a part of our strategy.

These are people who agree with us on the issues. The question is whether or not we can put together the ground game, and I think we can.”

In going back to the well for youth voters, Obama is seeking to engage a slice of the electorate that has suffered some of the worst depredations of the Great Recession. At least two-thirds of

Students and faculty set up a voter registration table at the University of Pennsylvania in 2008.

students who emerge with bachelor’s degrees must borrow to finance their college education, up from less than half in the early 1990s, according to a recent New York Times investigation.

Only about half of all Americans between the ages of 18 and 24 are now employed, according to an analysis by the Pew Research Center. Many college graduates are stuck in jobs that do not require their degrees.

“I don’t know what I’m going to do,” says Andrew Nelms, 25, who graduated three years ago with a bachelor’s in counseling psychology from Toccoa Falls College, a Christian school in Georgia. He carries $22,000 in student loan debt, a burden he confronts with his barista job at Caribou Coffee, where he earns $9 an hour.

Nelms lays this out over lunch at the Remedy Diner, a vegetarian restaurant in a gritty neighborhood in downtown Raleigh. The cocktail list features something called the “Anxiety Antidote.” Nelms has been ingesting more traditional medicine — antidepressants, which a doctor recently described for the stress that dominates his life. His college degree has so far produced a resume mostly limited to stints at Applebee’s

and Caribou coffee.

“It’s caused me a whole lot of anxiety,” he says. “It’s hard to even find an internship in this area, even an unpaid one. It just sucks to think that I’ve wasted the last six years of my life on, well, nothing. I knew it was going to be tough, but I didn’t know how difficult.”

He has thought about nursing school, but the prospect of taking on more debt frightens him. So does the thought of not taking on more debt and staying the course.

Four years ago, Nelms voted for McCain, a fact he offers more as testament to his surround-

ELECTION 2012 Obama & Young Voters HUFFINGTON 06.17.12

THE CONVERSATION ABOUT WHAT HAS NOT HAPPENED IN CONGRESS IS A LIVELY ONE.

ings — a Christian campus — than his personal values. This time, Nelms may vote for Paul.

Or he might vote for Obama, having been won over by the president’s efforts to tamp down

— Kal Penn

BATTLEGROUND YOUTH Of the 11 states up for grabs in the 2012 electon, the youth vote played the largest role in Iowa, Montana and North Carolina in 2008.

IA

PERCENTAGE OF VOTERS AGE 18-29, 2008

10%

8% 7%

6%

NH

7%

OH

10% 9%

PA

9%

NV

8%

AZ

9%

CO

8%

MO

10%

VA

NC

9%

9%

6% FL

COMPILED BY TIMOTHY WALLACE/THE HUFFINGTON POST; MAP SOURCE: CIRCLE ANALYSIS OF U.S. CENSUS DATA

7%

ELECTORAL VOTES interest rates on student loans.

“It definitely makes me view him in a more favorable light,” he says.

This is precisely the sort of issue the Obama campaign is counting on to produce support from young people. Kal Penn, the actor famous for his roles in the Harold & Kumar movies — classics of the stoner genre — toured campuses to drum up votes for Obama in 2008, and has been doing so again in recent months. Students are unhappy about all sorts of things,

he says, from the job market to the high costs of college, but they grasp that Obama has been laboring to address these problems, while encountering grief from Republicans.

“They have been frustrated about the same things that I’ve been frustrated about, and that the president has been frustrated about, and that’s the pace of change,” says Penn.

“The conversation about what has not happened in Congress is a lively one.”

But even if young voters are

NEVADA 6 ARIZONA 11 COLORADO 9 IOWA 6 MISSOURI 10 OHIO 18 PENSYLVANIA 20 VIRGINIA 13 NORTH CAROLINA 15 FLORIDA 29 NEW HAMPSIRE 4

inclined to blame Republicans for monkey-wrenching progress, the mere fact of partisan bickering could dampen enthusiasm and depress turnout.

The Harvard Institute of Politics survey found significant reductions in the percentage of young Americans who say they have clicked the “like” button on Facebook in support of political candidates and political issues, a development that may speak to social media fatigue as much as it does to political disenchantment.

Obama took the White House by persuading large numbers of young people to vote. His reelection now appears to hinge on a repeat from this historically fickle crowd. Despite the relative surge, youth turnout was still just 49 percent in 2008, as compared to 66 percent among those 30 and over, according to CIRCLE’s analysis. In both 1996 and 2000, only about 36 percent of Americans under-30 bothered to vote. Signs now point to a return to the mean.

“Almost every indication that I personally have looked at since 2009 indicates that young people are less interested in voting now than they were in 2008,” says Harvard’s Della Volpe. “There’s significant pes-

simism, mistrust and lack of belief that system is working.”

GET OUT THE VOTE For Democratic strategists, the youth vote beckons as a prodigious frontier of fresh support waiting to be harvested.

It also carries dividends that transcend face-value electoral arithmetic, lending the candidate the aura of trendy cool, along with the subsidiary benefit of extra media attention.

Rolling Stone is surely not pining to profile the candidate who polls nicely among Rust Belt-dwelling senior citizens, but the minute an aspirant captures the attention of college students, words like zeitgeist start getting thrown into the conversation, and comparisons are made to the Kennedys.

Then, spillover can result.

“The passion that young people had for Obama in 2008 carried over to having moderate parents and grandparents casting votes for Obama,” says Della Volpe. “Young people, maybe for the first time in a while, were persuading and influencing their parents rather than the other way around.”

How that happened speaks to a powerful confluence of factors. Broad disgust with

ELECTION 2012 Obama & Young Voters HUFFINGTON 06.17.12

Bush breached traditional divides of generation, geography and party, fostering a longing for someone who seemed above the partisan fray. Obama spoke not as a conventional politician, but as a moral figure holding out the promise of a better country, a more inclusive society, and a more productive discourse. He made voting for him seem like participating in a cultural awakening.

Much has been made of Obama’s adroit use of social media. This channel proved especially useful in connecting with younger voters, who are less likely to have fixed mailing addresses and landline phones, and who tend to be turned off by television advertising. But the real brilliance of Obama’s social media strategy was how it imbued the messaging with authenticity. In using Facebook, MySpace and other such channels to reach voters, the campaign turned ordinary people into the messengers.

In place of top-down missives from a centralized campaign, college friends heard about Obama from their friends (or at least their “friends.”) This fit perfectly with the campaign’s emphasis on welcoming volunteers not as additions

to a conventional apparatus, but as entrants to a grassroots movement.

“Obama did the best job of recognizing the untapped potential of the millennial generation, and reaching out to our generation in ways that were very effective,” says Alex Orlowski, who was an undergraduate at University of Dayton in 2008, and who co-authored a study on the nature of youth voter engagement, “Millennials Talk Politics.”

Here was a generation that had been reared amid emphasis on local community concerns. “We grew up with Sesame Street, and Mister Rogers’ neighborhood, and getting involved in the neighborhood, and the push toward community service as a requirement for graduation,” says Orlowski.

“Two-thirds of the people we talked to saw volunteering as form of politics, a way to get involved in their community.”

Obama spoke directly to such values in 2008, but strategists doubt that he can duplicate that feat — simply because too much has changed. He is the incumbent now. Rather than an opportunity to ratify aspirational change, this election boils down to a choice between two candi-

ELECTION 2012 Obama & Young Voters HUFFINGTON 06.17.12

IT’S GOING TO BE MORE DIFFICULT ELECTION TO GET EVERYONE 2012 EXCITED. MOST OF Obama & THE PEOPLE I KNOW Young Voters ARE A LOT MORE HUFFINGTON PREOCCUPIED WITH 06.17.12 FINDING A JOB.

— Sarah Griffin anU pta

sin ratibus sunt aliciis Sarah Griffin, who worked for apid ucimin the Democratic party during the porio. Et 2008 elections, has been unable eatur suntisc to find a job in her fieldimagnis and is working as a hostess. She intends debitem pore to vote for Obama again, but is rum consect unable to help on the campaign. emporep

dates representing two halves of an unloved political system.

“It’s a big challenge,” says Bill Carrick, a Democratic strategist in Los Angeles. “Circumstances are just entirely different. It’s just going to be more difficult.

There is just not as much of that incredible organic enthusiasm as there was in ‘08 so it makes the organizational challenge much greater.”

Romney is betting that disaffection among young voters will deprive Obama of foot soldiers. “There is definitely an intensity decline,” says Williams, the Romney spokesman.

“When there’s decline in intensity, turnout decreases. Also, it hurts their ground operations.

When young voters have lower intensity, they are much less likely to come in on a Saturday and knock on doors and make phone calls.”

If that prognosis proves correct, it will reflect changing sentiments among people like Daniel Gordon.

Four years ago, Gordon was a freshman at Bowling Green State University in northwestern Ohio. He watched Obama’s speech after his victory in the Iowa caucuses and swiftly joined the cause as a volunteer. He saw Obama as the antithesis of the

man who had dominated politics for most of his memory, George W. Bush, and the unsavory events that defined the Bush administration — lies about weapons of mass destruction, which pulled the country into Iraq; warrantless wiretapping of citizens; arrogance in world affairs; and the abandonment of New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina.

“He seemed transformative,” Gordon says of Obama. “This is somebody who could bring us back, who could have a national dialogue, somebody like Roosevelt or Kennedy. We wanted

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WHEN YOUNG VOTERS HAVE LOWER INTENSITY, THEY ARE MUCH LESS LIKELY TO COME IN ON A SATURDAY AND KNOCK ON DOORS.

— Ryan Williams

Spokesman, Romney for President

someone we could believe in, and not just another cynical politician. This was somebody who was actively defying the

apathy and cynicism that had cemented around us.”

Gordon appreciated Obama’s push to expand access to health care. As a child in Bowling Green, where his mother taught first grade and his father was a professor, he had suffered from asthma. He remembered listening to his parents arguing with insurance companies as they sought reimbursement for his care.

“None of those conversations seemed to end well,” he says.

He believed that Obama would restore jobs, grasping that the country was in the midst of a profound crisis, one that had hit Ohio and the Rust Belt with potency.

When he talks about Obama these days, Gordon sounds as if he is describing a failed relationship. He is incensed that the president did not push for a single-payer health care system, buying off the insurance lobby for its support, he says. He feels Obama’s stimulus spending package was too small.

“The kind of policies he’s put through are the right ones,” Gordon says, “but I don’t think they have gone far enough. There has been a recovery but it’s tepid. I really expected to see more of

an FDR-like program, building infrastructure, putting people back to work. I expected to see a lot more investment in our nation as a whole.”

Obama has Gordon’s vote in the bag: Romney disgusts him. Yet even though Gordon is himself a politico, having been elected to the Bowling Green City Council, he does not plan to help Obama get out the vote.

“I do that for candidates I believe in,” he says. “A lot of people who were swept up in 2008 are not as engaged this time.”

DRAWING ON THE SIDEWALK Sarah Griffin would like to be engaged, but she is too busy trying to find a job.

In 2008, when she was a sophomore at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro, she got “caught up in the Obama fever.”

Two years later, during the midterm elections, she worked for Organizing for America, a project of the Democratic party aimed at mobilizing people in favor of Obama’s legislative agenda.

She is not volunteering this time, she says.

This is in part because she is disappointed with Obama, who has turned out to be less of a change agent than she imagined. Mostly, though, Griffin is

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AP PHOTO/SETH PERLMAN

preoccupied with a post-college life that hasn’t worked out as she planned.

For most of her life, Griffin had succeeded at nearly everything, and she figured her career would prove no different.

As a high school student, she won a merit scholarship that covered her college tuition. Last spring, she graduated from college summa cum laude and Phi Beta Kappa. She had been the news director of the campus

radio station, and she expected to find a job in journalism, or perhaps public relations. Then, when she put in for an entrylevel job at a community radio station, she learned that 200 others had applied — among them, a former lecturer whose class she had taken in college.

University budget cuts had eliminated his position.

Without a job, she moved in with her parents in the Raleigh suburb of Cary — the sort of

Supporters cheer on Republican presidential candidate Ron Paul during a campaign rally.

place people describe as “really safe.” At first, it was nice to be home. She went to the gym with her mother. She enjoyed healthy fare at family dinners.

As weeks turned into months, however, she began sinking into depression. This was no summer visit. This was her life.

She was sleeping in a cramped twin bed in the same room in which she had grown up, the walls painted dark red — a color she had chosen in middle school. “It’s like a little cave,” she says. She went to Target and bought a clothes rack, because her closet was stuffed full of the past — her prom dress, her high school volleyball uniforms, a giant teddy bear.

Her parents had always known her as someone with drive, but now they began asking her what she was doing to look for work. She chafed at their concern, even as she understood it; even as she felt bad about feeling irritated.

“They are really great parents and they have done so much, sacrificed so much of their time so I can have the best in life, and you don’t want to disappoint them,” she says. “I just felt really helpless.”

As her job search continued to yield rejection, she figured

she had to do something — anything. A high school friend told her about a hostess job at the Lebanese restaurant where she worked, and Griffin took it. She greets people, wipes down tables, sets down silverware. One afternoon, the manager sent her outside with chalk to draw an enticing message on the sidewalk. As she bent down on the pavement, she made eye contact with a waiter who was outside on a cigarette break.

“I look up and I’m like, ‘I have a college degree, and I’m here drawing on the sidewalk,’” she says. The waiter laughed.

He, too, had a college degree.

She doesn’t blame Obama for her predicament. “How can you blame one person for not having a job?” she says. “I don’t really know how we could have gotten out of this mess. It was all created by years of federal policy.”

But politics seems tainted. “I guess I’m going to vote, because I really don’t want the Republicans to get the White House, but it’s more of an anti-vote,” she says. “It seems like the system is really broken. Most people are just really sick of the vitriol and negativity, and not necessarily toward Obama, but just the whole thing. It’s going to be more difficult to get every-

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one excited, for sure. Most of the people I know are a lot more preoccupied with finding a job.”

The day after Griffin says this, Obama goes on national television and proclaims his support for gay marriage. The following morning when we meet for coffee at an artsy place in Raleigh, she is elated.

“That was fabulous,” she says, donning a pink Planned Parenthood T-shirt. “That really makes me feel better about him. I’ll probably go volunteer.”

She’s touched that Obama mentioned his conversations with his daughters as a factor in bringing him around.

“It’s nice to see him as a Dad again,” she says, “a guy beyond a politician.”

VOTING WITHOUT PLEASURE At Obama headquarters, stories about people who worked for him last time but aren’t doing so this time tend to be dismissed as both inevitable and irrelevant: Some people have moved into different phases of their lives. New people will show up to take their places.

Campaigns are about issues, organization, and mobilization, and in all of these facets the Obama campaign lays claim to considerable advantages.

Facebook, which proved so useful in 2008, has grown roughly ten-fold since. Twitter has exploded into a major channel of information. Young voters are much more socially connected than the rest of the electorate, rendering these uniquely powerful platforms.

Last time, Team Obama had to amass an organization on the fly. This time, the pieces are already there — the volunteers, the maps, the telephone lists.

“We’ve been on the ground for five years,” says Messina.

“What we’re doing on the ground this time makes last time look like Jurassic Park.”

Talk to young people immersed in the Obama campaign and they assure you that their peers will ultimately deliver the votes. Yes, they say, many people are restive. Yes, this election feels more like a choice between two politicians with competing visions than a transcendent event. But the visions differ enormously, and the stakes are high.

“I don’t think anybody thinks things would be better without Obama, but they are not happy about how things are,” says Spencer Hattemer, who took a hiatus from college in 2008 to work for the Obama campaign

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Matt and Meghan Gilliland, who supported Obama in 2008, are dissatisfied with his presidency and threw their support behind Ron Paul in 2012.

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as a staff organizer in Ohio, Indiana and West Virginia, and who recently wrapped up a stint as a volunteer in Colorado.

“It was cool to be an Obama supporter in ‘08, and now it’s cool to have a critique: ‘Well, I think he should do this.’ But they’re still going to vote.”

Austin Gilmore, president of the Young Democrats at UNCChapel Hill, pushes back against what he divines as a condescending assumption folded into the expectations of lower youth turnout: that those who supported Obama last time naively embraced him as a political messiah, and have since lost faith in miracles, eschewing politics.

“People don’t give young people enough credit,” he says.

“Obama didn’t fix every problem that we have in four years, but he did the best he could in terms of dealing with the obstructions of the Republicans in Congress, and the horrible economy he inherited from George W. Bush. A lot of the disappointment comes from people who had unrealistic expectations.”

Direct and amiable, Gilmore boils politics down to execution. He puts stock in the Obama machine and takes comfort that it not only remains, but has been upgraded.

Local Democratic operatives have told him “money will be very accessible” for a sustained effort at generating turnout, he says. Canvassers possess detailed voting histories of residents laid out across maps, allowing them to focus the “90-percenters” — those most likely to vote. A program called CallFire allows the campaign to run call centers remotely.

“We’re all used to technology and we can do it fast,” he says.

“If you can just get ten energized students, that beats 50 normal people.”

Two weeks earlier, the president had come to UNC, and students stood in line on a drizzly day for hours to see him speak inside Carmichael Arena, the building in which Michael Jordan played college basketball.

Three days before he arrived, Gilmore used Twitter to put out a request for 150 volunteers. An hour later, he had more than he needed, he says.

“People are pumped about Obama,” he says.

Still, random conversations with students on the Chapel Hill campus — an architectural study in warm light filtering through trees onto brick — produce the sense that enthusiasm for the president is at best muted.

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AP PHOTO/DAVID SMITH

Four years ago, when he was undergraduate, Thomas Ginn and everyone he knew got swept up in the Obama campaign.

“Friends who weren’t even interested in politics were all very intrigued,” he says.

These days, everything looks different. “I’m kind of disillusioned with American politics,” says Ginn, who is about to enroll in graduate school. “It’s all about making the other party look bad, and not what’s best

for the country.”

A self-described progressive, he will definitely vote for Obama, but not with pleasure.

“He can’t run on the same inspirational platform of hope and change,” Ginn says. “He can’t possibly say he’s going to change Washington. He can’t use those same inspirational new-kid-onthe-block, let’s-all-do-this-together lines that worked so well last time, because he’s already in office. It’s more difficult to get

An Ohio State University student boards a shuttle outside a Columbus, Ohio, polling place in 2008.

people excited. He was a celebrity as much as he was a political candidate. He doesn’t have that anymore.”

IT’S JUST SO COOL Obama does have one thing that might provoke enough enthusiasm to extend his presidency: an extraordinary ability to connect with his audience; an ability that sometimes seems to eclipse setpiece battles over issues. This is something the campaign intends to draw on in sending Obama to campuses far and wide.

On issues alone, Joseph Terrell personifies why Obama may be in danger. Terrell grew up in High Point, N.C., the childhood home of jazz legend John Coltrane. He plays guitar in a folkbluegrass band called the Mipso Trio. Clean-cut, confident and intelligent, he seems like the sort of guy with whom almost anyone might plausibly be friends. In 2008, Terrell took time off from school to go work for the Democratic party. He was supposed to begin his freshman year at UNCChapel Hill, but getting Obama elected took precedence.

“I felt the same excitement everyone else did,” he says. “I was blown away by him.”

Once Obama took office, Terrell began to see him as a clas-

sic politician for whom political expedience dictates all.

“I don’t think Obama’s stuck to his guns on important issues,” he says, rattling off a list — Guantanamo, same-sex marriage, foregoing public financing of his campaign so he can raise unlimited cash. “He’s compromised not as a means, but as an end.”

Terrell is not planning to volunteer this time. When he looks back on his role in the last campaign, he feels used.

“It seemed like he wanted to win in 2008 by energizing young voters, but now he wants to win by not disappointing older white voters,” he says. “I feel taken for granted.”

As North Carolina’s primary approached in early May, Terrell was besieged by e-mails from the Obama campaign reminding him to vote, though Obama was the only name on the Democratic ballot. Terrell and his friends were focused on a different part of the ballot: a constitutional amendment codifying the state’s ban on gay marriage, which passed overwhelmingly. Facebook was jammed with entreaties from students to vote the amendment down, but Obama’s e-mails did not even mention the issue, much to Terrell’s consternation.

“If you’re going to ask for

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HE WAS INTELLIGENT, CLEVER AND TOTALLY COMPOSED. I KNOW I’M ONLY 22, BUT I STILL REMEMBER WELL WHEN OUR PRESIDENT WASN’T ANY OF THOSE THINGS.

my support, you ought to do it by appealing to my sentiments on issues that I care about,” he says. “I think he’ll be hard pressed to win the state.”

Yet when Obama came to Chapel Hill in late April, joining the comedian and television host Jimmy Fallon for a taping of his show, Terrell went for a look.

There was the president, comfortably hanging out as Fallon displayed a picture of him when he was a student at Occidental College. They joked about his Afro and a jacket Obama said he bought at the Goodwill. Fallon noted the couch covered with a sheet, and the dying spider plant in the corner. Obama talked about the milk crates that must have been there.

Then Obama shifted into serious mode, discussing the need to make college more affordable, while working his own family into the conversation — some-

— Joseph Terrell

thing every politician tries to do, but rarely as naturally.

“We didn’t finish paying off all our student loans until about eight years ago,” Obama said, drawing a gasp from Fallon. He noted his fight with Congress over the looming increase of interest rates on student loans.

None of this changed Terrell’s intellectual assessment of Obama. But it tapped into something visceral — the thing that Obama is going to need a lot of.

“He was intelligent, clever and totally composed,” Terrell says. “I know I’m only 22, but I still remember well when our president wasn’t any of those things. I left thinking, ‘Man, it’s just so cool that this guy’s the president.’ He’s all the things I would want in a president.

He hasn’t done all the things I would like him to do, but he still is that person.”

INDIE PRODUCERS WRESTLE WITH

BIG DREAMS AND SMALL BUDGETS BY MICHAEL HOGAN

PHOTOGRAPHS

BY ALIYA NAUMOFF

IT IS FEBRUARY.

It is the Academy Awards (your first time at the Academy Awards). Christopher Plummer is favored to win an Oscar for a ripe performance as a gay widower in your movie (your first movie nominated for an Oscar). And everyone asks if you think Plummer will thank you.

YOU ARE THE PRODUCERS of Beginners, Lars Knudsen and Jay Van Hoy, and you answer “no” every time. Because you are realists, and because you’ve been paying attention.

“He hadn’t in any speech prior to that,” says Van Hoy. Plummer, as anticipated, overlooks you. But you’re still satisfied, because you were the guys who said “yes” to Mike Mills after every other producer had passed on his script for Beginners.

People worried that the story — based on Mills’ experience with his own father — was too intimate, and that Mills, who is both a writer and director, was too hard to corral. You disagreed.

“The way we looked at it was, this thing is so personal to him, there’s no way he’s going to let anyone down,” Knudsen recalls. “He’s not going to let his father down.”

You had no money or connections of your own when you got into the business and you started off as interns in the demanding — ummm, frightening — hothouse known as Scott Rudin Productions.

Rudin, the Emmy-, Grammy-, Oscar- and Tony-winning producer of The Social Network and True Grit, is infamous for dropping the axe on assistants — or throwing a phone at them — when he thinks their work doesn’t measure up.

One of you, Knudsen, even-

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tually became Rudin’s executive assistant, and he once fired you 16 times in a single day, but you emerged from all of that with a powerful admirer and partner.

“Lars was unbelievably industrious and smart and fun, and incredibly ambitious,” Rudin says. “I think they’re both super talented guys.”

Rudin gave you a deal with enough money to rent an office and pay an assistant, and thanks in part to that you have produced more than a dozen films, most of them budgeted at $1 million or less (chump change, for example, on the set of Disney’s $250 million bomb, John Carter).

Recently, you have begun pursuing more expensive projects, while putting your own former assistants in charge of smaller films. You are, in other words, building your own road map in an industry notoriously averse to maps, to entrepreneurs, to being small and lithe and daring.

“They’re doing the hardest thing there is to do in the movie business, by far,” says Rudin. “They’re doing it all

on their own, without any institutional support. Every movie is from scratch, every movie is starting again. It’s brutally, brutally tough.”

You made Beginners for $3.4 million, and it became a modest summer hit, taking in $15 million worldwide.

Now you’re upping the ante, producing a film called Dirty White Boy about the late Wu Tang Clan rapper Ol’ Dirty Bastard’s stranger-than-fiction friendship with his last manager, a 22-year-old former VH1 intern named Jarred Weisfeld.

You have announced that Michael K. Williams — known to pop-culture addicts as the gay stickup man Omar Little in the HBO saga The Wire — will play Ol’ Dirty Bastard. The news was received with a mixture of enthusiasm (“What a combination!”) and dread (“Will they really get it right?”) within the overlapping Wu-Tang and Wire fan communities.

“It’s this beautiful harmony of icons colliding,” says Van Hoy. “It could potentially have that sacredness in a way. But that’s also enough

WE’VE HAD THIS IDEA, THAT IF WE TRUSTED EACH OTHER WE WOULD HAVE LEVERAGE IN AN INDUSTRY WHERE NOBODY TRUSTS EACH OTHER” — Jason Van Hoy

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to keep you up at night, if you’re trying to make the film. It’s so personally relevant to so many people, not the least of which are the surviving members of the Wu-Tang Clan and everybody who knew them.”

“It’s kind of like, we’d better not fuck this up.”

You plan to work tirelessly to avoid fucking things up, and you plan to work smart, squeezing as much as possible from your limited resources. You’ll find ways to reassure would-be investors that they won’t have to sell their first-edition Pulp Fic-

tion posters if things go awry, if the road map tears.

You also need to remember that you have a style and an ethos that puts actors and filmmakers at ease.

With your hipster beards and Williamsburg digs, you’re not so different from the musicians, writers and artists who have colonized this New York City borough where you work and live.

“From the beginning,” says Van Hoy, “we’ve had this idea, that if we trusted each other we would have leverage in an industry where nobody trusts anybody.”

Ewan McGregor and Christopher Plummer in Mike Mills’ Beginners

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The Oscar Knife Fight

Not many kids dream of being producers when they grow up. But Lars Knudsen, now 33, knew. He knew when he was a teenager living in Aarhus, Denmark’s second largest city, that he wanted to make movies. “I knew I didn’t want to direct, I can’t write, I’m not going to be an actor,” he says. “I knew that producers enable films to get made, and that’s something that stayed with me.”

Knudsen, whose mother is American, moved to New York in 2001 with a simple objective: to secure an internship working for Scott Rudin. Knudsen had read about Rudin’s explosive temper and tendency to unload on his assistants, and that’s exactly what attracted him.

“If I was as an intern, if I was there every day from early morning to evening, I knew there would be a window at some point where an assistant would get fired and I could step in,” Knudsen explains. “And that’s kind of what happened.”

Jay Van Hoy, 36, grew up in

Galveston, Texas, and studied film at the University of Texas at Austin.

He was already working as an assistant for Rudin when Knudsen arrived. “In that world, it was very much about pleasing the assistants,” Knudsen says, “so my first impression of Jay was, like, he needs to like me.”

“What I remember,” says Van Hoy, “was that he would just be there until 9 p.m. He would be there as long as we were. And the reason, it turned out, why he was hanging around the office was that he was living in a hostel across the street, on 45th Street.”

On the surface, the pair were nothing alike. Fairhaired and slightly built, Knudsen has a Scandinavian aversion to being the center of attention. (The photo shoot for this article was sheer torture for him.) Van Hoy is tall, burly, dark-haired and at ease with the sound of his own voice. But when they met they had one thing in common: unlike the vast majority of 20-somethings in New York, they knew what they wanted

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COURTESY LARS KNUDSEN AND JAY VAN HOY

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and were prepared to do what it took to get it.

It was late on a Friday night when Knudsen finally found an opportunity to prove his worth to Rudin. The producer was on his way home when he noticed that his weekend “take-home” bin — a postal basket piled high with scripts, videos, books, and other homework items — was sitting on Knudsen’s desk instead of on the doorstep of Rudin’s apartment, where it was supposed to be waiting for him.

Knudsen had messed up.

“He does what he does and gets upset with me,” Knud-

sen says, “and I just tell him, ‘Don’t worry, it’ll be there before you get home.’ And that’s obviously ridiculous, because he’s leaving now and the car’s waiting for him and I’m still here.”

As soon as Rudin left, Knudsen hoisted the bin and sprinted the long block from 7th Avenue to 8th Avenue, hailed a taxi and raced to Rudin’s apartment on the Upper West Side. Somehow, he beat the boss home — barely. He took the elevator to Rudin’s apartment, dropped off the bin, and then rode back down.

“And when the doors

LEFT: Lars

Knudsen (center) and Jay Van Hoy (right) after a day of skiing in 2003.

RIGHT: Jay Van Hoy (left) and Lars Knudsen (right) enjoying a poolside breakfast in Los Angeles for the 2003 Academy Awards.

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open, he’s standing there,” Knudsen says. “And he takes two steps back, and there’s some other people that live in the apartment, and he’s like, ‘Did you guys see that?’

From that moment on, he saw me in a different way.”

If Knudsen was obsessed with making an impression, Van Hoy was focused on hoovering up as much information as possible. Before working for Rudin, he had interned for a production company called The Shooting Gallery, where he’d spent all day every day filing legal papers — but not before reading them start to finish.

After three months with Rudin, he took an internship at Killer Films, the indie studio founded by Christine Vachon, because “there were no doors in the office and you could hear everything that went on. I figured I could learn a thing or two.”

Vachon was impressed enough to ask Van Hoy to coordinate post-production on Todd Haynes’ 2002 film, Far From Heaven.

Not long after the “take-

home bin” incident, Rudin made Knudsen his executive assistant, an experience the younger man likens (apologetically) to Ralph Macchio’s training in The Karate Kid: “He pushes you and pushes you. I think you don’t know until you leave what it is that you learned.”

“What I learned working for Rudin,” adds Van Hoy, “was that you’d better find your limitations before he does. If he finds them, you’re fucked.”

Eventually, Rudin put Knudsen in charge of the publicity and awards campaign for Stephen Daldry’s The Hours. “It was just fascinating to see how political the race is,” Knudsen recalls. “It was the year of Harvey and Scott.”

Rudin had developed The Hours with Paramount, but Harvey Weinstein, then in his glory as the head of Miramax, controlled foreign distribution. The two larger-than-life producers went to war after Rudin got the picture into the Venice Film Festival and Weinstein, who hated the score and Nicole Kidman’s

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KRISTEN MURPHY / GETTY IMAGES

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prosthetic nose, yanked it back out. As payback, Rudin sent the struggling ex-smoker a crate of cigarettes.

“I was there for that,” Knudsen says. “Contrary to the rumors, the note said ‘Thank you,’ not, like, ‘Fuck you, die.’”

The contest for Best Picture, he adds, “was between The Hours and Chicago, and all of a sudden The Pianist came from nowhere and took all the momentum. And it was like, ‘OK, no point in spending more money.’” (Nicole Kidman went on to win Best Actress for her portrayal of Vir-

ginia Woolf in The Hours.)

Having a front-row seat at the Oscar knife fight was amusing enough, but what Knudsen really craved was experience on the set of a movie. He got it in 2003, when Jonathan Demme’s remake of The Manchurian Candidate came to New York.

Rudin, who produced the film, granted Knudsen’s request for a job as assistant production coordinator.

“I know that the production manager and coordinator were not happy about that at all, because I sort of became this ‘must hire,’” Knudsen

Lars Knudsen and Jay Van Hoy attend the Producers Luncheon at the Sundance House during the 2011 Sundance Film Festival on January 23, 2011 in Park City, Utah.

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recalls, “but I became very close with them.”

All this time, Knudsen and Van Hoy were looking for a way to become independent producers in their own right.

They knew they needed to gain experience in every aspect of a film’s life, and now, thanks to Knudsen’s experience on The Manchurian Candidate, they were close.

“We thought at one point that we would partner up with all these other young people that wanted to produce and get some land in Jersey or something,” Knudsen recalls, “but no one really wanted to quit their jobs and go do it with us. Jay and I were the only ones. So we just said, ‘O.K., let’s do it.’”

I’m Not Celebrating Christmas

Developing a project from scratch would take months, even years, so Knudsen and Van Hoy set out in search of a filmmaker, with a script, who was willing to take a chance on two would-be producers who didn’t know what they were doing.

In the spring of 2003, Van

Hoy was volunteering for a non-profit called Cinematexas, screening student films, when he came across Gretchen & the Night Danger, a short about an awkward high school girl. Lars watched the film and liked it too, and the partners made a pitch to the filmmaker, an Austin-based writer/director named Steve Collins: let us help you turn your short into a feature film.

After numerous trips to Austin to scout locations and recruit a crew, Van Hoy and Knudsen put the budget at $350,000 — a modest sum in filmmaking terms that still proved murderously difficult to raise. They had no stars, no experience, and no idea how to find serious investors.

“We made a list of people we knew who we thought had money,” Knudsen says.

“I remember sending it out to friends of my parents, and then you realize that this is the real world and of course they’re not going to give you $15,000 or $20,000.”

“We chased down every single possible lead,” adds Van Hoy.

COMING UP RUDIN

“WHAT I LEARNED WORKING FOR RUDIN WAS THAT YOU’D BETTER FIND YOUR LIMITATIONS BEFORE HE DOES. IF HE FINDS THEM, YOU’RE FUCKED.”

—Van Hoy on Rudin

“HE PUSHES YOU AND PUSHES YOU. I THINK YOU DON’T KNOW UNTIL YOU LEAVE WHAT IT IS THAT YOU LEARNED.”

— Knudsen on Rudin

“THEY’RE DOING THE HARDEST THING THERE IS TO DO IN THE MOVIE BUSINESS,

BY FAR. THEY’RE DOING IT ALL ON THEIR OWN.”

— Rudin on Van Hoy and Knudsen

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THE INDIE WAY TOP: A scene

from Steve Collins’ 2006 film Gretchen, Van Hoy and Knudsen’s first feature production.

CENTER: Ben Foster and Lubna Azabal in Braden King’s Here.

BOTTOM: Ellen Burstyn and Martin Landau in Nik Fackler’s Lovely, Still.

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Van Hoy and Knudsen were collecting unemployment checks, and their benefits were set to run out on December 31, 2004. If they didn’t have their funding by then, they’d have to give up and go back to work.

The bleakest moment came on Christmas Day, when a prospective investor who had been stringing them along for weeks sent an email saying that he had opted out.

“That’s when I made my mom cry,” Knudsen recalls.

“She called from Denmark, like, ‘Merry Christmas,’ all that stuff. I just said, ‘Look, I’m not celebrating Christmas today.’”

But the following week, something miraculous happened: a fellow aspiring producer named Anish Savjani came through with the funding they needed. The deal was sealed on New Year’s Eve and filming began on Van Hoy’s 30th birthday, February 27, 2005. The shoot was hectic but successful, and as the year drew to a close, it looked as if Gretchen might take off.

“Everyone was like, ‘This is

the next Napoleon Dynamite.

You guys, you’ve made it.

This is gonna be a big thing.

You’re going to get into Sundance,’” Knudsen recalls.

By then, he and Van Hoy had signed on as producers of two smaller films that were in post-production: Old Joy, a haunting tale of two old friends who spend a weekend reconnecting in the woods near Portland, Ore., directed

by Kelly Reichardt; and Wild Tigers I Have Known, an experimental film about a crossdressing 13-year-old boy, directed by Cam Archer.

Knudsen and Van Hoy got a memorable lesson in the fickleness of the film world when Sundance turned Gretchen down — and accepted Old Joy and Wild Tigers to the festival’s new, cutting-edge Frontier section. “That’s when we knew we wanted to be very active and have several films in production at the same time,” says Knudsen. “If you juggle a lot of things, every day you get good news. You may get a lot of bad news, but there’s one thing that’s good.”

After that, the pieces of

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18 20 100 80%

Total days spent shooting (3 6-day weeks)

Crew members

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Industry minimum wage day rate

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their producing career began falling into place. Rudin, who was entering into a new deal with Miramax, came to them with an offer that would rescue the partners from the existential anxiety of the previous winter. In exchange for an upfront fee, they would serve as his eyes and ears in the independent film world.

The arrangement gave them extraordinary access to emerging filmmakers eager for Rudin’s attention. And, it forced Knudsen and Van Hoy to take a systematic approach

to surveying the landscape of independent film. “We recognized Mumblecore a full six months before it was called anything,” Van Hoy says, referring to the loose collective of D.I.Y. filmmakers whose talky, ultra-low-budget creations had a media moment last decade. “Our report was called ‘The Movement That Has No Name.’”

The Trick To Making Movies

Knudsen has a saying he likes to repeat: “We want to make films, not talk about

LEFT: The Wire

actor, Michael K Williams, will play the late Wu Tang Clan rapper Ol’ Dirty Bastard in Old Dirty White Boy. RIGHT: Rapper Ol’ Dirty Bastard in 2003.

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making them.”

In some ways, making films is easier than ever before.

Last year alone, Ed Burns produced an entire feature for $9,000 and Gena Rowlands starred in a movie that was shot entirely on a cell phone. But even with digital technology driving down costs across the board, it’s no small feat to make a feature film for under $1 million.

A typical six-figure-budget film will be shot over three six-day weeks — 18 days in all — with a handful of actors and between 12 and 20 crew members, all earning the industry minimum of $100 a day. Working with a smaller crew and fewer locations can limit food, housing, and equipment rental costs, and shooting on digital video instead of film can save an additional $50,000 to $150,000. Schedules are so tightly packed that a single setback can send ripples throughout the production.

Producers, if they know what they’re doing, don’t set budgets so low arbitrarily.

Like other independents,

Knudsen and Van Hoy work hard to gauge each film’s earning potential, using foreign sales estimates as a guide. (Foreign film markets are more transparent – and somewhat more reliable – than domestic ones.) The goal is to protect as much of the investment as possible; 80 percent is covered by foreign sales estimates, another 15 to 20 by tax subsidies or incentives. Whatever’s left over has to be accepted as pure risk by investors.

Unfortunately, the same technological revolution that has pushed down the costs of production has also cratered the market for original films, as viewers around the world turn away from DVDs in favor of a vast selection of cheap or free entertainment offerings presented on a bewildering array of platforms.

Unless they feature exploding robots or are based on popular young-adult book franchises, most movies today can’t drum up enough market interest to justify budgets of more than $5 million.

For industry veterans —

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even scrappy ones like Christine Vachon — the transition has been painful. “The downward pressure on budgets is extreme, and we have to be insanely prolific to scratch out a living,” Vachon says. “And I’m not exaggerating: we are scratching out a living.”

Knudsen and Van Hoy missed the good times altogether, which is arguably to their advantage. “At least we don’t know what we’re missing,” Knudsen says. Their early films all cost $1 million or less, so a $3-5 million budget feels positively luxurious to them. That comfort level, in turn, allows them to view today’s obligatory num-

ber-crunching as an exercise in liberation. If Hollywood, tethered as it is to scale and predictability, can’t afford to tell original stories anymore, says Van Hoy, “for me, that’s an opportunity. There is a market for it.”

The trick to making movies, then, as opposed to talking about making them, is setting the budget low enough that you can raise the money quickly and then launch into production.

“They take no pleasure in limitations,” says actor Ben Foster (Six Feet Under), who worked closely with Knudsen while filming Here, in which he played a map maker

Lars Knudsen (left) and Jay Van Hoy (right) in the Parts & Labor office in Williamsburg, Brooklyn.

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who embarks on a road trip across Armenia. “But they are tremendously creative.

And where one producer would say, ‘Well, we have to cut this scene, we don’t have it in the budget,’ Jay and Lars will collaborate with the director on how best to obtain the values, the quality, the aesthetic, the mood, whatever is needed, in a new and different way.”

Foster got a firsthand taste of just how committed Knudsen is to a filmmaker’s vision during a day of shooting on Armenia’s tense border with Iran. The production had applied for permission to shoot over the border into Iran, but the clearances never arrived.

The scene called for Foster to drive a truck along the border, but the actor didn’t have his passport, so Knudsen — who had been warned that there could be trouble with secret police active at the border — stepped in and took the wheel. Not shooting the scene, he says, “was never an option.”

Others share a similar fondness for Knudsen and

Van Hoy. “There are a lot of producers who are jerks,” says the Oscar-winning actor Martin Landau, who starred in a little-seen Parts and Labor gem called Lovely, Still, a love story about two elderly neighbors. “These two guys are creative producers at a time when most producers are basically money raisers and not filmmakers. These guys care about the product.”

The philosophy of making movies, not talking about making them, is one of the things that persuaded Mike Mills to sign up with Parts and Labor. “Beginners was such a personal film for Mike,” Knudsen recalls, “and a film that he needed to make next — he couldn’t not make it. And we said, ‘We’ll get it made. If we have to make it for a million dollars in Portland, we’ll make it.’ And I think that gave him some reassurance that we weren’t just going to play the game of having to attach an actor of a certain value to get the film financed.”

They ended up getting just

WORDS TO WORK BY

“WE WANT TO MAKE FILMS, NOT TALK ABOUT MAKING THEM.”

— Lars Knudson

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such an actor after Mills’ agent, Rich Klubeck of United Talent Agency, spotted Ewan McGregor at the ski lift in Park City during Sundance. “Rich pitched him the whole script on the gondola,” Van Hoy says.

Rudin helped arrange a meeting with Christopher Plummer in New York, and before long the film was financed to the tune of $3.4 million, thanks to an injection of cash from Olympus Pictures. “It was very intimate,” Knudsen says of the shoot. “The actors never used their trailers. They were always on the set, and

I think that was a refreshing experience for them.”

Beginners debuted at the Toronto International Film Festival in September 2010, where Focus Features picked it up. The distributor was hoping to repeat the success it had just enjoyed with The Kids Are All Right, Lisa Cholodenko’s film about a lesbian couple thrown into turmoil when one partner has a heterosexual affair.

That movie hit theaters in July, a time when multiplexes are dominated by aliens and vampires, and caught fire at the box office, earning $20.8

The cast and crew of Braden King’s Here traveled cross-country during production of this landscapeobsessed road film, the first American feature to be shot in Armenia.

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million in the U.S. and another $13 million abroad.

But other studios had taken note as well, and the June 2011 release of Beginners was overshadowed by two surprise hits, Woody Allen’s Midnight in Paris and Terence Malick’s Tree of Life. So Beginners earned just $5.8 million at home. “Midnight in Paris just blew us away,” Knudsen says.

Still, it was immediately evident that Plummer would be the man to beat at the Oscars. According to the oldschool producers’ handbook,

Knudsen and Van Hoy should have summoned thunderbolts from the sky when Plummer left their names out of his acceptance speeches. But instead, they took it in stride.

“The only reason I felt it was because we knew our parents were watching the Academy Awards, and all they gave a shit about was whether he was going to say our name,” says Van Hoy. “What I learned was not to take that stuff so seriously.”

And though Plummer may not have thanked them by

Director Braden King (right), producer Lars Knudsen (center) and 1st AD Chris Carroll (left) on the set of Here as a massive blanket of fog is about to sweep across the Armenian countryside, making filming impossible.

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name, his eventual victory gave the producers something far more valuable.

“There’s interest in us in a new way,” says Van Hoy. “It demonstrates that we’re capable of producing a film that will be recognized by the Academy, and that we’re able to do it on films that aren’t so expensive.”

Those Days Are Over

Last October, your deal with Scott Rudin expired. Rudin had moved to Sony and no longer needed all that granular intelligence you provided about the indie world.

You make up the difference by cutting a first-look deal with a foreign-sales company based in Germany. In addition to powering the lights and paying the assistant, the arrangement helps you improve your foreign-sales estimates and provide your investors with even more accurate forecasts.

Now you have to find a financier — be it a studio, hedge fund, or anybody with deep pockets who loves independent films — so you

can stop shaking your tin cup every time you want to make a movie. You’re also planning to launch a sister business in Denmark to take advantage of European subsidies. You wouldn’t mind becoming the go-to guys for Scandinavian directors looking to make international films in English.

You have five films due to be released this year — among them, Shit Year, starring Ellen Barkin as an actress who retires from the business, and The Loneliest Planet, with Gael Garcia Bernal and newcomer Hani Furstenberg as backpacking newlyweds — and at least eight more in the works, including Dirty White Boy, which will be directed by commercial and music-video veteran Joaquin Baca Acey; Ain’t Them Bodies Saints, a modern Western with Casey Affleck, Rooney Mara and Ben Foster; The Womb, directed by New Queer Cinema pioneer Gregg Araki; and Red Light Winter, New York writer/director Adam Rapp’s $3.5 million adaptation of his own stage play, starring Kirsten Dunst.

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“THESE TWO GUYS ARE CREATIVE PRODUCERS AT A TIME WHEN MOST PRODUCERS ARE BASICALLY MONEY RAISERS AND NOT FILMMAKERS. THESE GUYS CARE ABOUT THE PRODUCT.”

— Martin Landau

Knudsen (left) and Van Hoy (right) outside their Tem Brooklyn qui dis arion non seruptur Parts ab &illam Labor eum ipsum seritis ra pro office endesti in Brooklyn. sequi dolorro id experciti

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“I feel like I couldn’t be in better hands for a project like this,” says Rapp, whose film is being co-produced by Rudin and Parts and Labor. “In some weird way, these guys act like they’re working nonfor-profit, and I know they’re not, but it just feels like they’re making art.”

The truth is that, like all producers, you hope for a hit that will move you out of hand-to-mouth territory once and for all.

“I think we all know that there’s a possibility for a breakout,” Van Hoy says, “and we want to be smart about it, so that if it does happen it benefits everyone who’s been involved with it.”

In your keynote speech at last year’s Sundance Film Festival Producers Luncheon, you pointed to a few examples of such “breakout” films and emphasized that too many indie producers “are too busy adapting when we should be innovating.”

You set up a new organization, the Independent Producers’ Alliance, whose goal is to get producers to col-

laborate on a range of issues, from health insurance to online distribution platforms.

“What’s come about in the past four to five years is that there’s a different kind of camaraderie among producers,” says Van Hoy. A decade ago, “there was a sense of activity in New York. There were jobs, there were people working all over the city, and assistants that did all kinds of things. And that doesn’t exist in the same way anymore. There are definitely production companies, but they’re streamlined to the point that there are three or four producers sharing an office, with a folding table in the middle of the room.”

So no, you’re not a saint.

And you’re definitely not running a charity. The truth is, there’s no room in your world for the old Hollywood bullshit. It wastes time, and it doesn’t pay.

“You can slash and burn your way through your career, but what do you have to show for it at the end?” Van Hoy asks. “I think those days are sort of over.”

IT DEMONSTRATES THAT WE’RE CAPABLE OF PRODUCING A FILM THAT WILL BE RECOGNIZED BY THE ACADEMY AND THAT WE’RE ABLE TO DO IT ON FILMS THAT AREN’T SO EXPENSIVE”

— Van Hoy on Plummer’s Oscar Win for Beginners

• WELCO ME TO UNIONTOWN •

OLD KING COAL LIVIN G AMID INDUSTRIAL SLOP

• BY •

TOM ZELLER JR. • PHOTOGRAPHS BY • DAVID BUNDY

Booker T. Gipson, 71, owns a small piece of land directly across County Road 1 from the Arrowhead landfill, just outside of Uniontown, Alabama.

He’s got a modest trailer on the property, perched on thigh-high cinder block columns, and he keeps a few head of cattle in an adjacent field.

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Rolling prairie and farmland define the local landscape, but Uniontown and its surroundings are unmistakably poor.

Off the front of the trailer he’s built a broad wooden deck, which a few years back offered views of gently rolling scrubland and low forest. Today, the deck looks out on a small mountain — now among the highest geographical features in the area.

It’s built of coal ash.

“It will just about choke you,” Gipson says of the stench that sometimes rises from the pile.

Patches of newly-planted grass and dozens of white, hookshaped gas vents now cover the artificial butte, which was formed between 2009 and 2010. In that time, roughly 4 million tons of

coal ash — sometimes known as fly ash or, more officially, as “coal combustion residuals” — were dumped here. Laced with a variety of heavy metals like arsenic, mercury and lead, it’s what’s left over after coal is burned to produce electricity, something the United States continues to do in prodigious amounts.

Public health advocates consider the stuff poison, and have been lobbying for tough federal oversight of its disposal and handling — a function currently left to a patchwork of varying state laws.

Industry representatives say the hazards of coal ash, which is often

OLD KING COAL

recycled for use in concrete and other construction materials, are overstated, and that state rules, which typically treat coal ash as non-hazardous “special” waste, are adequate.

Either way, civil rights activists say the fact that the stuff was dumped near Gipson and his neighbors — mostly poor, predominantly black — reflects a broader national problem: More than two decades after the rise of the environmental justice movement, which aspired to protect disenfranchised Americans from the illeffects of pollution, a disproportionate share of the nation’s filth continues to land on low-income and minority communities.

The coal ash at Arrowhead is the result of an accident that occurred four years ago and roughly 300 miles north, in Kingston, Tenn. An impoundment pond at a coal-burning power plant near Kingston broke through a dike and spilled more than one billion gallons of wet coal ash sludge across the surrounding land and into nearby rivers and streams.

It was one of the largest environmental disasters of its kind in U.S. history, and, as all disasters do, it set in motion a complex and troubling chain of events.

At the time of the spill, Uniontown residents had recently lost a

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legal battle to block construction of a roughly 1,000-acre municipal landfill across from Gipson’s house. The facility — modern in design and ready to be put to full use — was close to rail lines and authorized to accept municipal, industrial, commercial, construction and, crucially, “special” wastes, from states near and far.

Simply put, it was a ripe target for Kingston’s coal ash, and after weighing a handful of other proposed sites, federal officials approved a plan to bring the waste — all 4 million tons of it — to Uniontown.

Gipson and other local residents were mortified, but local politicians, including several black leaders on the Perry County Commission in Marion, Ala., located 20 miles north of Uniontown, welcomed the business — not least because it earned the county, which negotiated a $1.05-per-ton fee on the ash, a multi-million dollar windfall.

But as the stuff rolled in over the course of a year, and the mountain of ash rose up off the former prairie, Gipson and other residents living around the landfill suggest they paid a price for the lack of stronger federal oversight. Wind and rain would often disperse the ash, they say, either as a grey-white dust that

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coated their yards and fruit trees and cars, or as a pasty mud that rolled across the road and into nearby ditches and streams.

Federal and state lawsuits against the operators of the site, filed amid the coal ash deliveries, are pending. In January, Gipson and other Perry County residents also filed a civil rights complaint with the Environmental Protection Agency.

“Now here’s what my concern is,” says Gipson, who has lived most of his life in and around Uniontown, the dilapidated hamlet that is the dump’s nominal home. “I got five grandkids, and they’ll be playing out there in the yard every day. All five of them play there in the yard daily. But I don’t know what they’re going to catch from this landfill.”

“They would protect an animal before they’d protect humans.”

— Uniontown resident on environmental regulators

BUZZARDS AND DOGS

On a recent afternoon, Gipson sits on the porch of his neighbor, Dora Williams, along with Esther Calhoun, another outspoken critic of the landfill.

Staring out at the coal ash mound, all three share recollections of the parade of developers, politicians, journalists, lawyers and state and federal regulators who have drifted in an out of the area since their battle against the placement of a landfill near Uniontown began almost a decade ago. Recalling the coal ash deliveries, they talk of a year or more of relentless noise, foul odors, sore throats, watery eyes and worries about the quality of the groundwater they drink.

Though it’s quieter these days, and the stench comes less often, they bemoan the swarms of buzzards and packs of dogs that have taken a liking to the landfill — the latest insult to a country corridor that they once cherished. And they worry that it is only a matter of time before more coal ash, from some other facility in some faraway state, or even from Alabama’s slew of loosely regulated holding ponds, begins rolling in again.

Calhoun is particularly incensed with the EPA and the state’s environmental regulator, the Alabama Department of

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Environmental Management, or ADEM, which she says did little to protect them. As it happens, a coalition of environmental and public health advocates sued the EPA in April for failing to develop rules for coal ash handling.

“They would protect an animal before they’d protect humans and I think that’s terrible,” Calhoun says of environmental regulators. “They came down here, and we rode around. We took them on the whole tour. We took them down and around. And I said ‘We gonna show ‘em!’” she continues.

“Didn’t hear nothing else from them. We poured our souls out and everything to them. They just take what we got and then you never hear anything. ADEM? They didn’t do anything. They think we’re a joke or something.

“But the thing of it is,” she adds, “we just can’t give up.”

Lawsuits claiming that authorities discriminate when choosing where to locate industrial facilities — whether landfills, toxic waste repositories, chemical facilities, or other potentially polluting enterprises — typically face a tough road. Courts have traditionally set very high bars for proving that a company or regulator was intentionally biased in the selection of a site.

But Robert Bullard, dean of the

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Barbara Jordan-Mickey Leland School of Public Affairs at Texas Southern University, suggests that the practical realities of wealth and power dictate that discrimination happens all the time, and he grows animated when talking about cases like the Perry County landfill.

“The fact is that after more than two decades of intense empirical study and evidence, it is very clear that environmental racism and discrimination is real,” says Bullard, who launched his career in the late 1970’s combating the placement or “siting” of landfills in predominantly minority neighborhoods of Houston.

“There’s lots of data — hundreds of studies establishing relationships and correlations between race and class in environmental disparities. When you start looking at these studies, particularly over last 10 years — whether it’s about siting or industrial pollution, chemical use or accidents and explosions, discoveries of old waste sites, air quality, dirty air — the trends are undeniable.”

Even without the data, the mechanics of this sort of de facto discrimination aren’t difficult to understand. Affluent communities, after all, have more resources to either fight off the arrival of an unwanted industry or facility; are less likely to need whatever

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economic benefits such projects might offer; and in any case have the means to relocate to fairer, and in all likelihood, more expensive pastures should an environmental insult prove too much.

Slide down the income scale, and you’ll eventually start running into folks like Booker Gipson, who lives on a tiny Social Security payment and whatever he can muster at the stockyards for his few head of cattle — less than $10,000 even in a good year.

“If they treat me well and give me enough of the green stuff, well then I can get up and go,” Gipson says, when asked if he’d sell his property if he could. “As it is, we can’t afford to move.”

On the flip side, potential polluters tend to favor — and surely follow — paths of least resistance.

Such paths, almost by definition, more often lead to the door of folks like Gipson than to, say, a wealthy suburb of Montgomery.

An analysis by researchers from the University of Colorado, and published in 2008 in the journal Sociological Perspectives, made the income connection quite clear.

Although the results were not predictive of pollution exposures, the researchers were able to combine broad pollution data gleaned from EPA’s Toxics Release Inventory with Census-tract demographic

Light industry buoys the local economy, but the area has seen better times.

data on race and income. The study revealed an unmistakable link between declining incomes and increasing odds of living in an area of higher toxic concentration.

Even more telling: the results varied significantly by race, even when income was the same. The average black household with an income below $10,000, the researchers noted, “lives in a neighborhood with a toxic concentration value that is significantly different from — and 1.51 times as great as — the average white household in the same category.”

Those findings came as no sur-

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prise to Bullard. In 2007, along with researchers from the Universities of Michigan and Montana, and Dillard University in New Orleans, he updated a 1987 analysis of toxic waste facilities in the United States. The new report, “Toxic Wastes and Race at 20,” used Census data and distancebased analyses to reveal the characteristics of residents within the orbit of the nation’s 413 commercial hazardous waste facilities.

“The application of these new methods, which better determine where people live in relation to where hazardous sites are locat-

“After more than two decades of intense empirical study...it is very clear that environmental racism and discrimination is real.”

— Robert Bullard, Dean of the Barbara Jordan-Mickey Leland School of Public Affairs at Texas Southern University

ed, reveals that racial disparities in the distribution of hazardous wastes are greater than previously reported,” the authors noted. “In fact, these methods show that people of color make up the majority of those living in host neighborhoods within 3 kilometers (1.8 miles) of the nation’s hazardous waste facilities. Racial and ethnic disparities are prevalent throughout the country.”

ONE OF THE BEST PLACES TO DUMP GARBAGE

Bullard points to BP’s Gulf oil spill as a recent example of how the pollution-discrimination dynamic continues to work. By July of 2010, workers were soaking massive quantities of oil sludge from the waters and surrounding shores of the Gulf, and delivering the refuse — some 39,000 tons of oil-soaked turf, clothing and other debris — to several sanctioned landfills in Florida, Mississippi, Alabama and Louisiana.

Bullard examined the data at the time and discovered that more than half of the landfills were located in communities where the resident population was primarily made up of racial and ethnic minorities.

EPA officials say BP was directed to select landfills based on a variety of criteria, including prox-

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The Arrowhead landfill is permitted to receive up to 15,000 tons of municipal, industrial, commercial and construction waste — as well as “special waste” like coal ash — from nearly all of the Eastern United States.

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ENVIRONMENTAL JUSTICE? Critics say the relocations of millions of tons of coal ash from Tennessee to the Arrowhead landfill near Uniontown, Alabama was discriminatory.

UNIONTOWN

86.7%

AFRICAN-AMERICAN

ARROWHEAD LANDFILL

UNIONTOWN

RIGHT:

The portion of the population nearest the landfill that is African American,

by Census block.

SOURCES: U.S. CENSUS BUREAU; DAVID LUDDER

LESS DENSE POPULATION

imity to the spill, a facility’s history of complaints, and potential impacts on nearby low-income and minority communities, among other factors.

Still, Bullard maintains that a larger share of the total refuse generated by the spill by mid-2010 — 24,000 of 39,000 tons, or 61 percent — was being deposited in minority communities, even though blacks and other people of color make up just a quarter of the coastal population in those four states.

In late July of that year, residents of Harrison County, Miss., successfully blocked BP from using the local Pecan Grove landfill for the oil trash. Harrison is 70 percent white.

97.6%

AFRICAN-AMERICAN

MORE DENSE POPULATION

96.8%

100%

AFRICANAMERICAN

AFRICANAMERICAN

100%

AFRICANAMERICAN

The situation in Perry County, Bullard says, is not different.

“It’s a classic case of environmental injustice,” he says. “The coal ash was too dangerous to stay in east Tennessee — in what happened to be a mostly white area — so why is it OK to ship it to Perry County?

“This is happening in 2010, not 1910,” Bullard says. “The problem with all this is not the lack of evidence. The problem is, once we have all these facts, what do we do?”

Though not a direct answer to that question, Alabama’s governor, Robert Bentley, did issue an executive order in February of last year, effectively establishing a moratorium on new landfill permits until

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better procedures for issuing them — and stiffer environmental oversight — could be established.

The state legislature similarly voted to approve a two-year moratorium last May. To local critics of the waste trade, these moves could not have come too soon, and in 2010, The Mobile Press-Register hinted at why: The state was importing some 19 million tons of trash — or roughly 7.5 percent of the total national volume. This while the state itself represents under 2 percent of the nation’s population, and generates just 1.6 percent of the nation’s garbage.

“Alabama is gaining a reputation as one of the best places in the nation to dump garbage,” the newspaper declared.

Part of the reason is that local county commissions in the state have enjoyed almost absolute power in approving landfill projects. A developer keen on establishing a landfill has traditionally only needed to convince a majority of local county commissioners — often a part-time job in Alabama — to get behind a landfill proposal. From there, a permit from the Alabama Department of Environmental Management is generally smooth sailing.

In more than one instance, developers have been caught greas-

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ing the palms of local commissioners to gain their support, but in many impoverished counties, the mere promise of economic activity — any economic activity — is enough.

The Arrowhead landfill in Perry County sits at the western end of a statewide, crescent-shaped region known as the Black Belt — so-named for its rich, dark soils. Rolling prairie, farmland, and dense stands of loblolly and shortleaf pine define the landscape, but Uniontown and its surroundings are unmistakably poor.

A smattering of light industry buoys the local economy, including a cheese plant, a fish processor, catfish ponds of varying size, and small-scale agriculture and livestock sales. A full 22 percent of the population is unemployed, and 40 percent live below the poverty line, according to federal statistics.

Roughly 90 percent of the population in this part of the county — about 20 miles southwest of the county seat in Marion — is black.

In the census block areas that directly border the landfill, the population ranges anywhere from 87 to 100 percent African-American.

Talk of bringing a landfill to the area dates at least as far back as the early 1990s, when longtime county commissioner Johnny Flowers, who is black, was work-

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ing as part of a regional coalition of county leaders to establish a waste facility in the area. Flowers says the project waxed and waned until the early 2000s when private real estate developers from Atlanta showed interest in the large tract of land across from Gipson’s place and began discussing a landfill project there with Perry County commissioners.

Perhaps not surprisingly, waste handling in the state often involves a whole ecosystem of players, including out-of-town real estate developers who sometimes purchase a lot and go through the steps of obtaining a landfill permit — site surveys, hydrology profiles and so forth — only to quickly sell the site, or the permit, or both (they are often owned and sold

“Can’t nobody tell you if coal ash is toxic or not. You never get a direct answer.”

— Uniontown resident and landfill critic, Esther Calhoun

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separately) to a certified waste handler, or hire a subcontractor to actually operate the site.

Arrowhead’s original Atlantabased developers, for example, flipped the site for $12.5 million almost immediately upon obtaining the permit.

Even before that permit was granted, residents around the property say they made their opposition to the project well known at public hearings in Uniontown, though they say the commissioners in Marion never took their concerns seriously.

In one notorious episode, Albert Turner Jr., a well-heeled Perry County commissioner and the scion of Albert Turner Sr., a prominent figure in the civil rights movement, dismissed the complaints of some Uniontownarea residents as coming from “hanky-headed niggers, or should I say Negroes.”

In an interview in his Marion office — nearly every inch of wall space covered with images of Turner posing with prominent figures, including Bill Clinton and Barack Obama — Turner is unrepentant when asked about this and his reputation in Uniontown for being a bully on the landfill issue. The project was, and is, unequivocally good for Perry County and for Uniontown, he says, and if

FEATURE_UNION

Booker T. Gipson, who owns a home directly across the road from the coal-ash landfill, worries about contamination of the groundwater that feeds his well.

HUFFINGTON 06.17.12

HUFFINGTON 06.17.12

OLD KING COAL

people in that part of the county feel silenced, it’s not his fault.

“I’ve never not allowed them to talk, but I’m not going to let you talk about stuff you don’t know about,” Turner says. “You don’t know what you’re talking about, so why should you get up and dominate a meeting spreading false information?”

Flowers’ take is less confrontational, but his attitude toward local landfill opponents is clear.

“When you live in a community and they don’t have anything, they don’t know how to go about getting something,” he explains.

“If you’re in a little match box, and you stay in that match box, you can’t strike unless you get out of that match box. Every match in the match box can burn the world up, but it won’t happen unless you get out of the box. So these people are in the box.”

The commission gave its imprimatur to the landfill proposal in 2005, prompting citizens of the Uniontown area to oust Flowers the following year and end his 18-year run on the commission. A group of some of the area’s betteroff residents, many of them white, also helped finance a lawsuit citing a variety of procedural violations in the permit process.

In June 2008, just six months before the coal ash dam in Ten-

nessee would fail, a Montgomery circuit court rejected the residents’ claims and found in favor the commission and the site’s owners — at that point a pair of limited-liability companies known as Perry Uniontown Ventures I, which owned the land, and Perry County Associates, which owned the permit. Susan Copeland, a Montgomery attorney who represented the residents, says the owners must have had a high level of confidence in the outcome: They had spent the preceding years bulldozing the site and preparing it for trash delivery.

Arrowhead opened for business in 2007, before the court had even issued a decision in the case.

CAN’T NOBODY TELL YOU

At the time of the Kingston coal ash disaster, Uniontown itself was in particularly dire straits. Creditors, including electric utilities, were harassing the village, according to Mayor Jamaal Hunter and county commissioner Turner, and both the state of Alabama and the federal Internal Revenue Service had placed liens on the city’s tax revenues. Uniontown was also facing action from ADEM officials over its sewer system, which was failing due to lack of maintenance.

According to the EPA, which was overseeing TVA’s emergency

FEATURE_UNION

HUFFINGTON 06.17.12

“That city was swamped in debt,” Perry County commissioner Albert Turner Jr., says of Uniontown. “It was on the verge of the lights and telephone being cut off.”

response to the Kingston spill, several sites in Alabama, Georgia, Pennsylvania and Tennessee were considered as destinations for the coal ash being dredged out the Emory River there. Arrowhead, which was then operated by a subsidiary of Knoxville-based land development and construction firm Phillips & Jordan, was deemed the best option by both TVA and the EPA — not least because of its large capacity, its modern containment and monitoring systems, and its proximity to a Norfolk Southern rail line, which would obviate the need for a massive convoy of coal-ash laden trucks on area roads.

TVA entered into a $95 million

contract with P&J to bring the ash to Uniontown.

Turner, meanwhile, says the decision was a no-brainer for the county. It delivered roughly $4 million to the commission’s coffers through a $1.05 per-ton fee, effectively doubling the Perry County budget in the space of a year.

At least $300,000 went directly to Uniontown to help balance its books.

“That city was swamped in debt,” Turner says. “It was on the verge of the lights and telephone being cut off. The city employees didn’t have insurance. That city was held together by hay string.”

The facility also employed dozens of local residents, earning

OLD KING COAL

between $12 and $20 per hour — good wages for the area — while the coal ash was being delivered.

Most of those jobs are now gone, and the landfill employs fewer than 10 people, although that number may go up if more coal ash can be found, something that Turner and other supporters are unabashedly hoping will happen.

Gipson and other residents argue that there were other ways of generating income for the area — including investing in tourism or outdoor recreation. Uniontown, they point out, is just 30 miles down the road from Selma, the birthplace of the civil rights movement, and it also has rich potential as a hunting and fishing corridor. Even if these wouldn’t amount to much, they argue, no one bothered to ask them whether they would mind if the landfill they never wanted in the first place suddenly became, in addition to a household waste facility, the final destination for millions of tons of coal ash.

“They can see that landfill right here in the people’s face,” Calhoun says, gesturing to the mountain across the road. “You can see how close it is. Can’t nobody tell you — they can’t tell you if coal ash is toxic or not. You never get a direct answer.”

In a conversation with The

HUFFINGTON 06.17.12

Huffington Post, Scott Hughes, a spokesman for the Alabama Department of Environmental Management, and Phil Davis, head of the agency’s Solid Waste Division, explained that the coal ash was carefully segregated from other waste streams, as per EPA requirements, and that odds were slim that any coal ash wafted offsite or otherwise migrated onto surrounding properties.

They were less clear about whether the stuff poses a health risk:

HUFFINGTON: Is coal ash a concern

for human health? That’s what I’m asking you.

PHIL DAVIS: It’s not a hazardous waste.

SCOTT HUGHES: I cannot answer that question. The only thing I can say is that our responsibility is to issue permits that are protective of human health and the environment. And then ensure that we have a field presence to ensure that facilities are operating in compliance with those permits.

H: I don’t mean to belabor the point, but as the Department of Environmental Management, which also takes into consideration the protection of human health, ADEM must have some opinion or thought on whether coal ash is safe?

OLD KING COAL

SH: I cannot answer that question H: Phil, is that something you can

answer?

PD: It’s not a hazardous waste.

H: Ok, so to the extent that it’s not classified as a hazardous waste, there should be no public health concern?

PD: You said that, Tom, I didn’t.

H: Well, what would you say?

PD: I would say what Scott said.

To be sure, the safety of coal ash is a hotly debated topic and to date, it remains unregulated at the federal level. Until last year, Alabama had no rules for coal ash at all.

A combination of increased elec-

“This is all we have.

Nobody seems to care, but let me tell you that this is only the beginning. You can listen or wait ‘til later to see what happens.”

— Esther Calhoun, a Uniontown resident, addresses regulators

HUFFINGTON 06.17.12

tricity demand and better pollution controls, which now capture many of the noxious constituents that, in previous years, would have been spewed into the air over the nation’s coal burning power plants, have led to a precipitous rise in the amount of coal ash produced.

The United States produces more than 130 million tons of coal ash annually, according to the American Coal Ash Association, an industry group. Roughly 43 percent of that is used as an additive in concrete products, bricks, shingles and other materials.

The rest has been traditionally deposited in loosely regulated landfills, or unlined holding pond systems like one that failed in Kingston, and environmental groups have busied themselves documenting the slow leaching of coal ash constituents, including arsenic and other heavy metals, into the groundwater surrounding such storage sites.

In the aftermath of the Kingston spill, the EPA revisited the coal ash issue in earnest, and in 2010, it proposed two options for bringing the waste material under the purview of the Resource Conservation and Recovery Act, the 1976 legislation that sets rules for the disposal of both non-hazardous and hazardous wastes in the United States.

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OLD KING COAL

Under the first option, coal ash — which can include a wide range of waste materials like fly ash, bottom ash and others — would be treated as a “special waste” under Subtitle C of RCRA, which governs hazardous wastes. A second option would deal with the material under Subtitle D of the statute, which governs non-hazardous wastes.

The coal ash industry opposes both of these regulatory designations and has lobbied hard to block them, claiming, among other things, that the combination of increased costs and attending higher electricity rates would result in as many as 316,000 lost jobs across the economy, and as much as $110 billion in lost economic activity over a 20-year period.

The industry has spent millions making their case on Capitol Hill, and Republicans in both houses introduced bills last year that would effectively strip the EPA of its ability to oversee coal ash disposal.

On April 5, a group of 11 environmental and public health groups sued the EPA in an attempt to force the issue, arguing that federal oversight of coal ash is “long overdue.”

By nearly all accounts, the Arrowhead landfill boasts the very latest containment technologies, including thick layers of com-

Residents say coal ash dust went airborne as it was being unloaded into the landfill, coating their homes and local vegetation with a fine, ashen dust.

Landfill supporters say that’s unlikely.

pacted soil, high-tech plastic liners and a modern system for collecting leachate, the foul liquid that percolates through decomposing piles of trash. Federal rules for handling coal ash, should they ever be promulgated, would almost certainly direct the nation’s coal waste, which has to go somewhere, to facilities like Arrowhead.

Supporters of the landfill also argue that Arrowhead sits above a particularly advantageous geologic formation, known as the Selma Chalk, which is a thick and nearly impermeable stratum of limestone sitting hundreds of feet above the

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OLD KING COAL

water table. That, in addition to Arrowhead’s own safety features, make dangers to the groundwater supply minimal, backers say.

ADEM officials also point out that the site has 13 groundwater monitoring wells currently in place, and that quarterly tests are conducted to ensure the water table is not impacted. Officials say they also measure air quality and explosive gas levels around the site.

But landfill operators themselves submit all of this information to ADEM for review. While the agency has the ability to conduct its own sampling, according to spokesman Scott Hughes, it does not generally do so -- nor has it made an independent review of the constituents of coal ash.

When asked if ADEM considers the demographics of an area — race, ethnicity, income — as part of its technical review of permit application, Hughes says no.

“That information,” he says, “is not part of the application process.”

At a recent public hearing with state environmental regulators in the basement of Uniontown city hall, a few dozen residents from around the area gather to hear ADEM describe a request from the landfill’s operators to modify its current permit so a new part of Arrowhead can be opened to receive trash.

A few residents hold homemade signs. One reads “Stop Black Land Loss.”

Booker Gipson, stands in the back of the room saying little. He’s holding a placard that reads “Stop Dumping on Uniontown.”

Other residents take to a microphone at the front of the room to offer their thoughts on the permit modification. Few stick to the script, instead issuing a litany of bitter condemnations, desperate pleas, and occasional warnings.

“What if this was your home?”

Esther Calhoun demands of the ADEM presenters, all of whom are white. In keeping with rules for such events, the officials could only sit and listen, without response. “This is all that we have, Calhoun says. “I mean, nobody seems to care, but let me tell you that this is only the beginning.

You can listen or you can wait ‘til later to see what happens. Someone has to open their eyes.

“It’s time to step up and listen to what the people say,” she adds.

“We are the people.”

RIGHTS AND WRONGS

David Ludder, a Florida-based environmental attorney, currently represents area residents in two lawsuits originally filed in Alabama state and federal courts. They charge Phillips & Jordan and its

FEATURE_UNION

HUFFINGTON 06.17.12

Esther Calhoun, a local landfill opponent, says the mountain of coal ash is testament to the failure of environmental regulators.

subsidiary with a variety of violations, including failure to prevent gag-inducing odors and flying ash from migrating outside the facility and into the surrounding community. The progress of those suits was slowed when the original owners of the Perry County landfill filed for bankruptcy in early 2010 — even as the coal ash was still pouring in.

Both of Ludder’s cases are now being heard in federal bankruptcy court, and the facility has since been purchased by Georgia-based Green Group Holdings, which has ties to Phillips & Jordan. Green Group Holdings now runs the Arrowhead facility through a subsidiary, formed in December, called Howling Coyote, LLC. Mike Smith, an attorney rep-

resenting Howling Coyote, says it was highly unlikely that the coal ash, which was delivered to the site wet and wrapped in plastic liners — and quickly covered — could have found its way off-site.

“When it was brought to the facility, it was required to have a certain level of moisture,” Smith says. “As a result, the coal ash itself didn’t really pose any risk of becoming airborne, because of the high moisture content. It couldn’t have been flying around.”

Whatever the outcome of his lawsuits, Ludder’s latest move — arguing to the EPA that Alabama regulators violated the civil rights of residents around Arrowhead — might take even longer to adjudicate.

OLD KING COAL

Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 holds that a recipient of federal funding, including the Alabama Department of Environmental Management, which receives funding from the EPA, cannot administer its programs in such a way that subjects individuals to discrimination based on race, color, sex or national origin.

Conceivably, if the EPA could not broker a resolution between the conflicting parties — its preferred tack in such cases — it could cut off funding for ADEM, and the agency’s own criteria for considering such charges would seem to provide for the sort of relief that Bullard and others have learned is so difficult to obtain from the courts.

“Frequently, discrimination results from policies and practices that are neutral on their face, but have the effect of discriminating,” reads the EPA’s 1998 interim guidance for investigating Title VI complaints. “Facially-neutral policies or practices that result in discriminatory effects violate EPA’s Title VI regulations unless it is shown that they are justified and that there is no less discriminatory alternative.”

Whether or not Ludder’s civilrights appeal will fly, however, is an open question. By early June, more than four months after the complaint was filed, EPA’s office

HUFFINGTON 06.17.12

of civil rights, which has come under fire for a long backlog of cases and a lack of organization, still had not indicated whether it would reject the case or accept it for investigation.

Ludder remains optimistic. “I don’t expect them to reject the complaint,” he says.

Booker Gipson is not sure it will matter.

As the sun sets behind his property, he walks over to the well pump in the front yard, which likely draws water from the same aquifer that sits beneath the giant mound of coal ash 200 feet away.

He opens the spigot and a stream of water spits out the end of a hose.

“I thought to my belief, not knowing, that they wouldn’t be allowed to put a landfill this close,” Gipson says. “And if it was just household garbage, well, we didn’t want it, but I guess it might not be so bad. But when they put this thing in here, they said they was putting in a molehill. But if anyone drives through here — you can see, it ain’t what they were saying.”

Asked what he thinks the future might hold, Gipson smiles and shakes his head.

“I don’t believe they’re ever gonna change it.”

John Allen Clark contributed reporting from Uniontown, Ala.

BAUER-GRIFFIN.COM (GOMEZ, LOHAN, CARTER, RIHANNA); JAMES DEVANEY/WIREIMAGE (BARRYMORE)

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CELEBRITY REHAB

HUFFINGTON 06.17.12

The Law of Lohan Can a mathematical formula predict whether a celebrity will go to rehab?

Star’s age at the time of his/her first IMDB listing ILLUSTRATION BY IAN KELTIE

Number of Google images in which the star is pictured with Lindsay Lohan

Number of Google images in which tatoos are visible

Were the star’s parents married or divorced at age 10?

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VERY CELEBRITY WATCHER is familiar with some of the more obvious signs that a star is headed for rehab: the glassy eyes, the inappropriately exposed skin, the low-speed collisions with vehicles operated by paparazzi. But what if there were a formula that could tell us, with something approaching scientific precision, how many interventions our favorite tabloid miscreants can expect to endure over the course of their careers?

Now, there (sort of) is. Brain Trust author and mathematics guru Garth Sundem has created a rehab prediction formula for Huffington, based on a handful of variables common to today’s young attention-seekers.

Sundem used the following variables to calculate the probability that a given star would make between zero and four trips to rehab: 1. Star’s age when his or her IMDB page was created; 2. Number of Google Images results, within the first ten, showing the star with Lindsay Lohan when both names are searched;

CELEBRITY REHAB

HUFFINGTON 06.17.12

E

3. Number of visible tattoos within first ten Google Images results; 4. Parents’ marital status when star reached the age of ten.

Sundem arranged the variables into an intricate equation, then made a few necessary tweaks — stars earned penalties for Selena a career start in muGomez, Aaron sic rather than actCarter and ing (subtract five Mary-Kate from IMDB age for Olsen may singers), as well as want to start if their parents dia cleanse: the vorced before the age formula finds of ten (plus five). that they’re The final results were spot on for a in danger. handful of stars, like Demi Lovato, Kirsten Dunst and Haley Joel Osment. Others have already exceeded their predictions — the formula put Lindsay Lohan’s career number at three when it is in fact already at five.

And Selena Gomez, Aaron Carter and Mary-Kate Olsen may want to start a cleanse: the formula finds that they are in danger of doing the dance with 12 steps.

— By Kiki Von Glinow

HUFFINGTON 06.17.12

CELEBRITY REHAB

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CELEBRITY

TRIPS TO REHAB PREDICTED CURRENT

THEO WARGO/NBCUNIVERSAL/GETTY IMAGES

TRIPS TO REHAB:

3

PREDICTED RESULT

5

CURRENT RESULT

LINDSAY LOHAN Lindsay Lohan seems to be the poster child for celebrity rehab visits. And why shouldn’t she be?

The Mean Girls actress has made five trips to the hush-hush haven to complete both court-ordered and voluntary rehabilitation programs. But this is one instance where we wish a star’s actual results conformed to the model’s projections. The tabloid regular shows only two tattoos in her first ten Google Images results (her saving grace), but her parents’ failed marriage and her early start in the business (six years old!) leave her with a predicted three visits — if only she had stopped there.

AJ McLean

2

3

Amber Portwood

2

2

Amy Winehouse

2

3

Corey Haim

2

15

Cory Monteith

2

1

Demi Lovato

1

1

Eminem

2

1

Emma Roberts

0

0

Haley Joel Osment 1

1

Kelly Osbourne

2

3

Kirsten Dunst

1

1

Kristen Stewart

0

0

Mary Kate Olsen

2

1

Miley Cyrus

0

0

Mischa Barton

1

1

Nick Carter

2

1

Nick Jonas

0

0

Nicole Richie

4

2

Stephanie Pratt

2

1

Tara Reid

1

1

Taylor Swift

0

0

Weston Cage

2

2

= DANGER ZONE

CELEBRITY REHAB

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HUFFINGTON 06.17.12

DREW BARRYMORE This Charlie’s

TRIPS TO REHAB:

1

PREDICTED RESULT

2

CURRENT RESULT

AXELLE/BAUER-GRIFFIN.COM (2)

AARON CARTER If not for his

parents’ divorce and his strong connection to Lindsay Lohan, Aaron’s rehab indicators would be relatively low. But because of his romantic past with Lohan (the pair jumped into a relationship in 2002), 7/10 of their shared Google Images results picture the pair together. That was enough to land the “I Want Candy” singer in the repeat-rehab bunch — though he has, thus far, only been one time. Now that he and Lohan have parted ways, we’re counting on him to remain a lifetime member of the one-timers club.

Angels golden girl made her first trip to rehab when she was only 13 years old. The Hollywood staple, who got her first IMDB page at the age of three (a key variable in her predicted rehab result), displays only one tattoo in her Google Images search results, but fares worse when it comes to her interactions with Lindsay Lohan (3/10 of their shared Google Images results show the pair together) and her parents’ short-lived union (they divorced when she was just a baby). The math says this darling from E.T.: The Extra-Terrestrial should have made one trip to rehab, and that she did – before heading back for a second stint at the age of 14.

TRIPS TO REHAB:

2

PREDICTED RESULT

1

CURRENT RESULT

CELEBRITY REHAB

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HUFFINGTON 06.17.12

SELENA GOMEZ Although the majority

TRIPS TO REHAB:

1

PREDICTED RESULT

0

CURRENT RESULT

BAUER-GRIFFIN.COM (2)

RIHANNA Rihanna may be bad (and

perfectly good at it), but when it comes to rehab, it looks like she’s more of a good girl.

Because she’s a musician (as opposed to an actor) her IMDB age was adjusted from 17 to 12. And she may have a whopping 16 tattoos, but Rihanna keeps them covered up in her first ten Google Images search results.

On top of that, the “Rude Boy” singer’s parents did not divorce until she was ten years old. Although her Twitter timeline is often sprinkled with references to a liquid lifestyle, Rihanna may be one superstar who can hit the club without hitting rehab.

of Selena’s variables land her on the straight and narrow path, there is one indicator that puts the former Disney star in the danger zone. Selena’s parents divorced when she was very young — a powerful predictor for a potential rehab visit, according to Sundem’s formula. But because Selena has no visible tattoos in her first ten Google Images hits, started her career at a young (but not too young!) age, and has managed to steer mostly clear of Lindsay Lohan, the raven-haired beauty can be expected to land in rehab no more than once. Perhaps we can count Selena’s summer 2011 hospital stay to treat “exhaustion” and call it a day.

TRIPS TO REHAB:

0

PREDICTED RESULT

0

CURRENT RESULT

Exit

FOOD

HUFFINGTON 06.17.12

A California chef tops soup with foie gras cream ahead of that state’s July 1 foie gras ban.

AP PHOTO/MARCIO JOSE SANCHEZ

A Brief History Of The War On Foie Gras

BY CAREY POLIS

NE OF THE best things about food is its subjectivity. What we eat is mostly dictated by our likes and dislikes, with no primary driving force beyond our tastebuds. But, sometimes ethics will intervene, and in extreme cases, the law. On July 1, California will be bound by the most sweeping anti-foie gras statute in the world. Consumed by few, the pricey delicacy made from duck or

O

AP PHOTO/M. SPENCER GREEN

Exit goose’s liver is lusted after by chefs and diners for its rich, singular flavor and versatility on the plate for everything from hot dogs to ice cream. Despite its limited production (compared to the no-less controversial factory farming of beef, chicken and pork), foie gras has been a common rallying cry for animal rights and vegetarian activists across the world. Like many of the world’s most coveted ingredients, foie gras suffers from a bit of an ethical foible: the force-feeding required to enlarge the duck or goose’s liver in the final 2-3 weeks of its life (“foie gras” is, after all, French for “fat liver”).

The key question is whether the process, called “gavage,” of putting a tube down the animal’s throat rises to the level of actual animal cruelty. Foie defenders will tell you that gavage is almost second-nature to ducks and geese, whose bodies happen to be built to seasonally gorge themselves to prepare for migration.

Their esophagi expand easily and they lack a gag reflex, so the process isn’t as uncomfortable — if it’s uncomfortable at all — as we might be led to believe. Foie opponents contend that the practice,

FOOD

which swells the animals’ livers to many times their normal size, is inherently inhumane.

At least 14 countries now have some sort of foie gras ban on the books, though most of these only target its production — not possession or consumption — through laws banning force-feeding as part of larger animal cruelty measures. The two exceptions to this are Chicago’s short-lived ban and California’s impending law, which not only prohibits foie gras production but also bars shops and restaurants from selling it.

It’s the closest thing to a scorched earth victory foie gras opponents might ever see.

See the timeline below for a brief history of these measures.

HUFFINGTON 06.17.12

Above, salt-cured foie gras at Cyrano’s in Chicago. The city repealed its ban in 2008.

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HUFFINGTON 06.17.12

SECTION

SEPTEMBER 2004 California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger signs into law a ban on the sale and production of foie gras starting in 2012. “This bill provides seven and a half years for agricultural husbandry practices to evolve and perfect a humane way for a duck to consume grain to increase the size of its liver through natural processes,” he said in his signing statement.

“If agricultural producers are successful in this endeavor, the ban on foie gras sales and production in California will not occur.”

APRIL 2006 After a campaign by animal rights groups, the city of Chicago bans the sale of foie gras by a vote of 48 to 1, making it the first city in the

Thanks, Arnold: California’s former governor signed the foie gras ban into law in 2004. As of July 1, violators risk fines of up to $1,000.

U.S. to do so. The measure, enforced only through citizen complaints, fines restaurants $250, then $500 per offense after an initial warning. Upset with being told what they could and could not serve, in acts of civil disobedience one day after the ban, chefs who didn’t typically have foie gras on their menus nonetheless serve it in various forms.

KOICHI KAMOSHIDA/GETTY IMAGES (SCHWARZENEGGER)

DUCK, DUCK, GOOSE Our picks for the most inventive foie gras dishes in the country.

NEW YORK wd-50: Pho Gras (pho + foie terrine) Do Or Dine: Foie Gras Doughnuts

Momofuku Ko: Shaved Frozen Foie Gras SAN FRANCISCO Benu: Foie Gras Xiao Long Bao (soup dumplings with pork and foie) Humphrey Slocombe: Foie Gras Ice Cream Sandwiches CHICAGO Hot Dog’s: Foie Dog

BOSTON Eastern Standard: Foie Gras Poutine Kickass Cupcakes: Foie Gras Cupcakes PHILADELPHIA The Corner: Foie & Scrapple Sbraga: Foie Gras Soup Meme: Sweet Corn Pancakes With Shaved Foie

Misconduct Tavern: Foie Gras Mac N Cheese LOS ANGELES The Bazaar: Foie Gras Cotton Candy Spice Table: Foie Gras Satay N/Naka: Foie Gras Sushi Urasawa: Foie Gras Shabu Shabu Bouchon: Foie Gras Dog Biscuit

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FOOD

HUFFINGTON 06.17.12

MAY 2008 Mayor Richard M. Daley, who called Chicago’s ban the “silliest” ordinance the city had ever passed, puts forward a bill to repeal it. The City Council votes to overturn Chicago’s foie gras ban by a vote of 37-6.

JULY 2011 France and Germany get into a a diplomatic kerfuffle after a major German food fair prohibits the inclusion of French foie gras. Alain Fauconnier, a Socialist member of France’s senate, remarked, “It’s unbelievable. It’s like banning German sausages in France. The economic cost is enormous.”

TINA WONG/THEWANDERINGEATER.COM

DECEMBER 2011

in protest. They host elaborate foie-filled meals. Due to increased demand in California, the price of foie gras nearly doubles and becomes harder to find. At the James Beard Awards, chefs sport “Save The Foie” pins.

While the U.K. has banned the production of foie gras, it can still be served at restaurants. Most supermarkets, however, prohibit the sale. Celebrity butcher Jack O’Shea was escorted out of Selfridges supermarket for illegally selling foie gras to customers that knew his secret password. Two months later he was fired from his post.

MAY 2012

SPRING 2012

JULY 2012

Several prominent chefs and restaurateurs who oppose the California ban form a coalition

California’s foie gras ban takes effect. Violators risk fines of up to $1,000. The sole producer of foie gras in California, SonomaArtisan, will cease operations on July 1.

Brandishing a less common strategy in the fight to ban foie gras, leading animal rights groups file a lawsuit against the USDA claiming that foie gras is inherently the product of diseased birds, due to their oversized livers, and therefore is illegal under existing USDA regulations.

Some chefs at the 2012 James Beard Awards wore “Save the Foie” pins in protest of the California law.

Exit

APPROVAL

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HUFFINGTON 06.17.12

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I can’t do anything to change my son’s disease. It will ultimately take his life no matter what I do, but I’ve found a way to give back.”

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GREATEST PERSON OF THE WEEK

Natalie Blakemore & Victoria Schmitt-Babb

Missouri Moms On A Mission

BY JORDAN LANHAM

NATALIE BLAKEMORE used to hate playgrounds.

The O’Fallon, Missouri mother dreaded the monkey bars, slides and brightly colored play areas that were no fun for her threeyear-old son Zachary.

A rare genetic central nervous system disease makes it difficult for Zachary to walk and speak.

The playgrounds were making PHOTOGRAPH BY WHITNEY CURTIS

HUFFINGTON 06.17.12

Blakemore, right, and SchmittBabb are spreading a message of acceptance by building accessible playgrounds.

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GREATEST PERSON OF THE WEEK

HUFFINGTON 06.17.12

it tough for him to play with his friends without his mom right by his side.

Blakemore said park barriers and wood chips were another challenge: Zachary found it hard to make moves in his wheelchair or with his assistive walking device.

“We would play on playgrounds here and I’d have to get Zach out of his wheelchair and carry him around,” Blakemore said. “It was really emotionally draining and I’d come up with any excuse to not take them to playground.”

Instead of excuses, Blakemore eventually found a solution — for Zachary, now 12, and thousands of other kids in metro St. Louis.

TOP TO BOTTOM: RAY ROCKWELL; WHITNEY CURTIS

THE ROAD TO CHANGE Blakemore was skeptical about socalled “accessible playgrounds,” but became a believer on a 2002 trip to Washington, D.C. That’s where she first found a playground with a rubber surface that Zachary could use his wheelchair on, and ramps in the play area so he could use the slides.

For the first time she watched her son interacting with his peers and having fun without her help.

The image of Zachary playing in the park stayed with Natalie, and

while she and her husband Todd considered moving to Washington, she had a better idea: she would bring the playground to Zachary.

‘MOM ON A MISSION’ It took four years — from the first green light in 2003 to the 2007 opening of Zachary’s Playground in Lake Saint Louis — for Blakemore to realize her dream.

Teaming up with Zachary’s

Brendan’s Playground, above, opened in O’Fallon, Missouri in 2011.

Exit speech therapist, Karena Romstad, Blakemore formed Unlimited Play, Inc., a non-profit organization dedicated to raising money, planning and building accessible playgrounds where children of all abilities can have fun together.

Victoria Schmitt Babb, who joined Unlimited Play in 2004, described Blakemore as the “mom on a mission” who helped start an inclusive playground movement.

“Natalie saw the need and started it from her kitchen table,” Schmitt Babb said.

A PLAYGROUND FOR EVERYONE Unlimited Play has become a fulltime job and passion for Blakemore and Schmitt Babb, who work together from home to raise money, design playgrounds, and spread a message of understanding differences through the universal language of play.

Today the organization has successfully built three parks in Missouri, including Zachary’s Playground in Lake Saint Louis, Shaw Park Tree Top Playground in Clayton and Brendan’s Playground in O’Fallon.

Unlimited Play’s next project is scheduled to be complete this summer in Jaycee Park in St. Charles.

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HUFFINGTON 06.17.12

Two new projects — one in Breese, Illinois and another in Kansas City — are also in the works.

Blakemore and Schmitt Babb say it’s important for people to understand Unlimited Play playgrounds are not just for children who struggle with disabilities.

“The whole point is for everyone to play together,” Natalie said.

WORTH THE TRIP One mother, Kim Gibson, drives an hour and a half several times a year to bring her 12-year-old daughter Gracie, who has Cerebral Palsy, to Zachary’s Playground.

“It empowers her It empowers and makes her feel her and makes like she’s not just a her feel like child in a wheelchair she’s not just because she can play a child in a with kids who aren’t wheelchair in wheelchairs,” Gibbecause she can son added. play with kids She said the playwho aren’t in ground is well worth wheelchairs.” the drive when she sees her daughter having fun and interacting with others in a safe place.

“As a parent, that just makes you happy. You want the best for your child and for her to be

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included and play in a way that brings people together,” she said.

GRACE BELNAP

BY POPULAR DEMAND Gibson hopes one day Unlimited Play can help bring a playground closer to home for Gracie. Blakemore and Schmitt Babb have received similar requests from parents across the country.

“There’s so much of a need out there it’s just, how can we help and have the funding base as well?” Blakemore said. “Ideally

GREATEST PERSON OF THE WEEK

we’d like to find a large corporate sponsor to help us go national and keep building.”

Blakemore said the greatest message of Unlimited Play is to value all people, no matter their differences, and to take time to slow down and play.

“I can’t do anything to change my son’s disease. It will ultimately take his life no matter what I do, but I’ve found a way to give back,” Blakemore said. “I’ve watched these mothers fighting for their children and in the end it may not matter, but they can give back.”

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Zachary Blakemore and Gracie Gibson at Zachary’s Playground in Lake Saint Louis, Missouri.

TFU

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REUTERS/CRIS TOALA OLIVARES (CAT); ALAN RICHARDSON DUNDEE, PIX-AR.CO.UK (BABY); SHUTTERSTOCK (MONEY, HITCHHIKER)

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Artist Turns Dead Cat Into Flying Helicopter

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TEACHER ALLEGEDLY CALLS STUDENT “BLACK BOY” AFTER FORGETTING HIS NAME

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Mom Forced To Deliver Her Own Baby In Parking Garage After Cops Stop Her TWICE On Way To Hospital

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CONGRESS APPROVES CUTS TO NEARLY EVERYTHING BUT ITS OWN OFFICE BUDGETS

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Man Writing Book Called The Kindness Of America Gets Shot In Montana Drive-By

06 AP PHOTO/THE IDAHO PRESS-TRIBUNE, ADAM ESCHBACH (PROTESTOR); SHUTTERSTOCK (BAND-AID); JUSTIN SULLIVAN/GETTY IMAGES (ROVE)

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During SeizureInduced Crash

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