Huffington (Issue #02)

THE HUFFINGTON POST MAGAZINE

DIGITAL LOTHARIOS AFTER YOUR HEART AND YOUR MONEY

POLITICO GETS PRICEY AUTO BODIES BEST MOVIE OF THE YEAR?

JUNE 24, 2012

06.24.12 #02 CONTENTS

Enter POINTERS: Vagina Drama, Huckabee vs.

Bristol, Google Alarmed MOVING IMAGE DATA: The Moral Acceptability Index Q&A: Meghan McCain

Voices

ROMANTIC PREDATORS TAKE TO THE WEB

BY KATHERINE BINDLEY

PEGGY DREXLER: Warning Against A Culture Where Every Child Wins GARY HART: Legalizing Watergate PRIYAMVADA NATARAJAN : Can Science Be Crowd-Sourced?

QUOTED

Exit WILLIAM DUKE (PREDATORS); MARVIN SHAOUNI (CARS); BOB ECKSTEIN (POLITICO)

MOVIES: Beasts of the Southern Wild: 2012’s First Oscar Contender

DESIGN DYNAMICS

BY SHARON CARTY

TRAVEL: 50 Hours, 23 Minutes and 20 Seconds in Portland, Maine eWISE: Claiming Baby’s Domain, Friending Coworkers GREATEST PERSON OF THE WEEK: Georgia’s Homeless Pet Hero TFU: RNC Latino Gaffe, 18-Second Burp & more

INSIDE THE CULT

BY MICHAEL CALDERONE

FROM THE EDITOR: The Slow News Movement ON THE COVER: Illustration for

Huffington by William Duke

LETTER FROM THE EDITOR

The Slow News Movement ACH YEAR, THE Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity gathers thousands of innovative thinkers and practitioners in advertising and media from around the world to talk about what’s new and what’s next in our brave new digital world. Last year I spoke about one of the most exciting developments online: the fact that the Internet has come out of its adolescent stage and is growing up into a place where our online and our offline lives have merged — where the qualities we care most about offline are increasingly reflected in our experience online. And where, among all the random searching that defined the Internet’s early years, something new has emerged: a search for greater meaning.

On Monday, I took the stage again with Roy Sekoff, HuffPost’s founding editor and president of our soon-to-be-launched video

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streaming network, HuffPost Live.

And what was on my mind was the speed with which the Internet is heading in this new direction. A world of too much data, too many choices, too many possibilities and too little time is forcing us to decide what we really value. And, more and more, people and innovative companies are recognizing that we actually have a life beyond our gadgets. That is why one of the most exciting features of Apple’s Worldwide Developers Conference last week was Do Not Disturb, the new iPhone feature designed to get you off your iPhone altogether.

And Huffington is definitely a

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LETTER FROM THE EDITOR

manifestation of this longing to disconnect from the hurly-burly of our hyper-connected lives and join the slow news movement.

So here are some of this issue’s highlights: Katie Bindley on the psychology behind online romance scams; Michael Calderone on Politico’s growth since its upstart days way back in the 2008 election; Sharon Carty on the young designers, engineers and scientists pumping new life into Detroit’s auto industry; Peggy Drexler on the risks and rewards of raising children to believe they’re all winners, all the time; Gary Hart on the possible consequences — both legal and illegal — of the Supreme Court’s Citizens United decision; and Priyamvada Natarajan, who asks “Can Science Be Crowd-Sourced?”

There’s also Mike Hogan’s review of Beasts of the Southern Wild (which won big at another festival in Cannes), a Q&A with Meghan McCain and a Greatest Person of the Week feature on Dr. Michael Good, a Marietta, Georgia, veterinarian who takes in stray animals who would otherwise have little chance of getting medical attention or being adopted.

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I’m delighted that Huffington’s first issue entered the world last week to great reviews. On the morning Huffington launched, I gave the commencement address at the all-girls Nightingale School in New York. I told the young women in the graduating class the story of HuffPost’s birth seven years ago, and the A world negative reviews that of too many greeted its arrival. choices and You don’t have to too little buy into the negative time is forcing reviews, I told them. us to decide And just the same, what we really you can’t lean on the value.” positive ones.

So, here at Huffington, our goal is to keep learning, keep growing, and keep listening to you, our readers, about what you want more and what you want less of. And to stay true to the qualities of storytelling, engagement, and community — the kind of timeless qualities that, I have a feeling, will continue to resonate no matter how our online lives change.

ARIANNA

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AP PHOTO/DETROIT NEWS, DALE G. YOUNG

1 VAGINA DRAMA ROCKS MICHIGAN HOUSE

POINTERS

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A Michigan lawmaker performed The Vagina Monologues on the statehouse steps after she says she was barred from speaking about abortion. Democratic state Rep. Lisa Brown says that the Republican Majority Floor Leader, Jim Stamas, gaveled her out of order when she told supporters of an anti-abortion bill that, “I’m flattered you’re all so concerned about my vagina, but no means no.” Eve Ensler, the author of the play, flew in to see Brown’s performance and compared the Republican House leadership to “the Dark Ages.”

Enter

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JOE ARPAIO’S OFFICE ARRESTS 6-YEAROLD GIRL

AP PHOTO/ROSS D. FRANKLIN (ARPAIO); AP PHOTO/MARK LENNIHAN (GOOGLE); SHUTTERSTOCK (CHAIN); IMAGINECHINA VIA AP IMAGES (MUSHROOM CLOUD)

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America’s toughest sheriff has taken another threat to our national security off the streets—a six-year-old girl suspected of entering the country illegally. At the time of her arrest, the child was reportedly traveling with 15 other suspected undocumented immigrants, who claimed to know nothing about her and were jailed in Arizona by Maricopa County Sheriff Office deputies.

“We enforce the human-smuggling laws here,” Arpaio told the Arizona Republic.

GOOGLE CONDEMNS “ALARMING” TREND

During the second half of 2011 Google received about 12,000 requests from authorities to remove content from its search results, according to its twiceyearly Transparency Report. The number was an increase of about 25 percent over the first half of the year, and many requests targeted political speech. Dorothy Chou, the search engine’s senior policy analyst, wrote in a blog post that she finds the trend troubling. “It’s alarming not only because free expression is at risk, but because some of these requests come from countries you might not suspect — Western democracies not typically associated with censorship,” she said.

MUSHROOM CLOUD DESCENDS UPON CHINA A giant cloud resembling an atomic bomb burst was spotted over Beijing, where the skyline was briefly obscured by the mushroom-like formation. Residents were baffled, and the cloud lasted just an hour before lightning strikes filled the sky. The cumulonimbus storm cloud was reportedly unrelated to a recent pollution haze that settled over the country.

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LEANN RIMES/TWITTER (CAKE); AP PHOTO/JOSE LUIS MAGANA (HUCKABEE); ALBERTO E. RODRIGUEZ/GETTY IMAGES (PALIN)

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POINTERS

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LEANN RIMES GIVES HUSBAND AWKWARD BIRTHDAY CAKE

LeAnn Rimes gave her husband, Eddie Cibrian, an unusual surprise for his 39th birthday. “Eddie’s favorite things bday cake!” Rimes tweeted with a photo of a red velvet layer cake topped with an edible depiction of her and Cibrian in bed together.

On the cake’s second level sat candy versions of Cibrian’s two sons (Rimes’ stepsons), with their backs turned away from the action.

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BRISTOL PALIN STANDS UP MIKE HUCKABEE THAT’S VIRAL WOMAN’S TONGUE INSEMINATED BY SQUID

Bristol Palin is “fair game” to Mike Huckabee after she failed to show up for an appearance on the former Arkansas governor’s radio show.

Palin was supposed to promote her new reality show, and Huckabee says he won’t be watching it, adding that children of politicians open themselves up for criticism when they seek attention. “Once the child decides, ‘Hey I like the spotlight, I like the limelight, I want to have more of it,’ then they become fair game,” he said. “I hope that she is ready for it.”

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

TAP HEADLINES TO VIEW FULL STORIES

STUDY SHOWS EVOLUTIONARY BENEFIT FOR FAMILIES OF GAY MEN

A PHOTOBOMB IS FOREVER

MAN PLAYS GAME OF ‘CIV 2’ FOR 10 YEARS, RESULTS IN HELLISH FUTURE

RODNEY KING DIES AT THE AGE OF 47

Enter Packing, Rolling, Banding, Boxing While on assignment, I visited almost all the countries where cigars are manufactured. It is said that 400 hands touch each cigar in the process of its creation, from the field to the factory, washing, drying, sorting, fermenting, packing, stripping, bunching, rolling, inspecting, banding and boxing. I was there to shoot the factories, the owners and mangers of the various locations, but the workers drew me in.

PHOTOGRAPHS AND INTRO BY IAN SPANIER

Adelnida Noloseo: Packing and Selecting, El Tabacalera de Garcia; La Romana, Dominican Republic

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Zorayda Mercedez: Chuvarria, Drew Estates Factory; Estelli, Nicaragua

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Elucieno Perez: Casing, El Tabacalera de Garcia; La Romana, Dominican Republic

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Coronada Herera: Wrapper Department Worker, Drew Estates Factory; Estelli, Nicaragua

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Juana Mendoza and Jairo Zoza — married — Cigar Rollers, Rocky Patel Factory; Danli, Honduras

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Enter

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Unnamed worker: Tabacalera Alberto Turrent Factory; San Andres, Veracruz, Mexico

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Unnamed worker: Tabacalera Alberto Turrent Factory; San Andres, Veracruz, Mexico

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Humberto Ivan: Flores Rivera, Drew Estates Factory; Estelli, Nicaragua

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Mario Rodriguez: Buncher, La Flor de Copan, SAS; Santa Rosa de Copan, Honduras

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Paublo Cruz Davila: Maintenance Worker, Drew Estates Factory; Estelli, Nicaragua

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Julio Aponte: La AuroraLeon Jimmaes; Santiago, Dominican Republic

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DATA

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The Moral Acceptability Index Have we become more or less accepting of same-sex relationships? Divorce?

Animal testing? Gallup research from the last 12 years shows that while positions on some moral hot-button issues have

slowly progressed, certain matters remain as taboo as ever. Track the evolution of public opinion on these 10 issues starting in 2001, through the last presidential election in 2008, to the present. — Ann Butler

.1

2012

2008 .0

2001

TAP FOR DETAILED VIEW

DIVORCE

PREMARITAL SEX

GAY AND LESBIAN RELATIONS

DOCTOR-ASSISTED SUICIDE

CLONING HUMANS

EXTRAMARITAL AFFAIR

DEATH PENALTY

ABORTION

ANIMAL TESTING

CLONING ANIMALS

Enter

Q&A

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Meghan McCain On Marijuana, Gay Marriage & Glenn Beck PHOTOGRAPHS BY HEATHER BRAND

Enter

MEGHAN MCCAIN — pundit, columnist, scourge of the Republican base, 27-yearold daughter of John — hit the road in an RV last July with liberal Democratic comedian Michael Ian Black to see if two people with radically different beliefs could “tackle the bigger picture problems” facing the country.

They document their trip in their new book, America, You Sexy Bitch: A Love Letter to Freedom (Da Capo). McCain spoke with Huffington about smoking weed in New Orleans, how Glenn Beck sent her to therapy and butting heads with her father on gay marriage.

—Lori Leibovich

Q&A

McCain says her father is “not thrilled” with her new book.

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What made you want to go on a road trip with a stranger? I was a guest on Michael’s show, and then one night at 2 a.m. he tweeted me and said, “Do you want to write a book together?” I was living in LA and had just gone through a bad breakup, and I had a development deal that was a huge failure. Michael was turning 40 and going through a midlife crisis. We said he hadn’t really seen America, the red states. So we went on this road trip to meet as

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Q&A

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many Americans as possible and see why we’re so fucked up and polarized right now.

In the book you come clean about the fact that you’re for the legalization of marijuana. There’s even a scene where you get high in New Orleans. Did you consider leaving that out? I feel like it’s something that could benefit our country economically. I’m not a pot smoker — I haven’t smoked pot since then.

But if people are going to pay $15 dollars for this book, I should be as honest as possible. The only reason it was scary to include is because it was just one more point for people to think I’m not Republican enough and use against me.

Have your parents read the book? My father is not thrilled — at all. But he does respect that I have a different audience. As misunderstood as I feel by a lot of people in Republican circles, I really value the respect I have from college students.

Why do you think college students like you? Young people can smell out people who are pretending to be someone else. Whether you love me or hate me, I am who I am.

I’m not in my ivory tower doing safe things because it’s conve-

nient. I’m almost jealous of people who can live like that. What’s it like being guarded?

Where do you think that comes from?

My parents raised me to have opinions. My mom didn’t care what it was as long as I stood up for what I believed in. The problem is I’m one of 20 girls who actually do it.

It’s scary to speak out because everything can be pushed back at you and people will say, ‘you’re a fat bitch, kill yourself.’”

You mean a lot of girls were encouraged to have opinions but don’t actually voice them? It’s scary to speak out because everything can be pushed back at you and people will say “you’re a fat bitch, kill yourself.”

I love what I do. If I’m not doing things that are challenging, then I don’t want to be here. A lot of children that come from politicians’ families are rightfully fearful of saying controversial things. I feel I’ve been given a platform and I have used it wisely. I also know that I could cure cancer and win

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Q&A

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a Pulitzer Prize and people would say my father bought it for me.

You’ve been criticized for the way you dress and what you weigh. You’ve talked candidly about how soul killing it can be — that the media’s focus on your body even sent you to therapy after the 2008 campaign. Why do you think you’re such a target? I’ve been to the doctor recently and I’m not overweight. I exercise all the time and I eat healthy. I’m just curvy. When I felt compelled to see a therapist was when it was affecting my personal life. I started feeling like maybe there was something wrong with me. Glenn Beck sent me to therapy, to be honest. [Beck graphically pretended to vomit on his radio show at the sight of McCain wearing a strapless dress in a PSA about skin cancer.]

Right after President Obama came out in support of gay marriage, you wrote a column where you said he had taken only a half-step. What would constitute a leap for you? I felt that he sent Vice President Biden out like a sacrificial lamb. And then he said, “I personally support a man and man or a woman and a woman getting married.” I think he should get behind some legislation and get Congress to take action. I feel like that’s

the problem with the gay rights movement — they accept halves of things. I am a huge supporter of gay rights, but I have had pushback from people in the LGBT community because I’m not a Democrat.

When I communicate with Republicans about gay marriage, I always talk about the Constitution and freedom and the Declaration of Independence and what this country was founded on. I find more success with that than talking about love or sex. But I do give it up to the president. I wish my father would come around.

McCain has called Obama’s support for gay marriage a “half-step.”

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Warning Against a Culture Where Every Child Wins

PEGGY DREXLER

BACK WHEN WE were living in San Francisco, both my son and daughter went to a “progressive” school that taught grades K through 8. The school had a very clear motto, one that was repeated to the kids and their parents again and again: “Everyone at [Our School] is a Winner!”

One day after class, I arrived to see my 6-year-old son playing a game of what looked to me like baseball. I casually asked the teacher on hand whether that’s what it was—and who was winning. “Oh,” she said, turning to ILLUSTRATION BY HANNA MELIN

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Peggy Drexler is the author of Our Fathers, Ourselves: Daughters, Fathers, and the Changing American Family

Voices me. “We don’t really care about who’s winning. And the game doesn’t really have a name. The kids make up the rules as they go.”

It was hard to argue—at first.

After all, there’s nothing wrong with fostering creativity or encouraging free play. And without a “loser,” there was no risk of sending home a crying kid. Right? But, I wondered, aren’t we missing out on teaching kids a valuable lesson in how superior performance reaps greater praise? Isn’t there something to be said for being rewarded for working hard, rather than just showing up?

Of course there is. Right now, there’s a divide happening between those who believe that kids should be shielded from the idea of competition—that no child should ever be put in the position of losing, which means everyone’s in the position of winning—and those who, well, advocate for a more reality-based approach. I’m with the latter. Because letting kids win, or avoiding declaring a winner at all, is setting them up for disappointment and failure later on.

As my son got older, the kids played sports in a more traditional way: with rules and boundaries.

And yet, the end of each season al-

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ways included some sort of awards ceremony during which medals or trophies were handed out to every child. You may think this is a good thing: Let’s help kids feel better about themselves, no matter what.

Boost their egos, instill confidence.

But it’s actually doing the opposite.

Later on, these are children who may have trouble recognizing their own successes. They may have a hard time motivating themselves to work hard, or push to earn what’s theirs.

Why would they?

Aren’t They’ve grown accuswe missing tomed to having victo- out on ries and praise handed teaching kids to them with zero a valuable to little effort. They lesson in have no faith in their how superior own abilities because performance we’ve never given reaps greater them reason to. This praise?” leaves them feeling empty and ill prepared for life in the “real world.”

Consider what may happen when we teach kids about healthy competition, and how victories earned are sweeter than those blithely handed over. Through my work with families I met Fran, a woman who never took a physics course until college but ended up

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working as a physicist in a top research lab, holding her own among scores of men. Fran remembered a childhood spent camping, sailing, working on the car, and learning how to use power tools with her father. “And when we would play games—Monopoly or anything like that—he would never let us win, my brother or me,” she told me.

“I remember beating my dad at checkers for the first time at age seven, and I was very satisfied.”

When every kid gets a medal, however, no matter how well she plays or how poorly the team does—and this is the norm in many communities—we send a dangerous message. We may think that rewarding every child will make them feel good—and it may,

PEGGY DREXLER

for a moment. But it may also make them feel that they are entitled to praise and recognition for merely existing. And that does no one any favors.

The truth is that in real life you don’t get rewarded for showing up. The real lesson we should be teaching kids is that the rewards come when you work hard and accomplish something. And the rewards might not always come— that’s an important lesson, too.

Fran’s father’s belief in his daughter’s intelligence fueled her urge to compete and emerge triumphant. When she finally beat him at checkers, she knew the win was real. She had played better than he had, end of story. In that way, at the early age of seven, Fran was primed to trust her competence and own her success. And that is a real victory.

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Sports seasons often end in awards ceremonies that honor each child.

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GARY HART

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Legalizing Watergate WHO WOULD HAVE thought, forty years after the greatest political scandal and presidential abuse of power in U.S. history, that the Supreme Court of the United States would rule that the practices that fueled and financed that scandal were now legal?

Yet that is essentially the effect of the Citizens United decision. Go ahead and take bets on how much time will pass before the tsunami of cash unleashed by Citizens United ends up in the pockets of a Watergate-like cast of break-in burglars, wiretap experts, surveillance magicians and cyberpunks.

Given the power and money at stake in the nation’s elections, it is inevitable that candidates or their operatives will tap into the hundreds of millions of dollars flowing through their campaigns and try to game the system — in perfectly

ILLUSTRATION BY MARTIN O’NEILL

legal or highly illegal ways.

And, of course, the ultimate victims of the corruption of the Democratic process are not defeated candidates and parties but America’s citizens. Perhaps Supreme Court justices should have to experience a corrupted election process firsthand to understand what it means to live with a hollowedout democracy. As one who experienced Watergate in its multitentacled form, it isn’t pleasant to discover that you’ve been placed under surveillance, had your taxes audited and been subjected to other dirty tricks. All this happened to me, among a number of others,

Gary Hart is president of Hart International, Ltd. and a former U.S. Senator representing Colorado

Voices simply because we worked for an honest presidential candidate who dared to challenge the authority and power of a president who had long-since forgotten the integrity the Democratic process requires.

Coupled with the concentration of lobbying power now consolidating in the offices of a small handfull of mega-firms, the advent of legalized corruption launched by the Supreme Court through Citizens United empowers the superrich to fund their own presidential and congressional campaigns as pet projects and to foster pet policies. The calculus here is simple: Because you have several hundred million dollars, or even a billion, you can lease or purchase a candidate from an endless reserve of minor politicians and make him or her a star. In short order, all of that money and marketing power makes your candidate a mouthpiece for any cause you and your money handlers value, no matter how questionable. Your candidate-forhire will mouth your script in endless debates and through as many television spots as you are willing to pay for — all of which Citizens United makes quite legal now.

The five prevailing Supreme Court justices might at least have

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required the bought-and-paid-for candidates to wear sponsor labels on their suits like stock car drivers. For the time being, though, Exxon-Mobil or the Stardust Casino can’t openly sponsor candidates, and instead rely on phony “Committee for Good Government” smokescreen entities.

The ultimate victims of the corruption of the Democratic process are not defeated candidates but America’s citizens.”

So, America: Welcome to the Age of Vanity Politics and CampaignsFor-Hire. If this Court had been sitting in 1974, when the Watergate scandal was in full blossom, it would not have voted 9-0 to require the president to turn over legally incriminating tapes but instead would have voted to support the use of illegal campaign contributions to finance criminal cover-ups as an exercise in “free speech.”

For many decades our citizens have had to survive free-wheeling antics by politicians and parties. Now Americans have to survive their own Supreme Court.

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PRIYAMVADA NATARAJAN

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Can Science Be Crowd-Sourced?

NEWS RECENTLY BROKE that Stockholm University’s Sven Hovmöller had discovered the atomic structure of complex crystals known as approximants — a complicated chemistry riddle he spent eight years pondering. But the real story behind the story was that he credited his breakthrough to insights from his then 10-yearold son, Linus, who knew nothing about chemistry or crystals, but a great deal about Sudoku. In short, Linus perceived a pattern where his father did not, demonstrating that sometimes in science knowing too much about a problem can muddle the path to a solution, and a fresh, clear view from the outside makes all the difference.

There is no substitute for the rigorous training credentialed scientists undergo to tackle our most challenging problems, but this heartwarming story gives many observers the impression that

ILLUSTRATION BY LEONDRO CASTELAO

anyone can “do” science. Indeed, much attention has been paid lately to the notion of “citizen science” — members of the general public participating directly in the scientific research process. Some scientists themselves have been championing the idea as a way to increase public involvement and support for science.

But we need to think carefully

Priyamvada Natarajan is a professor of Astronomy and Physics at Yale University

Voices about the appropriate role of citizens in science in order to harness the public’s interest and energy while still preserving the integrity of the scientific process. As I see it, there are definitely opportunities for non-scientists to participate, but their roles must be carefully defined. Research in any domain of science today requires specialized training to build up knowledge and clinical competence. To make major breakthroughs, we need people with expertise who are engaged in sustained research over a long period of time — in a word, scientists.

So, when and how should citizens be involved in science?

First, there will be occasions when citizens can participate in data analysis and provide direct input to professional scientists. There are now successful examples of this in astronomy and chemistry. One of them, Galaxy Zoo, invites the public to assist in classifying the shapes of over sixty million galaxy images.

No knowledge of astronomy is required, and it turns out that the human brain is more suited to this activity than any advanced computer. More than 250,000 people have taken part in Galaxy Zoo so far, producing a wealth of valuable data and sending telescopes

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on Earth and in space chasing after their discoveries.

One such case centers on Hanny van Arkel, a Dutch biology schoolteacher who chanced upon a strange interstellar object that she could not match with any of the known galaxy types listed in the Galaxy Zoo classification tutorial. As it happens, this object, now known as Hanny’s Voorwerp, is eminently unique: a light

Sometimes in science knowing too much about a problem can muddle the path to a solution.” echo from the dying gasp of a black hole that was once active as a quasar. We knew that such objects ought to exist but this was the first one to be discovered. Van Arkel is now listed as a co-author with me on a scientific paper interpreting the discovery.

Another example is the computer game FoldIt, developed by the University of Washington, Seattle.

Foldit drafts competitive video gamers and leverages their gaming experience and intuition to flesh out new structures for proteins, and it does so better than comput-

Voices ers. At last count there were seven scientific publications that included FoldIt Players as co-authors.

Second, the public can contribute to the actual collection of scientific data — but only once the scientific community has defined the parameters of debate. We cannot decide on the efficacy of a medical treatment by counting the number of “Likes” on Facebook; no matter what, professionals will need to conduct continued clinical trials and evaluate their outcomes carefully. But gathering the full range of side effects a drug may have is a point where public input would be invaluable. Individuals reporting on their own experiences would provide first-hand accounts that could be considered in the improvement of drug design.

Recent success stories make it clear that citizens may well play an increasingly important role in aiding science. But if the public gets involved at too early a stage in the scientific process, confusion can ensue. A real-world case is found in the climate crisis. Scientifically, the climate change problem is a complex one that has profound implications for each one of us. A deeper understanding of modeling future uncertainties is actively be-

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ing developed and debated among scientists, but the terms of the debate have devolved from evidence and data to politics, due to the participation of citizens with specific agendas. As such, before we can even begin to explore a solution, we must convince large swathes of the public that there is a problem to begin with.

While some crowd-sourcing advocates will chafe at a limited

We cannot decide on the efficacy of a medical treatment by counting the number of ‘Likes’ on Facebook.” role for public involvement in the scientific process, citing the buzz surrounding effective crowdsourcing in its other applications, we ultimately still need experts.

No one wants to walk across a crowd-sourced bridge. Citizen science is new territory for us all — scientists and citizens — and the possibilities for success are legion. But we must think very carefully about where the boundaries should be. What is clear is that there must be boundaries, and that is a truth we don’t need to crowd-source.

LACEY TERRELL/HBO (“TRUE BLOOD”); GETTY IMAGES/STOCKBYTE PLATINUM (NAIL POLISH); AP PHOTO/OFFICE OF REP. GABRIELLE GIFFORDS (GIFFORDS AND KELLY)

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QUOTED

“ For me the jumping off point was watching the Republican primaries, watching Michelle Bachmann, Rick Santorum, and asking what would it be like to have a theocracy in America.”

—Alan Ball,

creator of True Blood, to The Wrap when asked about the upcoming season

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“ My daughters have learned much from having a dad manly enough to allow them to paint his toenails.”

— HuffPost commentor madkoz

“She has been an incredible inspiration to me.

Each day as she heads off to therapy she’ll often tell me, ‘fight, fight, fight.’”

—Mark Kelly,

husband of former U.S. Rep. Gabrielle Giffords, to graduates at the U.S. Merchant Marine Academy

Voices

QUOTED

“ Rodney King was the only person I’ve ever seen come out of a race-related incident with a voice of reason.”

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“To all of you who like to cry foul over ‘socialism’: Please note that the Bush Wars (Iraq and Afghanistan) have been the largest redistribution of wealth program ever. Close to $8 trillion from the US Treasury transferred to corporations and defense contractors.”

— HuffPost commentor humuhumunukunukuapua

AP PHOTO/MATT SAYLES (KING); AP PHOTO/PHIL MCCARTEN (SHEEN)

— HuffPost commentor Alex0393

How has ‘stop and frisk’ not been ruled unconstitutional?

— HuffPost commentor mariusvinchi

“ Well, I’m hoping...

I think it’s a tough sell.”

— Mika Brzezinski

on Morning Joe on whether Obama’s efforts to blame George W. Bush for the economy will work

“This is my swan song... There’s a lot more out there to do than make-believe, you know?”

— Charlie Sheen

to The New York Times about his upcoming TV series Anger Management

06.24.12 #02 FEATURES CHRYSLER

ROMANTIC PREDATORS TAKE TO THE WEB DESIGN DYNAMICS INSIDE THE CULT

ROMANTIC PREDATORS TAKE TO THE WEB

BY KATHERINE BINDLEY ILLUSTRATION BY WILLIAM DUKE

A

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FTER A DIVORCE, dates that didn’t go anywhere, and the continued hope that she might meet someone online whom she could marry, Jodi Bourgeois met the perfect man – someone who identified himself as Greg Garic. • Garic told her that his wife had died while giving birth to their son five years earlier, and he said he hadn’t dated anyone until the day, last April, that he messaged Bourgeois on Chemistry.com. Nights of instant messaging, for three or four hours at a time, followed and Garic spoke with Bourgeois about his childhood in France, projects he worked on as an engineer, and their shared love of dogs. Bourgeois confided that she couldn’t have children.

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“He was very good with words,” Bourgeois recalls. “Some of the emails he sent me were unbelievable. I showed them to my friends and they were like, ‘Oh my god, he’s so romantic. He’s wonderful’.”

After a week, Garic was saying, “I love you,” and within a month he and Bourgeois were talking about marriage. He said he lived in Chicago, and even called Bourgeois from a 312 area code, but a business trip took Garic to London before the pair could to meet in person.

Once Garic said he had arrived in London, he asked Bourgeois for $1,800, a request that stunned her.

“When he first asked me for the money, it was like somebody punched me in the gut,” she says. “When it started com-

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ing up [more often], I was pulling back a little bit. I started getting a feeling.”

Bourgeois, who works for the state of Louisiana, had searched for “Greg Garic” on Google when she first started communicating with him, but nothing suspicious came up. But when Garic’s requests for money grew persistent — ­ to the point that he asked her to use a credit card and take out a loan when she said she didn’t have enough cash on hand — she began to worry about his motives. So she tried a different Google search: “Greg Garic, internet scam.”

The results took Bourgeois to a victim support website devoted to exposing digital scams where she counted at least four women posting about Garic.

“Everything from that blog fit my situation to a T,” Bourgeois recalls. “I was floored. I kept thinking how could I not have seen it sooner?”

According to the site, Garic, who couldn’t be reached for comment, was a scammer working out of West Africa, and one of the women in the support group had posted the text of a romantic email he sent her that Bourgeois recognized word for word.

“I’ve cried,” she says. “I cried Monday. I cried yesterday. I cried a little bit today… He knew exactly what to say to tug at my heartstrings. Because I can’t have children, he told me I could be the mother to his.”

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In the end, Bourgeois may have lost some of her dignity to Garic, but she never lent him any money. Others who have been targeted by romantic predators online have fared much worse. A friend of Bourgeois lost $20,000 in a scam to another man who lied about serving in the military, and the Federal Bureau of Investigation says that 5,600 people in the U.S. alone reported being victimized in online romance scams in 2011. They lost an average of $10,000 each, totaling around $50 million.

Romance and fraud have been mingling for ages, of course, and the fact that Lotharios pull on victim’s heartstrings in order to open their purse strings is an ancient tale. But the advent of the Internet, and the realities of our digitally-connected world, make romantic predators more potent than ever before, with bags of tricks that allow them to disguise their location,

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their identity and their intentions with relative ease.

Analysts also have come to understand much more about the victims themselves as well —and to answering the question of why a man or a woman (though most victims are women) would fork over a significant sum of money in the earliest stages of a romance to someone they’ve never met before.

While it might be easy to dismiss the victims as thoughtless, or even dumb, romance scams aren’t about intelligence: they’re about emotion. And what experts now know about victims is that they aren’t simply lonely-hearts. Instead, they tend to have highly idealized notions of romance and marriage, and share a basic belief that most people are, alas, well-intentioned.

When people like this look to the web for companionship, they form emotional bonds quickly and with an abandon they might not demonstrate in the workaday, offline world.

“People fall in love very quickly online and form hyper-personal relationships,”

“ I cried. I cried Monday.

I cried yesterday. I cried a little bit today...

He knew exactly what to say to tug at my heartstrings.”

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says Monica Whitty, a psychologist and professor at the University of Leicester in England. Such connections can be “more intimate than a face-to-face relationship…People self-disclose a lot more information than they normally would.”

Although romantic predators target every demographic, from 20-somethings to women in their ‘30s, Nikolas Savage, an agent with the FBI, says the majority of victims appear to be somewhat older women in their 40s and 50s and they tend to be the ones who lose the most money.

But other analysts aren’t entirely certain about the demographics of romantic scams because only a portion of the victimized population is willing to come forward and

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discuss their plights or to take legal action.

Whitty recently studied 466 romance scam victims from a sample of around 1,200 online daters and found that older women weren’t any more likely to fall for predators. In general, the victims she encountered had one overlapping characteristic, and it wasn’t their age or their gender.

“Romantic beliefs,” are the common trait, says Whitty. “The people who believe that there is an ideal perfect person out there are the people who are more prone to being victims of the scam.”

For her part, Bourgeois, who is 41, says she recognizes all of this about herself.

“I watch romance movies a lot, and I would say that I would like to have something like that. Maybe that’s not realistic, but I believe in romance, I really do,” she says. “And I believe in love at first sight.”

THE NIGERIAN CONNECTION Mary Wheaton, a divorced, 51-year-old from Grand Rapids, Mich., is a woman of faith, and one night, though she still can’t say why, she felt compelled to click on a Match.com advertisement that popped up on her computer screen.

Wheaton soon connected with a man named Terry Donald Slyd. In the very first message Slyd sent her on Match. com, Wheaton says, he suggested the two talk on IM instead.

“Within three days, he already was

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expressing strong affection and attraction, when he didn’t know anything about me,” Wheaton recalls. “I expressed [that] to him. I said, ‘I’m concerned that you’re getting too attached and we don’t even know each other yet.’

That’s one of the things they do, is they flatter you.”

Wheaton and Slyd grew closer as they continued to talk on instant messenger.

He emailed her three times a day, often quoting poetry. He sent her pictures of him with his daughter, and of the house where they lived. Two weeks in, Slyd shared with Wheaton a past tragedy that had defined him: his wife had died while giving birth to their second child, and the baby hadn’t survived either.

When Wheaton had doubts – and she remembers having plenty of them, especially when Slyd called her and his accent sounded French, though he said he’d grown up in Germany – she prayed.

“Throughout the whole relationship,

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I kept trying and reading my Bible,” she recalls. “And every time I tried to seek guidance in that area, I would get something that confirmed that I needed to continue this relationship.”

Wheaton’s suspicions were strong enough early on that she threatened to cut off communication with Slyd if they didn’t meet in person. With that, he promised to come to Grand Rapids to visit her.

Slyd said he was traveling to Spain on business and bringing his 12-yearold daughter with him. But the plan, he claimed, was to come directly to Michigan from Spain.

When he arrived in Spain (if he was actually ever there at all), mishaps began. He told Wheaton that customs agents at the airport seized his cash.

He said his daughter wasn’t feeling well and that he just wanted to get her someplace safe, so Wheaton says she wired him $2,000 to pay for his hotel room for two weeks. Then he needed $5,000 for legal fees.

Wheaton felt that Slyd’s story didn’t

“ T he people who believe that there is an ideal perfect person out there are the people who are more prone to being victims of the scam.”

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add up: He asked for money to buy plane tickets to fly from Spain to Michigan, but why hadn’t he purchased round trip tickets in the first place?

Wheaton says that she doesn’t have a Cinderella complex. For years, when people asked about her marital status, she answered, “Happily single.”

“For me, it was an intellectual versus spiritual battle,” she explains. “I was following it as an act of faith, not knowing where God would lead me, even though intellectually, I was thinking I need to get rid of this guy.”

Wheaton wired Slyd more money — she gave him $15,000 in total — so that he and his daughter could fly to Michigan.

But Slyd, who couldn’t be reached for

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comment for this article, told her he was in a car accident on the way to the airport and that his daughter was in the hospital, near death and in need of surgery.

A man claiming to be “Dr. Matthew” from a St. Matthew’s hospital in Spain even e-mailed Wheaton to explain that Slyd’s daughter was being treated.

But Wheaton decided not to send any more money. She says she reached a point where ignoring the red flags – like the name of the doctor being exactly the same as the name of the hospital and a friend telling her the email must be fake — became too much.

“It was just a constant conflict of feeling like I was doing stuff that didn’t make any sense to me,” she says. “And I couldn’t handle that any more. It didn’t make any logical sense.”

As soon as Wheaton turned off the cash spigot, Slyd pressured her again.

“He made it seem like it was my fault because I wouldn’t give him any money,” says Wheaton. “If I would have given him $3,000, the doctor would do the surgery, but I didn’t, so he had to watch her die.”

Frustrated by the guilt-trip and all the red flags, Wheaton sought out a victim support website called Romancescams.org and sought out a counselor on staff for some live chat support. After that, she took an online quiz to see if she’d just been conned:

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❏ H as someone fallen in love with you quickly? ❏ D o they immediately want to leave the dating site to use IM or email? ❏ D o they claim to be from the U.S. but working overseas; Nigeria or UK? And so on. Wheaton answered yes to every question.

Romancscams.org is stocked with veterans of romance cons. Started in 2005, its founder is Barbara Sluppick, who started the group after she fell for a man online who claimed to be from the UK. “I knew that his accent was Nigerian,” Sluppick recalls. “I was just lucky enough to have a guy that I worked with that was Nigerian and I’d had many, many conversations with him.”

Sluppick pulled herself out of the relationship before losing any money to her predator, but others she works with haven’t been as fortunate. Today, Romancescams.org has 19,000 active members posting about their experiences and supporting one another, the details of their stories helping to lift the veil off of the ways scammers operate.

Sluppick say that the majority of romance scams she deals with originate in Ghana and Nigeria and that predators there have provided a road map for how they target and take advantage of victims. “They’re taking actual notes,” Sluppick says of the predators. “You say,

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‘Oh, I’m looking to have three kids and I want this and I want that.’ In a very short period of time, they become the dream person that you’re looking for.”

According to Sluppick, a scammer’s first move is to get a victim off a dating site and on to e-mail or instant messenger — they might even say they cancelled their membership on the dating site because they found their perfect match.

Then come the endearing nicknames — “baby,” “honey,” “sweetie.” Predators use the same pet name for all of their victims — everyone is just “sweetie,” for example — so they don’t screw up names when they’re IM-ing (mistakenly calling Jane, Mary, and outing themselves).

Most scammers are men, analysts say, but they’re savvy enough to con their own: Whitty says that predators can use apps to disguise their voices over the phone, allowing a husky-voiced male to sound like a breathy, eager young woman. Digitally enhanced, the scams just keep coming. According to the FBI, there have been 2,600 romance scam complaints made in 2012 so far, and 790 of them were by males, with $3.6 million in reported losses.

Sluppick notes that predators also use gifts as part of their artillery. Beyond merely softening up a victim, gift-giving allows predators to get a crucial bit of information: an address. With an address in hand, predators can set up a reshipping scam. They buy items with a stolen

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Ty Fortner’s profile on Sugar Daddies.com

credit card, send them to the victim’s house, and ask the victim to ship the goods back to them.

Check-kiting is another popular tactic. Romantic predators ask their victim to cash a check for them and wire the money along. Victims later discover that the check they cashed never cleared and that law enforcement officials are investigating them for fraud. According to Sluppick, victims have ended up facing criminal charges when all they thought they were doing was helping someone they loved in a perfectly legal way.

The list of strategies that prime a victim to do these things goes on and on, and it all amounts to a steady courtship and seduction aimed at making a victim a softer and more accessible mark.

“I’m not afraid to call it grooming, because that’s what it is,” says Savage, the FBI agent. “It doesn’t matter who you are, what you look like, what your education level is, or how much money you make.”

What scammers are good at, Savage

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said, is exploiting whatever vulnerability they detect. For Bourgeois, that meant the promise of a baby. For Wheaton, it may well have been as simple as her scammer knowing she was a good Christian.

Although the majority of romance scams are still dominated by men working out of West Africa, in recent years similar schemes have also started emanating from other parts of the world, according to analysts and law enforcement officials.

Savage, the FBI agent, says the growth reflects the success predators are enjoying.

“We are seeing it from all corners of the world,” he says. “I think we’re seeing the majority of it from Africa, but if it’s working, then other people are going to jump on board with it.”

MALE MODELS Fred, who is 49 and works as a physician in the Chicago area and asked that his full name not be used for this article, says he began an online relationship two years ago with someone he believed to be a male model from St. Petersburg. Fred admits that he’s a romantic who falls in love quickly, and that all the model really had to do to draw him in was give him some attention.

“I’m shy. I’m quiet. I do have low self-esteem,” Fred says. “I have a very hard time meeting people, whether it’s romantic love, friendship, anything.

And he made it so easy.”

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Kind words over email, Skype and text, in addition to promises of a future together, were enough to seduce Fred.

But the model made sure to continue to keep Fred’s insecurities alive and well: he says the model often reminded him that he was lucky – or more likely not good enough – to be with someone so young and attractive in the first place.

Eventually, they reached an understanding: If Fred would support the model with $2,500 every month, the model would quit his job, and in time, move to the United States so the two could be together.

But by April of this year, the model still hadn’t moved and Fred had given him $100,000 — including money to buy a car, a new laptop and a camera.

The best explanation Fred can think as for how it all happened is emotional blackmail. When he wouldn’t give the model more money, the man threatened to leave him and go find someone wealthier who would. After the last payment Fred provided — $42,000 — he

started to ask for his money back and the model stopped communicating with him altogether.

“There are a lot of characteristics that I have...I’m sensitive, caring, giving, I’m all those things. And someone like him will pick up on all those things and know how to manipulate them,” Fred says, adding that even early on, deep down, he suspected he was being scammed.

“But he had me so sucked in,” Fred says.”He was so evil, and so good at what he did, that it made it almost impossible for me to say no.”

When Karen Hansen, a 63-year-old former nurse’s assistant from Minnesota, talks about trying move on from the man she fell in love with on Match.com last summer, she doesn’t sound like she’s talking about someone who scammed her out of $20,000 — the bulk of her retirement money.

“He called and you wanted to call him back,” Hansen says. “You had that feeling of you had to talk to him.”

If there is such a things as a Stockholm syndrome in online romance scams, Hansen suffered from it.

“After I found out he was a scam-

“ A fter I found out he was a scammer, it was hard to break that, you know, that love.”

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mer, it was hard to break that, you know, that love,” she says. “Or what do you call it, you thought you were in love.”

It took Hansen three months in therapy, and a stay at a mental hospital to treat her the depression she was dealing with, to accept that the relationship had never been real.

Victims can go broke after a scam — Hansen ended up losing her house to a short sale after giving most of her savings to pay her predator’s debts and other costs — but those who have worked with anyone who has been fleeced say the emotional fallout can be worse than financial losses.

In Professor Whitty’s interviews with victims, she found that ties to the scam-

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mer are, indeed, hard to break. One woman she interviewed was so attached to her scammer that she kept a photo of him on her iPhone.

“She’d moved on to a new relationship, and the guy was lovely, but she still compares the real relationship with the fake relationship,” Whitty says. “She’d say, ‘He really understood me and my boyfriend doesn’t.’”

One male victim told Whitty he’d have been willing to pay to continue the relationship – knowing it was fake and with a man– just to have that constant source of happiness back in his life again.

Beyond that, victims deal with their own shame and embarrassment over what they’ve done. Karen Hansen found that even the authorities she reported the fraud to weren’t sympathetic.

“The police station, they aren’t very nice to you,” she says. “They don’t understand what you’ve been through.”

If victims do decide to tell their families, they risk humiliation. When Mary Wheaton told her family what happened, one of her brothers suggested she go on Dateline.

“He wanted to have me publicly ridiculed,” she says. “I don’t talk to very many friends anymore. I don’t really go to family functions.”

When Professor Whitty attended a conference in Chicago last month to speak with the major dating sites -Match.com, eHarmony, and Spark Net-

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works among them — for the first time, she was asked about scammers who are willing to emerge from the digital veil and meet in person.

“It’s a lot of work to meet face to face, but they’re definitely coming out,” Whitty says. “People must be cashing in on it, realizing there’s another strategy.”

Robert, a 50-year-old commodity broker from Manhattan, who declined to give his last name for this article, says he scammed him this past spring by a woman he met online and dated for several weeks.

After he thought the two were committed, he gave her $3,000 to pay bills.

“I remember when I gave her the check, I said, ‘If I don’t see you next week, I’ll know that you scammed me.’”

He didn’t see her again. Instead, what he got were angry text messages when he wouldn’t give her more money and later, an email from the predator that said, “we met on the internet, what did you expect?”

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THE SERIAL PREDATOR? Megan, who is 34, and works in medicine, also asked that her last name not be used for this article, believes she dated an actual conman, Andrew Funches, whom she met on Match.com. The two lived in different states — she was on the West Coast and he said he lived in Minnesota — but went on dates when he was in town for business.

Megan described Funches as charming and as flattering as they come. He said he traveled frequently, wore expensive clothes, spent freely on dates, and never gave any sign that he’d ask her for money. After two visits, Megan says he made it seem like he was head over heels.

“He started throwing around ‘I miss you so much’ and he told me that he loved me,” she recalls.

Not only that, Megan says his actions seemed to back up his words: the two usually spoke by phone several times a week, they texted more frequently than that, and when the holidays came around, she says Funches welcomed the chance to spend time with her family.

Ty Fortner, also known as Andrew Funches; Jodi Bourgeois, a victim of Greg Garic; and Karen Hansen, 63, who lost her house and $20,000 to a scam

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“He was talking about living together, and we were going to get married someday,” Megan says. Such promises, she admits, appealed to her romantic side.

“I think I’ve always had a little bit of an optimistic view on love,” she says.

“I don’t want to say fairytale, but yea, I think I used to idealize love.”

But two months in, Megan says, Funches came to her with a story of a $10,000 gambling debt that he owed to the mafia. Megan initially said she wouldn’t lend him money, but a few weeks later he told her that if he didn’t pay, they were going to shoot him.

“I figured it was at the very least an exaggeration,” she says. “But he would retell these stories, very detailed stories and

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experiences…It was very thought out.”

Megan says Funches tried to convince her to give him the money by saying he couldn’t move cities to be with her until the debt was settled. She had doubts about his story, but managed to quiet them by considering the alternative.

“Something didn’t seem right,” she explains. “But what I asked myself is…

What if something did happen and you could have stopped it but you didn’t?”

Megan loaned Funches the money and drew up a promissory note and a payment plan which included interest charges and late fees for missing payments.

“I was standing in line at that bank,” she recalls, about to transfer the money, “and there was a tiny little place in my heart that was saying, ‘Don’t do it.’”

She did it anyway.

“I overrode that. I wanted to prove that [suspicion] wasn’t true, that he was real,” she says.

Megan said Funches still came to visit her after the loan, and he even paid her a few hundred dollars. But not long after, he started dodging her phone calls.

“I was sitting at home one night and something felt so off and I started searching and I found all these [online dating] profiles,” Megan says. “I think there were six of them that I found that night.”

She hired a private investigator who put her in touch with another woman who was owed money by the same man.

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The two spent hours on the phone comparing notes.

“This was a Lifetime movie,” Megan says. “This isn’t what happens in real life and certainly not to me…I’m not a stupid person. Naïve maybe, and certainly too trusting, but not stupid.”

Megan tried to get her money back by pretending for another six months that she hadn’t uncovered Funches’ scam, but keeping up that charade was preventing her from moving on and getting over how devastated she felt. Emotionally spent, she gave up on getting her money back, closed her old email account, changed her cell number so he would stop asking her for money, and deleted any other evidence that Andrew Funches ever was part of her life.

About a year later, Megan got a note from Funches’ lawyer saying he’d declared bankruptcy and that she was one of his listed debtors.

It’s now been eight years since Megan dated Andrew Funches, but this past

March he resurfaced in her life in the form of a handwritten letter a woman sent to her. The story was the essentially the same: a name, a mob debt and a five figure loan.

Megan and her correspondent are members of an unusual club. They and at least 18 other women living in multiple states all began comparing notes and say that they have all been fleeced by the same man, who they say uses the names Andrew Funches, Ty Fortner, and other aliases. The victims say that Funches/ Fortner lives in Chicago, is 41-years-old, and claims that he works for an insurance company.

Tamara White, now 50, has been trying to get her money back from Ty Fortner since 2008. She says she loaned him over $28,000, most of which was meant to cover his mob debts, and was forced to take him to court to try to recover her money.

Another woman, who ask that her name be withheld, said in an e-mail that she’d lost her house in a short sale and went into bankruptcy years ago. Had she not loaned Ty Fortner $20,000 when

“ I was standing in line at that bank, and there was a tiny little place in my heart that was saying, ‘Don’t do it.’”

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she was 25, she says she could have stayed afloat financially.

Fortner’s lawyer, a Chicago attorney named Richard Zito, declined to allow his client to be interviewed. But Zito says in an email that any claim that his client was a romantic predator or a con man is untrue.

“Mr. Fortner was not running a “scam”; at most, he is guilty only of borrowing money from a girlfriend and failing to pay it back,” Zito writes.

Carrie, who is 29 and also asked that her name not be used, said she dated Fortner within the last year and borrowed $9,000 from an ex-boyfriend so she could to pay off his Fortner’s debt and keep him from being killed.

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After connecting with another woman on Facebook who said Fortner scammed her, Carrie pieced together Fortner’s history as a Lothario.

Carrie says that she stayed in touch with Fortner until this past spring, hoping to get her money back. For several months she says he used the loan to control her by saying that if she came to his apartment, they could talk about paying her back the moneyback. But when she would arrive, Fortner would tell her that she had to sleep with him first.

Whenever Carrie went to see him she’d leave a note on her desk in her apartment for someone to open in case she didn’t return. She wanted them to know that it would be Fortner who was responsible for her disappearance.

Carrie gave up on getting her money back when she says Fortner threatened call the police and report her for harassment.

“I just stopped contacting him, because there’s no point,” she says.

Despite all of this, she says that when she first found out about Fortner’s history she still wanted to marry him.

“I was pretty stupid,” Carrie says. She remembers that after learning about Fortner’s troubled and troubling record with women, her first thought was to reassure him.

“If you want to change, I will stay by your side,” she recalls telling him.

DESIGN DYNAMICS

C ABOVE: Chrysler’s head of motorsport design, Mark Trostle, dreams up a sketch of the Dodge Viper.

CAN MOTOWN MAKE SEXY CARS?

BY SHARON CARTY

PORTRAITS BY MARVIN SHAOUNI

LAY DEAN SPENDS his days imagining the future.

You might soon be driving what he dreams.

As executive director of General Motors’ advanced global design department, he is currently envisioning the roads of 2040, and what he sees is very different from today.

We are on the verge, he says, of a renaissance, an era in which car design will change the look of our roads, the way we commute to work, how much stress we endure throughout the day, even our impact on the planet.

“Today, it is all possible,” says Dean, who sees Walt Disney’s vision of futurism as a model. “It is an exciting time to be a designer.”

This month marks 85 years since GM became the first automaker to create a department devoted entirely to body design. That department now finds itself at a crossroads: as GM, the world’s biggest automaker, and other major American manufacturers seek to regain the country’s confidence and engage younger buyers — and even expand their business to more distant, untapped markets — innovating at a pace beyond what most car companies are used to will be key.

GM CO.

DESIGN DYNAMICS

GM hopes its history will be instructive. The company’s first design chief, Hollywood coachbuilder Harley Earl, added colors beyond the then-standard black and is credited with the idea of the “concept car” — as in, a sexy, wild-looking design (albeit one that people may not actually be able to drive). By the time Earl retired in 1958, he had some truly progressive designs to his name, too, from the 1938 Buick Y-Job, with its hidden headlamps

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and electric windows, to the 1956 Firebird II, which included a guidance system that GM said would soon be integrated with the “highway of the future,” enabling the car to drive itself.

This hasn’t quite come to pass.

Even if automakers push through innovative new products, it’s unclear if people will buy them.

The most popular cars today aren’t known for their radical styling. The Toyota Camry has been the bestselling car in the U.S. for every year since 1997 except one.

Nor is it certain the automakers will manufacture anything too

The 1956 GM Firebird II — a car that Harley Earl dreamed would be able to drive itself.

GM CO.

DESIGN DYNAMICS

out of the box. Take the Chevy Volt, the advanced hybrid battery-powered car that has won accolades and awards for its design, but almost didn’t happen.

It took the persistence of one top executive to convince the company’s board that the idea made financial sense.

These are the kinds of challenges the Big Three U.S. automakers have struggled to meet for decades.

The flying cars promised more than half a century ago remain far from dealers’ lots, but with their companies’ futures anything but certain, designers at GM, Ford and Chrysler now seem to feel a new urgency as they grapple with new material compositions, shifting transportation needs and, not least, the legacies of their predecessors, which loom large around them as they work to make Americans fall back in love with the automobile.

Meanwhile, GM designers are still working out of a oncefuturistic Eero Saarinen building that was completed during Earl’s tenure. Even if Dean never makes it to Disney World, the suspended staircase and jet-aerated pond in the lobby lend the design compound a distinct whiff of

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Tomorrowland, or maybe the Pirates of the Caribbean ride.

The design center’s retro flavor belies its high-tech work systems. An attached wind tunnel helps designers ensure that their clay models remain not just dynamic, but aerodynamic. GM’s head of global design, Ed Welburn, runs conference calls with staffers beamed onto giant screens from eight countries.

GM’s Director of Advanced Design, Clay Dean, with the Chevrolet Code 130 R concept car.

DESIGN DYNAMICS

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GM’s Vice President of Global Design, Ed Welburn, in the company’s “Design Dome.”

MARVIN SHAOUNI

“PEOPLE FALL IN LOVE—ED WITH A CAR WELBURN FOR MANY REASONS.” Still, observers say, the auto industry’s present doesn’t look much like the future promised in buildings like this back when Eisenhower was president. While the industry has always had striking, exciting “statement cars,” mass-market models have essentially remained

incrementally-modified boxes balanced atop four wheels.

That’s in large part because of how much its costs to develop a new car: Jim Hall, a consultant with 2953 Analytics in Birmingham, Mich., says automakers spend about $1 billion to $1.5 billion for each new model they introduce.

“When you’ve got that much money on the line, you are

CHRYSLER

DESIGN DYNAMICS

very, very cautious about doing anything that might be considered frivolous,” he says.

Now, however, designers at GM and elsewhere say technology is catching up with their imaginations, which should make for much broader, more dynamic changes faster. Their goals are ambitious: Create radical new vehicle designs that can adapt to a more crowded, more resource-strained and rapidly-changing world.

“I will be really disappointed if we’re not doing some of these things in 2030,” Dean says. “We need to create the solutions that will make society better.”

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CHISELED HOODS

Safety and fuel economy regulations drive a lot of design demands. Designers have to take into consideration airbags, crumple zones (the area of that crunches together in a car accident), roof strength, pedestrian safety concerns and a host of other issues.

Combine those issues with fuel economy concerns, and the fact that steel is quite hard to bend, and you can see why it’s challenging to pursue avant garde designs in mass-market cars.

The drive for improved fuel economy is also forcing automakers to be more inventive, and could mean we’ll see some

Analysts say automakers spend more than $1 billion on the development of new car models, like the Dodge Viper.

“WE’RE TRYING TO GET BACK TO A WASHABLE SURFACE — WHEN THEY WANT TO GO AND TOUCH AND WASH THE CAR. ” —MARK TROSTLE

DESIGN DYNAMICS

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“TO A LOT OF PEOPLE, CARS OF—JIM HALL CURRENT TIMES ARE BORING.” more quirky designs on the road. Automakers are now using carbon fiber, an expensive blend of carbon and plastic which has been most commonly used in spacecraft, airplanes and race cars. It is highly moldable and light, which would make it more popular in cars if it weren’t so expensive.

Chrysler’s Dodge brand is using carbon fiber in the new Viper, which hits the market later this year and will be priced around $95,000. Carbon fiber is in the hood and roof, and the automaker used high-strength aluminum in the doors to help make it lighter.

The result is a chiseled hood with seven air vents, and doors that look like something out of Minority Report.

Traditionally, car doors and other steel parts are made on stamping machines. The piece of steel that makes a door might be stamped five or six times to get the right shape. But there’s no amount of stamping that would make the

Viper’s door. The company had to “superform” the door piece, by heating up the aluminum and pressing it into shape.

“We’re trying to get back to what I call a washable surface,” says Mark Trostle, head of motorsport design for Chrysler.

“That’s when a customer wants to go out and touch and wash the car, to touch those hard edges.”

Although the new shapes will make cars more modern, Trostle says he thinks they’ll also be more timeless and classic. “A little more beautiful,” he says.

Before 1980 or so, carmakers rarely took aerodynamics into account when looking at car design. When new fuel efficiency standards hit after the oil crisis in the mid 1970s, the companies had to start thinking of ways to cut fuel consumption. About 25 percent of a car’s fuel consumption comes from pushing itself through the air.

Over the past decade, designers have learned to spend more time in the wind tunnel, a practice that won’t go away anytime soon.

Designers bring clay models, about one-quarter the size of a

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FORD MOTOR COMPANY

New models like Ford’s Vertrek Concept are designed at a studio in Turin, Italy.

DESIGN DYNAMICS

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FORD MOTOR COMPANY

The Ford Vertrek Concept

real car, into an air tunnel. A giant fan blows air over the model car, and computers determine how easily the air slips over, under and around the car. Designers bring their carving tools with them, and go in and trim off clay here and mold it on there, trying to figure out the best aerodynamics,

experimenting as they go along.

Trostle said the challenge in the next few years will be how to make cars that cut through the air but don’t all look the same.

Before a model is revealed, it is inspected by designers like Stefan Lamm (top) and Ernst Reim (bottom).

DESIGN DYNAMICS

GM CO.

TOMORROW’S DESIGNERS

Beyond the push to create less generic-looking cars, manufacturers also are struggling in their pursuit of an apathetic youth market, and one with less discretionary income.

That’s where Ed Welburn comes in. To most of America, he isn’t much of a celebrity, despite his global influence. But around Detroit, General Motors’ head of car design is a rock star.

Even though the attention makes this soft-spoken man a little uncomfortable, he always tries to be polite and engaging. Especially to the kids.

A few months ago, he says was eating dinner with a colleague at a restaurant in Brighton, Mich., when a boy around 8 or 9 years old came up to the table. He told Welburn he wanted to draw a car for him.

“He just slightly taller than the table, and he stood there thinking, looking up at the ceiling, taking it very seriously,” Welburn said. The young designer was very focused on the stripes, making sure they

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looked just right. Welburn took the drawing, done on a napkin, back with him to the office.

Welburn remembers his own brush with GM’s design department as a child. When he was 10, he wrote a letter to GM, telling them he wanted to be a designer. What classes should he take, he asked.

What did he need to do?

Someone at GM wrote back, laying out a detailed course of action that Welburn followed. He’s now just the sixth lead designer GM has had in its 85-year history, and the first AfricanAmerican to head up design.

Connecting with tomorrow’s designers is something Welburn takes seriously.

Kids these days don’t have the same love affair with cars that their parents had: The number of young drivers is on the decline, with just 46.3 percent of them getting their licenses in 2008, compared with 64.4 percent in 1998, according to the Federal Highway Administration. Gartner, a research firm, says 46 percent of people aged 19 to 24 would opt to have Internet access over having a car.

The car isn’t the key to freedom and independence anymore, Welburn said, so younger

Welburn took the sketch that David Rush gave him and turned it into a concept car.

“YOU MIGHT LUST AFTER THE EXTERIOR OF A CAR, BUT LIKE A RELATIONSHIP WITH A PERSON, IT’S THE INSIDE THAT COUNTS” —MIKE ARBAUGH

AP PHOTO (MODEL T); GM CO. (CORVETTE)

DESIGN DYNAMICS

generations aren’t as excited about getting their own vehicles.

Welburn said he knows that in order to keep GM’s cars vibrant, the department needs an influx of younger designers coming in to make sure its car designers connect with tomorrow’s buyers.

So when he got back from meeting that young boy at the restaurant, he took the boy’s napkin to one of his most creative designers and asked him to turn it into an official car sketch. He then sent it back to the boy, whose parents told him he fell in love with it and hung it on his bedroom wall.

If you can relate your brand to people at an early age, it’s a tremendous thing, Welburn said.

The industry also needs to look at new ways of connecting with younger drivers, Dean said. Maybe that means making motorized Chevy bikes that would assist riders up hills, but mostly act like a bike. Or come up with entirely new cars, radical designs that seat just two people but can get you to work and are cheap to own and operate.

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TEN CARS THAT STOOD OUT

FORD MODEL T (1908) Rarely lauded for its style, this innovative, practical car sparked a worldwide fascination with automobiles.

VOLKSWAGEN’S BEETLE AND MICROBUS (1938) Compact and spare alternatives to the colossal cars of the 1950s cars, these autos became bedrocks of the counterculture in the ‘60s and ‘70s.

FORD F-SERIES (1948) A staple in the Southern states, these burly, full-sized pickups have become synonymous with country music and manual labor.

CHEVROLET CORVETTE (1953) Chevrolet’s powerful, durable sports car won the hearts of young drivers and eventually became a symbol of the American lifestyle.

DESIGN DYNAMICS

CHRYSLER

REWRITING THE BOOK

Two years ago, GM showed off a concept car in Shanghai called the En-V, a two-wheeler that is shaped like a Russian nesting doll. Its meant to drive no faster than 35 mph, designed to make commuting through overcrowded cities much easier.

The automaker is also looking at other kinds of transportation: Bikes, trains, commuter trucks that could carry pint-sized oneor two-seater cars. They’re trying to solve future transportation problems that are sure to develop as the world grows increasingly more crowded, Dean said.

Growing urban populations are a challenge for carmakers, because those cities lack the infrastructure to handle the millions of cars on the road. That results in huge traffic jams, like a 12-day traffic jam that happened in China in 2010. More often, though, people end up spending an inordinate amount of time in their cars, driving no faster than 30 mph.

About 3 billion people live in cities today; by 2040, that figure is expected to grow to 6 billion.

Automated cars will play a large role in moving all those

CADILLAC DEVILLE (1959) These pastel-colored land yachts were a symbol of opulence and style in the late 1950s. Each car sported massive tail fins on its rear — a signature feature.

PONTIAC GTO (1964) With a list of optional equipment described as being “as long as your arm and twice as hairy,” the “Goat” became the preferred car of hellraisers in the late 1960s.

FORD MUSTANG (1965) One of the most gorgeous mainstream cars ever put on the street, it created the “pony car” class of American automobiles — sports car-like coupes with long hoods and short rear decks.

HONDA CIVIC (1972) Renowned motorcycle manufacturer Honda unveiled this fuel-sipper in 1972.

It ran on the revolutionary new CVCC engine and got 39 miles per gallon.

w

CHRYSLER MINIVAN (1983) A bigger, more comfortable alternative to station wagons, the Minivan became the go-to choice for family road trips and the official vehicle of the suburban soccer mom.

TOYOTA PRIUS (1997) The birth of the modern, environmentally conscious automobile, it popularized the use of alternative energy in fueling cars.

All information from Paul Ingrassia’s new book, Engines of Change: A History of the American Dream in Fifteen Cars

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“WE NEED TO CREATE SOLUTIONS TO MAKE SOCIETY BETTER .”—CLAY DEAN people around, and they will radically change car design.

Cars that drive themselves will alleviate traffic. They’ll be more evenly spaced on the highway, and get into fewer crashes. They’ll also change the way people think about driving and what a car should even look like.

“You basically rewrite the whole book for what the car is,” Hall says. “Do you need windows in an autonomous vehicle? No, you don’t. It changes everything.”

Automated driving seems like the exact opposite of what would inspire passion for cars, but it could it could open up huge opportunities in design, Welburn says, and it could help people fall in love with cars again. Automated driving seems like the exact opposite of what would inspire passion for cars.

First, there’d be no real driving.

Second, they don’t give the driver a sense of freedom - the car does all the work.

Still, Welburn thinks drivers

who enjoy their commutes more will enjoy being in their vehicles.

They could check email, work on their computers, watch a movie, maybe even nap. It also could give older drivers who are losing their reflexes the ability to stay mobile even if they weren’t driving.

Maybe society could lower the driving age, if the car was doing most of the work.

“I think people fall in love with a car for many reasons,” Welburn says. “Some love to drive, some love the fashion. And with autonomous vehicles, some people might just love the time they get to be in their car.”

Population trends will also make car sharing more popular.

In the U.S., growth is expected in Western cities, the Sunbelt states and along the I-85 corridor between Raleigh, N.C. and Atlanta, where there is often a lack of a mass transit. This will lead to commuters seeking alternatives such as the Zipcar, a rental-car company that offers hourly and day rates to its customers.

Welburn says car sharing also will inevitably result in sleek,

GM CO.

DESIGN DYNAMICS

minimalistic cars. The interiors would become more like a blank movie screen that lights up when drivers bring in their own iPod or other handheld device.

That would light up customized dashboards, radio station presets and maps personalized to the driver. They’d also be easier to clean in between drivers.

Automakers would design shared cars with the idea that the interior was a blank slate that would be customized later by the user. A study done by PWC showed that younger car buyers

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are very interested in customizing their vehicles — and this kind of idea could answer that desire.

While a lot of car design discussions focus on the car’s exterior, automakers have realized that customers really prioritize comfortable, easy-to-use, quality interiors. So interior design has become equally important to the industry. “I like to say it’s very similar to dating,” says Michael Arbaugh, chief designer of interiors for Ford. “You might lust after the exterior of a car, but like a relationship with a person, it’s the inside that counts.”

Ford has already spent time making their interiors very high-

Futuristic models like the EN-V are designed to alleviate traffic troubles and improve air quality.

DESIGN DYNAMICS

tech, using the Sync system to connect with smartphones and iPods, and allowing drivers to talk to their cars. They’re also working on making seats more comfortable, dashboards and other parts feel more expensive to the touch, and making the technology systems less distracting.

Mood lighting helps, too.

Chrysler, Ford and GM are all working on ways to light up little nooks and crannies in the car, because it makes the inside feel more like a living room than a car. The colors are changeable, so drivers who get bored of blue accent lights can change it to pink or white or red.

THE EMOTIONAL SIDE

Welburn is sitting in the back of Nicola Bulgari’s 1932 Cadillac Fleetwood limousine, showing off the spacious interior. The car is on loan from Bulgari, the scion of the Bulgari luxury goods company, who recently awarded Welburn the inaugural Bulgari award for people who have made a contribution to automotive heritage.

The car feels like it’s as big as a modern day minivan. The seats feel like a wide, soft couch. On the

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outside, the running boards rise up over the wheels, making the car look like a piece of art.

He’s raving about the proportions of the car — proportions are something automotive designers like to talk about, but few people really understand.

“It’s how the car works together, the relationship of the body of the vehicle to the curve of the bumpers to the placement of the wheels,” he says. “Sometimes it all works together just right, and the proportions just sing.

When you don’t have great proportions, you can tell.”

Yet over the past century or so, what appears in retrospect to be elegant or daring design was either standard procedure at the time the car was built or was something that got adopted and assimilated so rapidly that it became commonplace.

In the 1930s, when Bulgari’s limousine was built, the proportions may have been exquisite but it looked a lot like other cars on the road. The bumper curving up over the front tire was standard practice. The shiny black paint and chrome bumpers seemed somewhat conventional, too. In the ‘50s, once tailfins and multi-colored cars became popular, that style

GM CO.

DESIGN DYNAMICS

became the norm. Muscle cars of the ‘60s at some point became less surprising, too.

“To a lot of people, the cars of the current time always seem boring,” Hall says. “It’s the horror of the now. Now is the place where you live, and because you have to live here, it’s less interesting than the future and not as romantic as the past.”

Hall predicts that 10 years from now, when we look back on the design of today, we’ll agree that it was pretty good. But he believes it’s going to get even better.

“That’s the hook, right? That’s how you differentiate yourself from the other automakers,” Hall

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says. “It’s the most subjective part of the car, and the most interesting.”

In the end, it’s seductive styling, the automakers hope, that will keep people passionate about their cars.

“You don’t want customers to justify a car based on logic; you want them to justify the purchase based on emotion,” says J. Mays, head of global design for Ford.

“It’s a bit like falling in love. You don’t fall in love for practical reasons. You fall in love for emotional reasons. The practical things have to be there — but that’s just establishing trust, the price of entry. Ultimately, you need the emotional side to come through, just as it does in a relationship.”

The GM Design Dome — home to the company’s 85-yearold design department.

INSIDE THE CULT

Politico at a Crossroads

By Michael Calderone Illustrated by Bob Eckstein

O INSIDE THE CULT

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ON AN EARLY May evening, Politico executive editor and co-founder Jim VandeHei rallied his troops on the 30th floor of Allbritton Communications, located on the Virginia side of the Potomac and blessed with a clear view of the Washington Monument rising above the nation’s capital. ¶ VandeHei praised his staffers’ dedication and hard work in a pressure-cooker newsroom where “winning the morning” is a mantra and burnout is part of the diet.

VandeHei, who’s fond of saying that his most successful worker bees have a certain “screw loose,” also embraced the idea that everybody at his politics-obsessed enterprise should just keep swallowing their Kool Aid. “We get flak for being a cult sometimes,” VandeHei said, according to staffers present. “But you wanna know what? We are a cult!”

Roughly 150 staffers gathered that night for Politico’s fifth birthday party, a belated celebration for a website and newspaper that has become a pivotal force in political reporting. As higherups catalogued the site’s achievements since its 2007 launch, Robert Allbritton, Politico’s publisher and CEO of the parent company that bears his family’s

name, joined VandeHei and editor-in-chief John Harris, as the room was treated to a video tribute to, well, Politico.

In the video, Presidents Barack Obama and George W. Bush playfully mock Politico, a flurry of cable news anchors reference the site, and several political media heavyweights offered birthday wishes, including NBC’s David Gregory, ABC’s Diane Sawyer, CBS’s Bob Schieffer, MSNBC’s Chris Matthews, and Time’s Mark Halperin. Former NBC Nightly

INSIDE THE CULT

News anchor Tom Brokaw appeared on the video, too, praising chief White House correspondent Mike Allen.

“I don’t know how he does it,” Brokaw gushed about Allen, “but whatever it is, we all want a part of it.”

A few weeks later, during the wedding reception of Jonathan Martin, Politico’s senior political reporter, and Meet the Press executive producer Betsy Fischer — a chattering class soiree Allen chronicled on his must-read morning “Playbook” — Brokaw toasted the happy couple, noting that their marriage symbolized the “union of these two most powerful organizations in American political journalism.”

So it is that Politico, the last election cycle’s insurgent, has morphed into a muscular member of this cycle’s establishment.

No longer the upstart it was during Barack Obama’s 2008 presidential campaign, Politico’s current success is also freighted with the reality that however cultish it may be, however pivotal it has become, it is also at a crossroads: Having built a sizable and still-expanding newsroom of 225 editorial and business staffers, Politico has to size up new revenue streams and reshape the franchise in such a way that

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staffers speculate the company’s co-founders may not stick around a few years from now.

In the middle of an election year, with political junkies frothing, Politico’s traffic during the first five months of 2012 is down, from an average of 4.229 million unique visitors in 2011 to 4.165 million so far this year, according to the Internet marketing research firm comScore. Traffic numbers over the past two years, which have basically plateaued, suggest Politico has captured just about as big an audience as it can for its unique brand of non-stop political news.

Politico charges premium advertising rates in the Beltway, but isn’t immune from the cur-

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rent slump plaguing media organizations nationwide. Beltway publications, which rely heavily on selling ads to advocacy organizations and contractors looking to influence Congress, may have even more trouble finding advertisers given that there is likely to be little movement on the legisla-

er than the lumbering giants of legacy media and didn’t shy away from sensationalizing even the most granular movement of politics, leading wags and some competitors to dub the site “Incremento.” Today, longstanding print publications are just as fast in getting quick-take stories and

“ I don’t know how he does it, but whatever it is, we all want a part of it.”

—Tom Brokaw

praising Politico’s Mike Allen tive front before November.

At the same time, Politico is doubling down on Washington with the expansion of Politico Pro, its policy-focused subscription service, a signal that the company’s financial future may be increasingly tied to sober, sophisticated reporting on sectors like technology and health care, rather than its signature and sensational takes on politics.

Meanwhile, the political media world has undergone a technological sea change over the last four years, a dramatic shift that was spurred on in part by Politico’s own insatiable need for speed.

In 2008, Politico moved fast-

news nuggets online, while the uber-insider conversation has moved to Twitter.

Politico’s newsroom is changing, too, with the company announcing plans this month to hire another 20 reporters and editors for Pro, a move that led one staffer to suggest to Huffington that there could soon be more Pro journalists than those primarily writing for the main Politico site and newspaper. Staffers, many of whom requested anonymity to protect their jobs, wonder exactly how the Politico and Pro newsrooms will be integrated, a strategy now under development, and whether Politico could be viewed

INSIDE THE CULT

by the 2016 election as a paid service with a free website, rather than the other way around.

Contracts will be up post-election for several top political reporters, including Glenn Thrush, Maggie Haberman and Carrie Budoff Brown, along with national politics editor Charlie Mahtesian.

With such stars in play, Politico’s cultish, screw-loose culture has come into even starker relief.

Politico has long had trouble retaining talent in its newsroom, where staffers either thrive or barely survive in a male-dominated, hard-driving environment defined by frantic 5 a.m. emails from editors and weekend assignments. There have been so many departures lately that Politico editors have done away with the traditional going-away cake in the newsroom, which staffers jokingly call the “awkward cake” given what they describe as Harris’ sometimes clumsy send-offs.

While some staff have been told that VandeHei, Harris and Allen

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“ If we’re complacent, conventional, we’re dead.”

—Jim VandeHei

on what animates Politico’s thinking all recently signed contracts that will likely keep each of them at Politico for the next several years, people close to VandeHei and Harris say that the entrepreneurial pair may grow restless before 2016 or depart if Politico Pro – and a more trade-oriented news approach — come to dominate and define the enterprise.

In recent years, Politico has become more aggressive than any print or online publication in locking up in-house and outside talent, including influential Capitol Hill reporters like Jake Sherman, Manu Raju and John Bresnahan and chief investigative reporter Kenneth Vogel. These contracts are notoriously hard to break, and yet star reporter Ben Smith, who was under contract

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through the election, managed to join BuzzFeed late last year.

Although Politico enjoyed positive buzz this spring for its idiosyncratic Politico Live streaming broadcasts on Republican primary nights, including a “Talk of the Town” write-up in the New Yorker, it’s unclear how much investment in streaming video and produced television there will be down the line.

For his part, VandeHei didn’t fixate on contracts or growing pains at the anniversary party in May. Instead, he boasted that he’d take Politico’s editorial and business-side teams — whether Congress, White House, Enterprise, Sales or Marketing — over any other publication’s in the country and reminded staffers that, five years earlier, he said Politico would be better than the New York Times and Washington Post. And five years later, he said, Politico is better.

Indeed, VandeHei did make such a boast over five years ago — to me.

“I think we’ll show that we’re

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better than the New York Times or the Washington Post,” VandeHei told me in November 2006, for a New York Observer article covering his and Harris’ bombshell exit from the Washington Post to launch a newspaper called Capitol Leader and an “as-of-yet-unnamed” website.

Both later became Politico, or POLITICO, to borrow from the all-caps house style it uses to promote the publication’s name in every article. (A year after the Observer interview, I joined Politico as the site’s first media reporter, a position I held until leaving in 2010).

Politico takes its brand seriously and is fiercely protective of its reputation, earning largely laudatory coverage over the last five years. A few days after I made calls for this story, Politico chief operating officer Kim Kingsley sent a “friendly reminder” to staffers that they should direct any questions from reporters to her, Harris and VandeHei. Following that email, several

DAVID S. HOLLOWAY/GETTY IMAGES FOR TURNER

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Politico reporters and editors either immediately declined to comment or asked to speak “off the record” for this story. Many other sources spoke to Huffington on the condition of anonymity, including more than a dozen current and former Politico staffers.

Harris and VandeHei worry about Politico’s future with a post-Depression sense of paranoia. Even when times are flush, there’s a gnawing fear that the bottom could drop out at any moment. While the two newspaper veterans can seem preoccupied with being viewed on the same level as, say, the Times and Post, both express concerns about Politico getting weighed down by the baggage and bureaucracy of legacy news outlets and, in effect, becoming traditional.

“There is nothing that animated our thinking in the beginning, and nothing that animates our thinking more today, than a fear of being complacent, of becoming conventional,” says VandeHei. “If we’re complacent, conventional, we’re dead.”

“And so you’re not going to meet two people who obsess about that more than John and me,” he continues. “That’s all we think about.

How do you continue to keep this place sharp, on the edge, where it has to be to be successful?”

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Jim VandeHei and former CNN president Jon Klein speak during Time Warner’s 2008 Political Conference.

CONVERSATION DRIVERS VandeHei, 41, dressed in dark jeans and a black blazer, at times seems more like a coach than an editor, doling out sports metaphors and riding his players to move faster, to crush the competition. Skipping pleasantries, he sometimes paces the newsroom asking reporters whether they’re breaking news today.

Harris, seven years older and a bit stockier, plays the part of

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the rumpled, sleeves-rolled-up newspaper editor, albeit one not averse to new technology. Though an odd couple to look at, the cofounders often sign staff memos “VandeHarris” and typically read from the same script when it comes to Politico.

Seated on a couch in VandeHei’s office, and frequently tapping away on a BlackBerry, Harris acknowledges that Politico can’t win on speed alone as it did in 2008, when “we were competing against a number of organizations that hadn’t reckoned with the immediacy, non-stop nature of the news cycle.”

“Now that’s kind of taken as a given, and you can put yourself out of contention and make yourself irrelevant by not being fast.

But I don’t think you can make yourself really distinctive by being fast. We’re looking for places where we can have comparative advantage,” Harris says.

He adds, “I think still the best way to do it is by being bestinformed and smartest, most sophisticated. I think our core politics team is run by people who are recognized, uniformly, really in both parties, as being masters of their beat. The phrase we use, and you’ve heard it, is to be conversation drivers.”

I have often heard that phrase,

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as has anyone who’s passed through the Rosslyn newsroom.

So far in the current election cycle, Politico has sparked the political conversation with legitimate scoops, such as breaking the allegations of sexual harassment against former Republican candidate Herman Cain, digging into campaign spending, and offering provocative analysis, like Martin’s attention-grabbing piece last August, “Is Rick Perry dumb?”

Politico also drives the conversation, at times, straight back to Politico — and not always in a positive way.

IN A MUCH-discussed May 31 piece leading the site, VandeHei and Allen suggested that the Times and Post were biased against Mitt Romney for not making a bigger deal of new revelations about Obama’s teenage marijuana use, a topic the president wrote about 17 years ago in his memoir. They also knocked the Post for its deeply reported piece on Romney’s prep school days that included disturbing details of bullying — a story that several Politico reporters and editors themselves aggregated and followed. To bolster their argument, VandeHei and Allen

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called up two notable Republicans, former Bush press secretary Ari Fleischer and ex-Mississippi governor Haley Barbour, who — surprise! — dished supportive, media-bashing quotes.

Some in the Politico news-

ical insiders online, on Twitter and on cable news — Politico’s target demographic — were talking about it. For better or worse, Politico was again driving the conversation.

Harris and VandeHei tout their top political reporters as the

“ We don’t want you taking off in the middle of an election where you’re playing a critical role for the publication.”

—John Harris

on asking reporters and editors to sign contracts room weren’t happy with the piece. One staffer said it “went over extremely poorly” with the rank-and-file and looked like top writers were simply “picking a fight unnecessarily” with competitors. Times and Post writers weren’t pleased either, suggesting that VandeHei and Allen downplayed or completely ignored their extensive coverage of Obama since the 2008 race.

Other journalists mocked the piece on Twitter and critics, like the Post’s Erik Wemple, tore it apart in a series of blog posts.

Lo and behold: even if the story was a transparent attempt at currying favor with the Romney campaign, the net effect was that polit-

reason they stand out this cycle, regardless of their competitors’ cranked up metabolisms or the Twitterverse micro-controversy of the moment. Harris described Martin as “one of the most authoritative forces covering the presidential campaign,” called Haberman “almost supernatural,” and described 26-year-old reporter Alexander Burns, who started as the top editors’ researcher straight out of college, as “indispensable.”

When it comes to covering the current president, Harris says he’d put Thrush “against any competitor in terms of his ability to interpret and to understand what’s going on in the White House.”

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VandeHei concurs.

“We’ve got a really fricken’ good politics team, full of these amazingly creative minds who break news and drive conversation even in a world where it’s really hard to do that. And that’s the trick.”

Harris wouldn’t comment on specific employment situations, but he explained why they asked numerous reporters and editors to sign contracts spanning several months to years, a management move that’s common in the television industry but unusual to this degree in print or online journalism.

“What’s clear is that we created a platform that allows people to enhance their value, makes them more competitive,” says Harris. “So if we’re doing that, that’s our end of the bargain. Your end of the bargain — you, being the person under the contract — is to give us a cer-

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tain amount of stability. We don’t want you taking off in the middle of an election where you’re playing a critical role for the publication.”

Ben Smith, who’d been with Politico since the beginning, did just that. A few weeks before the Iowa Caucus, he became editor-in-chief of BuzzFeed, a site better known for pumping out viral memes than for original, political reporting.

Despite imposing language in the contracts about the risk of a lawsuit if employees break them, the company didn’t sue Smith. It seems as if Smith called management’s bluff, knowing that a public spat wouldn’t be good for either party. However, the two sides struck a new deal in which Smith would write a weekly Politico column on the 2012 election and hold back his byline on BuzzFeed until the Republican nomination race was over and perhaps until

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the GOP convention – a curious move considering Smith had already swapped his “benpolitico” Twitter handle for “buzzfeedben” and was regularly linking to his un-bylined pieces on BuzzFeed.

Then Smith stopped writing the Politico column in March and began using a byline on BuzzFeed, even though Romney was not yet the official nominee.

“We love Ben. We’re not talking about that contract,” VandeHei says. Smith declined to comment on his contract.

Politico staffers say Smith was understandably focused on running BuzzFeed, and his weekly columns weren’t considered as strong as his previous work. While Harris similarly wouldn’t discuss any specifics about Smith’s contract, he explains “mak[ing] a decision to modify the column arrangement” with his former reporter after just a few months.

“I felt Ben had taken on an assignment that deserved his mindshare,” Harris says of Smith’s BuzzFeed job. “I think he underestimated and I underestimated to what extent a column would work in his interests and work in ours.”

In recent months, Smith has told journalists that he can’t yet poach from Politico, sources say, presumably because of a stipulation with the exit agreement. On

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Tuesday, Smith hired BuzzFeed’s first Washington D.C. bureau chief and plans to staff up more through the year. So it remains to be seen if any Politico staffers, perhaps post-election, will follow him to a site that’s emerged as the most talked about newcomer in this Twitter-fueled campaign news cycle — in some respects, the Politico of 2012.

Smith’s departure wasn’t the only big shake-up on the politics desk this cycle, with staffers describing a “mutiny” in recent months that led Mahtesian in April to focus on blogging and writing pieces, rather than editing Politico’s top reporters.

Mahtesian and Burns have had a frosty relationship for a long time and in recent months there have also been tensions between Mahtesian and Haberman. To staffers, it appeared like Burns, the Van-

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deHarris protégé, had won out (Mahtesian and Burns declined to comment).

Harris says he has simply freed Mahtesian from day-to-day editing duties so he can write more for the site. “We know we have this genius, this rain man of politics in our midst, and we were not getting his insights onto the site often enough,” Harris says, adding that Mahtesian is “the smartest guy in Washington when it comes to politics.”

Every newsroom can be a cauldron of personality conflicts, staff rivalries and heated spats between reporters and editors but Politico has still gained a reputation over the years as a stressful, hamster wheel environment, where expectations aren’t just about staying late to cover breaking news — as any Politico reporter would do — but essentially being on call, nights and weekends, for even the most granular piece of political news.

Politico staffers routinely talk of a Politico “star-system” in which a handful of reporters in the VandeHarris orbit receive preferential treatment from company leadership, while the majority are left drifting in a far off journalistic galaxy. One former staffer likens the newsroom to The Hunger Games, in which young people

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fight to the death for the enjoyment of a privileged class.

Last fall, a plagiarism scandal involving a young Politico reporter who had been churning out transportation policy stories for Pro led to several damage control meetings involving managers and staff.

In response, Politico set up a mentorship program to help reporters making their way in its competitive newsroom.

Still, current and former staffers don’t expect Politico brass to have much tolerance for complaints about the workload and several recall COO Kingsley famously dismissing anonymous grumbling in a 2010 Times profile of Allen. She said “people who whine about working at Politico shouldn’t be at Politico,” and that “they likely lack the metabolism and professional drive it takes to thrive here.”

To be sure, Politico offers reporters a platform read widely in the corridors of Washington power and a brand name that will allow even cub reporters to get their calls quickly returned from Capitol Hill and the White House. Yet many of them do burn out. Some staffers

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who’ve left the newsroom over the years have recently started a Facebook group for alumni: the “Politico Survivor’s Club.”

POLITICO GOES PRO As the Politico alumni network grows, so does the newsroom.

Despite newsroom war stories having filtered out over the years, the company is still a very desirable place to work for many ambitious journalists.

This month’s announcement of a sizable Pro expansion signaled that executives are pleased with the results of the premium service after just over a year on the market. Subscriptions, targeted at Congressional offices, agencies, trade associations and corporations, start at $3,295 per year, but can reach into the five digits for larger memberships.

Because Allbritton is a private company, it’s impossible to

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know exactly how much Pro is bringing in. While it’s unclear how many customers Pro has, those that ordered a package are apparently happy with the results. Miki King, Pro’s executive director for business development, recently told Nieman Journalism Lab that Pro exceeded market renewal expectations in the 85 to 90 percent range during its first year on the market.

Pro competes in a subscription market against established properties like CQ and well-financed upstarts like Bloomberg’s BGov and aims for up-to-the-second information for customers who need to make immediate decisions in policy areas such as energy, technology, health, transportation, and in the near future, defense and financial regulation.

Customers won’t be curling up with Pro content as they might with a 10,000-word New Yorker piece, according to Pro editor-inchief Tim Grieve.

“It’s [not] what we’re trying to

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do,” he told Nieman. “If you’re racing around the Hill trying to make progress on the policy area you care about, that’s a really lousy way of getting information.”

Management won’t give away potentially lucrative Pro content for free, but editors have been making moves to further integrate the two editorial operations and increasingly bring some of Pro’s policy coverage, often written in a more staid tone, onto the homepage.

At Politico, the “web lead” is of paramount importance to reporters fighting for the site’s top billing and editors hoping to shepherd pieces into that highly coveted slot, a cable news agenda-setter eyed each day by TV bookers across the networks. Increasingly, Pro stories have occu-

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pied that spot. Still, inside Politico, there’s long been a sense that Harris and VandeHei — drawn to the day’s hot-button political controversy of the moment — are less interested in policy. Both are quick to publicly talk up Pro’s importance to the overall operation, but staffers doubt that that’s where their passions reside.

In fact, some at Politico suggest that a Pro-dominated franchise will likely mean that VandeHei and Harris, both more passionate about national politics, may eventually depart. Harris called such speculation “way off-base” in an email, and pointed out that Pro will help the company reach its long-term goal.

“We want to be the dominant politics and policy news organi-

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zation in Washington and Pro’s expansion has allowed us to do that,” Harris says. “Much of what Pro’s doing is aimed at a highly specialized audience. We want some of their work to be aimed at a broader audience of politically sophisticated and really highly engaged people, and the way to do that is through the main site.”

Harris adds that Politico editors “want to make sure it’s one newsroom and not two distinct newsrooms.”

As for his future amid Politico’s growth, Harris wrote, “at the moment, I’m expecting to stay for as long as I’m welcome.”

AN ESPN OF POLITICS? In addition to hiring up policy reporters, Politico’s also now looking for an executive producer for Politico TV. Politico drew attention this spring on several primary nights with its distinctive Politico Live streaming broadcasts, which include such unique elements as a “Mikey Cam” that follows the indefatigable Allen around as

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he pulls up breaking news on a BlackBerry. C-SPAN also aired several of the broadcasts, thus landing Politico on a national television network. While Politico’s PR team has proven highly adept at getting reporters and editors on air from the start, and TV regulars like Allen, VandeHei and Patrick Gavin are found daily during the “Politico Playbook” segment of MSNBC’s Morning Joe, a regular television component hasn’t come together.

Don Ennis, whom Politico hired in late 2007 as an executive producer to help create TV content, says his first conversation with VandeHei included a discussion of becoming the “ESPN of Politics.” Both editors, he said, longed to do something “less traditional” than the usual punditocracy, but couldn’t pin down exactly what that would be. They didn’t want Politico’s TV brand to be over-produced, which seemed inconsistent with emulating ESPN, a network where shows like SportsCenter are tightly structured to let

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DANIEL ROSENBAUM/THE NEW YORK TIMES

John Harris, left, and Jim VandeHei at the Politico office in December, 2008

viewers know which specific stories are coming up.

Ennis helped create Capitol Sunday, which aired on Allbritton’s ABC affiliate, WJLA-7, and featured the station’s top anchor, Leon Harris, as host, with a rotating cast of Politicos coming in.

Ennis said Politico writers were usually great at answering specific questions, but their attempts at longer riffs on politics — the type of insidery banter that comprises much of the Politico Live broadcasts — didn’t work well in a visual medium.

“What’s that expression from Saturday Night Live, not ready for primetime?” says Ennis, now a freelance writer/producer based in New York.

In April 2008, a few months after Capitol Sunday got off the ground VandeHei told the New York Observer it was soon going to be relaunched as Politico TV. At the time, VandeHei told the Observer that they “want[ed] to create TV that has some of the Politico edge to it,” which “takes a lot of experimentation.” He also described Politico as vying to be the “ESPN of Politics.”

A month later, Capitol Sunday was canceled and Ennis left soon after.

Politico flirted with the idea of a Sunday show in early 2010, according to a source with knowledge of the talks, and even had discussions with Mark Halperin about hosting. Halperin, known

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primarily as Time’s editor-atlarge and an MSNBC senior political analyst, also served as Harris’s co-author on the 2006 book, The Way to Win. Halperin didn’t respond to a request for comment on his past talks with Politico.

Lately, Politico has once again signaled an interest in television, but more akin to streaming video shows around major political events, or perhaps, a regular web series on the site or on a dedicated YouTube channel. VandeHei says Politico is now “trying to experiment with a bunch of

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established industry players.

“All those people are looking to build channels, are looking to build content that’s going to be delivered differently than it is today,” he says. “We think we’re well positioned, because of the size of the newsroom, and because of the type of people we recruit here, to be able to produce that content.

“Is there a big market for that? Over time, can you sustain that financially? At this point, we’re not as worried about the financial question. We’re more

“At this point, we’re not as worried about the financial question.”

—Jim VandeHei different things, everything from short bursts of programming to live programming.”

VandeHei likens the next couple years in television and online video to 2006 and 2007, a time of “massive upheaval in print,” which coincided with the birth of Politico. He mentioned new players like Google, YouTube and Apple TV, and The Huffington Post — which is launching a 12-hour streaming network — joining more

worried about the experimentation question. I think over the next six months, hopefully you’ll see different experiments that tip our hand where we think things are going on video.”

“NOT MONOPOLY MONEY” Politico’s editors maintain that their company is profitable and isn’t borrowing money to fund its expansion. Since Allbritton is privately held, it’s impossible to

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dig into the financials and verify that claim and there have long been doubts about whether Politico actually has earnings putting the company in the black.

Since wealthy people have been known to bankroll moneylosing media outlets for the influence they carry, there have also been suggestions that Politico is a vanity project for Robert Allbritton, son of local media titan Joe Allbritton, who once also owned the now-defunct Washington Star newspaper as well as the scandal-plagued Riggs Bank.

Allbritton wasn’t available to comment before this article closed, but Harris contends that Allbritton cares about Politico being financially successful.

“It’s not monopoly money for him, it’s real,” Harris says.

A focus on a paid subscription model with Pro suggests that Allbritton wants to increase revenue rather than spend lavishly on more brand-name political writers for the main, free site. After all, Politico didn’t rush out to replace Smith with a top-tier writer and is instead adding writers to produce more policy-driven stories.

There are, of course, non-financial benefits to owning Politico for Allbritton and Fred Ryan, Allbritton’s president and Politico’s president and chief executive.

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Ryan, who worked in the Reagan White House, also serves as chairman of the Board of Trustees for the Ronald Reagan Presidential Foundation and Chairman of the White House Historical Association Board.

Two journalists who helped run Allbritton’s highly anticipated hyper-local 2010 venture about the Washington area, TBD.com, suggest that Allbritton and Ryan want influence and were willing to accept Politico’s early losses to gain that foothold.

Digital First Media editor-inchief Jim Brady, who helped conceive TBD.com as general manager but left after just three months online, said he and his staff believed they had a “five-year runway” to work toward profitability. But that never happened: layoffs hit the 35-person staff within the site’s first year and

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the numbers continued dwindling. The Washington City Paper reported recently that TBD had “lost its last full-time employee.”

Brady said that Politico “got the runway it needed to take-off,” unlike TBD and that he “never got the sense the corporate folks got the same passion for local news as politics.”

Steve Buttry, who was TBD’s director of community engagement and now holds the position at Digital First Media and the Journal Register Co., said he had the same impression.

“I don’t think Fred Ryan was ever as committed to TBD as he was to Politico,” Buttry said. “Politico made him politically relevant again and that was important to him, and I think he had more patience for that than for TBD.” Harris places Allbritton and Ryan in the “core group that started Politico,” along with VandeHei, Allen and himself. When

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discussing his future with Politico, Harris said Allbritton knows the two top editors “will do everything we can to make sure we help him build a publication that can prosper for the very long haul.”

While it’s difficult for outsiders to dig into Politico’s books, several top editorial and business side executives tried explaining to the newsroom how the company makes money at an in-house presentation in May called “Understanding Our Business Side.”

Politico staffers crammed into a conference room in the Rosslyn offices and enjoyed pizzas and sodas while VandeHei, Harris, Miki King, chief revenue officer Roy Schwartz and vice president of events Beth Lester spoke to the audience, according to sources not authorized to publicly discuss the meeting.

During the discussion, Schwartz described Politico as pulling in online ad rates significantly ahead of Washington competitors. VandeHei added some specifics, telling staff that Politico has a two-tier CPM (or cost-per-

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thousand impressions), which hinges on site-visitors’ locations.

Politico’s CPM outside D.C. is $10-20, while within the Beltway, the company brings between $50-60, depending on the timing and location of the ads.

VandeHei noted that Politico is geared toward a niche audience and doesn’t have to continuously grow traffic as do more general interest sites that don’t command premium ad rates.

Four days later, in his office, VandeHei touched upon this theme, saying that while every site hopes to grow traffic, it’s not the most important thing for Politico.

“We’re not reliant on big traffic,” he said. “Our whole business model is being indispensable to this city, to people who do this stuff professionally, to people who are addicted to it.”

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VandeHei says that Politico is “a niche play, and we’re dominating our niche,” adding “that’s why we’re expanding into all these different areas, always with a focus on Washington.”

Traffic chatter bores him, he says.

“I get a little bit weary when people try to compare this to, ‘Oh, The New York Times has so much more traffic than you or The Huffington Post,” VandeHei says.

“Right, you guys have about forty different sub-channels, you’re in different countries, you’re covering sports, you have pictures and girls and all this stuff that generates a lot of traffic. We do politics. That’s what we do. We do policy.

That’s what we do.”

Rebecca Ballhaus provided research assistance for this article.

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MOVIES

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Why Beasts of The Southern Wild is 2012’s first Oscar contender

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BY MICHAEL HOGAN

Dwight Henry, left, and Quvenzhane Wallis in Beasts of the Southern Wild.

Exit ROM A DISTANCE, Beasts of the Southern Wild bears zero resemblance to the typical Oscar contender. It’s neither an adaptation of a literary bestseller nor a biopic about an iconic yet misunderstood historical figure. It doesn’t hearken back with nostalgic affection to Hollywood’s Golden Era, nor does it have a single thing to say about World War II or the Holocaust. Its director has no recognizable credits to his name, and its stars, if you can call them that, give new meaning to the term “unknowns.” One works as a baker in New Orleans; the other is years away from finishing grade school.

Yet for all that, this staggeringly cathartic film may well figure in the Oscar equation this winter, scoring nominations in any or all of the following categories: Best Picture, Best Director, Best Supporting Actor, Best Original Score, and maybe even Best Actress, which would make newcomer Quvenzhané Wallis the youngest nominee ever. (Justin Henry, who was eight when Kramer vs. Kramer came out, is the current record-holder.)

Beasts of the Southern Wild is

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the brainchild of first-time filmmaker Benh Zeitlin, 29, who grew up in Queens and later moved to New Orleans. He pieced the script together over the course of eight months, spending much of that time in the remote South Louisiana fishing villages of Terrebone Parish. The resulting film offers an intoxicating vision of a community beyond the edges of civilization, with all the free-

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dom and terror that implies.

The protagonist, a six-year-old girl named Hushpuppy (Wallis), lives in circumstances that would alarm even the most committed free-range parents. She resides in a trailer elevated above the floodprone ground, alone but for the company of her “pets” — a snorting, clucking gang of pigs, chickens and other farm animals with whom she shares her meals. Her mother is long gone, and her father, Wink (Dwight Henry), lives

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in his own ramshackle abode, close by enough that Hushpuppy can hear him ring his makeshift dinner bell when “feedin’ time” comes around.

If that sounds grim, it’s not — not really. Wink, Hushpuppy and the other residents of The Bathtub — a lush, lawless bayou set beyond the levees of a New Orleans-like city — wouldn’t trade their lives of Dionysian self-exile for anything as mundane as heat or hot water. They do what they want, live how they like, and celebrate more holidays than anybody else. “We got the prettiest place

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Wallis, 8, could be the youngest Oscar nominee ever for her performance in the film.

Exit on Earth,” says Hushpuppy, who shares her father’s contempt for the conformists on the other side of the levee. “They’re afraid of the water like a bunch of babies. They built the wall that cut us off.”

Pretty is not the first word that springs to mind, despite the breathtaking production design and cinematography. These are wild people, with weathered faces and bodies, surrounded by trash and detritus, and most of the adults are permanently attached to bottles of booze. But residents of our overscheduled, overanalyzed world are likely to envy their fiery passions, their untethered freedom and their visceral connection to the water. Wink has instructed Hushpuppy to light him on fire and send him out to sea if he’s ever too sick to drink beer or catch catfish. The alternative, being hospitalized and “plugged into the wall,” is just too humiliating to contemplate.

Like all Earthly Utopias, this one faces mortal danger — from nature, which sends an apocalyptic hurricane to test the Bathtub residents’ stubborn commitment to staying put; from the government, which wants to relocate them to someplace more civilized; and from

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the rough beasts of the title, who slouch through Hushpuppy’s fevered imagination, threatening untold annihilation to The Bathtub.

Will they destroy her, or will the losses she suffers at this tender age only make her stronger? There’s never much doubt, thanks in part to the revelatory performances by Wallis and Henry, who together form one of the least orthodox daughter-and-father combinations

Pretty is not the first word that springs to mind, despite the breathtaking production design and cinematography.” ever. She is wise and strong beyond her years, without ever sacrificing a shred of her childishness; he can be childish, too, and maddeningly so, but it’s impossible not to admire his relentless efforts to equip his daughter to protect and provide for herself.

Zeitlin, whose mother and father are both folklorists (really), never lets the story’s magic-realist elements get in the way of the human drama. The film packs an emotional wallop — one strong enough to seduce the seen-it-

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Exit all cynics at Sundance, where it won the Grand Jury Prize, and at Cannes, where the International Federation of Film Critics named it best picture in the Un Certain Regard division.

Fox Searchlight won the bidding war at Sundance, and it’s reasonable to think that the studio responsible for guiding such “difficult” films as The Tree of Life and Black Swan into Oscar contention be able to chart a winning path for this one. But before you pencil in Beasts of the Southern Wild on your Oscar ballot, it’s worth noting that winning, in this case, doesn’t necessarily mean taking home actual statuettes. Barring an epic collective fail from Steven Spielberg, P.T. Anderson, Baz Luhrmann, Quentin Tarantino and Tom Hooper — all of whom have films coming out in the latter part of this year — the Beasts team is likely to remain seated when the envelopes are opened.

Make no mistake, though: it’s a sizable victory for a low-budget film, by a filmmaker this inexperienced, featuring actors this unheard of, to have this much momentum before it’s even been released. And who really knows what will happen? If recent Best

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From top to bottom: Wallis as Hushpuppy; Henry as Wink; Wallis on set with Zeitlin.

Picture winners like The Hurt Locker and The Artist have proved anything, it’s that the levees Hollywood has erected around its beloved awards are still vulnerable to underdogs riding tidal waves of goodwill.

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TRAVEL

50 Hours, 23 Minutes and 20 Seconds in Portland, Maine 1

Thanks to locals’ fearsome independent streak, and an influx of young 295 may have the hippest working watercreatives, New England’s second city front in America. Direct flights from New York, Philadelphia and D.C. make getaways to Portland convenient, and the small downtown, with its great public transportation, allows ambitious travelers to cram in a lot of leisure.

Here are our devoted travel reporter’s exacting notes on his hurried visit to the city that went local before going local was a thing. —Andrew Burman

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eWISE

BY KATY HALL

I’m a few months pregnant, and my husband and I are debating baby names. We’ve narrowed it down to a few, and he brought up the idea of reserving domain names and email addresses. Is this crazy, or is it something people do these days? — Baffled mom, Brooklyn

Q

It’s both! People do crazy things in large numbers, especially when it comes to their babies. Remember that Time cover? Breast-feeding your preschooler is a thing.

If your kid is special enough to need his own website, he will have the resourcefulness needed to claim a URL with the right name for his professional or creative needs. By the time he’s old enough to build a useful site, URL naming conventions and searchability parameters will surely have changed, anyway. Or you could just name your child based on what URL is available — just make

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sure you give her a normal middle name in case she doesn’t want to go

by Henrietta-Rose or an equally free name.

Same with email addresses. Choosing a handle that prevents you from getting hired for any job is a rite of adolescence, and transitioning to something resembling your name a sign of maturity. Best to let your kid navigate these stages in her own good time.

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eWISE

I don’t Facebook friend people from work because I frequently bitch about my job to my select group of friends. But when higher-ups send you a friend request, what do you do? I think it’s creepy, but how do you decline politely? (Besides not having any interest in their personal lives, I find it weird that they want to know about mine.) —WTF, N.J. Q

Unless the prospect of your coworkers simply showing up in your friend list is troubling, you can be friends without ever being reminded of the person’s existence. Next time a photo of the person’s breakfast sandwich appears in your newsfeed, click the arrow to the right of his name and select “unsubscribe.”

If you haven’t created a limited profile yet, it’s a good idea to have one of these — not just for coworkers but for the friends of exes, weird cousins and people you last saw in high school.

Do you really want these people scrolling through photos of your children before they go to bed?

You can also just leave the friend request in purgatory and hope they forget about it, but in the scheme of keeping the peace with coworkers, accepting a friend request is pretty painless.

ENOUGH ALREADY

totally over.

Things we’re

VALERY HACHE/AFP/GETTYIMAGES (MCCONAUGHEY); JB LACROIX/FILMMAGIC (LOVATO); TURNER BROADCASTING SYSTEM (“DALLAS”); SHUTTERSTOCK (ICE CREAM)

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Have a question about electronic etiquette?

Email ewise@huffingtonpost.com.

Rielle Hunter Matthew McConaughey Communal tables Neon hair Chris Christie outbursts The return of Dallas TODAY Professionals series Savory ice cream #throwbackthursdays, or any excuse to post photos of your (cuter) former self on Instagram

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I kept thinking, ‘I’m really sorry I have to kill you because you’re homeless.’”

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GREATEST PERSON OF THE WEEK

Dr. Michael Good

Georgia’s Homeless Pet Hero

BY HOLLY ROBINSON

AN ANTISEPTIC SMELL permeates the air at Marietta, Georgia’s Town & Country Veterinary Clinic. A chaotic symphony of barking dogs and ringing phones resonates through the halls.

Dr. Michael Good is used to it, though. Every day, he works to help animals in need of care or shelter. While many owners bring their injured and ailing pets to PHOTOGRAPH BY GREGORY CAMPBELL

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COURTESY OF DR. GOOD

Exit Good’s office, good Samaritans also bring in a number of stray animals each day.

Good, 58, specializes in helping those stray animals. Not only does he provide highly discounted veterinary services, he does his best to ensure they find a new home. In an area that — by his estimations — euthanizes around 100,000 stray cats and dogs each year, he tries to save as many lives as he can.

About 14 years ago, Good volunteered to help out as a “de facto medical director” at a rundown animal shelter in nearby Fulton County. At the time, the shelter was severely overcrowded, and according to Good, resembled a “Doggie Auschwitz.”

He remembers his first day — the day when he had to euthanize 40 to 50 stray animals “just because they didn’t have a home.”

“I could see it in their eyes each time,” Good says. “I kept thinking, ‘I’m really sorry I have to kill you because you’re homeless.’”

Good says that he swore an oath to find a better solution that day. Since then, he’s started the Homeless Pet Foundation in hopes of utilizing word-of-mouth and social networking to find homes for stray animals — many

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of whom, he says, may have just gotten loose from their homes.

“Let’s say you go on a three-day business trip,” Good says. “A lot of communities have a rule where they can euthanize stray animals after three days. If they don’t have any records on file and your dog isn’t wearing any kind of ID, you may think everything’s fine, but you get back and your dog has been euthanized.”

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Above, Dr. Good finishes surgery at his veterinary practice.

Below, members of Good’s staff.

Exit Good’s foundation also helps facilitate the adoption process for abandoned animals. Often times, he says, when owners neglect to spay or neuter their pets, they end up with a litter of puppies or kittens that they can’t care for.

Without services like his, many would end up on the streets and could eventually be euthanized.

Unfortunately, the Atlanta area’s large animal population makes it difficult for shelters to house all the strays, so many get put down. That’s why Good started the “Underhound Railroad,” another service that helps move stray animals from overpopulated shelters to areas around the country that have fewer strays.

“There are shelters in other parts of the country that are really good, but they don’t have big populations of animals around them,” he says. “For $50, I can take a dog that would have been euthanized around here and put it in a facility where it will get adopted. That’s worth it.”

Good estimates that, through both of his non-profit endeavors and his veterinary clinic, he assists 7,000 to 10,000 stray animals each year. None of this would be possible, he says, without the

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thousands of clubs throughout the country that sponsor his animals and help spread the word to get them adopted.

But Good doesn’t just see these clubs as helpers — he says they are keys to fixing a problem that sees thousands of stray animals euthanized each year.

“We try to give these people a sense of what the world’s about

For $50, I can take a dog that would have been euthanized around here and put it in a facility where it will get adopted.

That’s worth it.” and why they should respect it,” he says. “We don’t want them to be a club that just rescues animals, we also want them to be developing quality citizens.”

Whether it’s a local Girl Scout troop or a group of business executives, when one of these clubs sponsors an animal, they’re encouraged to visit them at the shelter. According to Good, that’s the key to finding them a new home.

“I tried to create a relationship

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HUFFINGTON 06.24.12

COURTESY OF DR. GOOD

We’re trying to change how people think about animal shelters.”

where school clubs and business clubs were sponsoring dogs and could feel good when they visited them,” he says. “Now, these animals are healthy and happy because they’re in a place where they get care and food. If they’re in a high kill shelter, you can see it — they know the clock is ticking and they look depressed.”

“When the community gets involved, it’s a better experience.

We’re trying to change how people think about animal shelters, in general,” he adds.

Even though each of Good’s endeavors has grown in both reach and size throughout the years, he still doesn’t make any money from them. He says that’s OK, though, because he was never concerned about the money.

“I don’t need to take anything out of it because that was never my mission,” Good says. “My number one mission from the beginning was to do this for all those animals I had to euthanize back on my first day at that shelter.”

“I made that oath,” he says.

AJ Barbosa contributed to this report.

Dr. Good puts a dog on the “Underhound Railroad,” which ships area dogs to parts of the country with fewer strays.

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