PERSONAL ROBOTS | ALBINOS IN AFRICA | SUMMER READING
THE HUFFINGTON POST MAGAZINE
JULY 15, 2012
07.15.12 #05 CONTENTS
Enter POINTERS: Extreme Heat, “Heart Attack” Food, Buchanan vs. Women MOVING IMAGE DATA: Immigration Rhetoric vs. Reality Q&A: Heather Cassils
TWILIGHT IN THE SUNSHINE STATE BY BEN HALLMAN
Voices NAVEEN JAIN: Why Non-Experts are Better at Disruptive Innovation ROBERT FRIEDMAN: When the Drones Come Home to Roost CHEVONNE HARRIS: Tyler Perry and the Black Moviegoer Conundrum QUOTED
Exit BOOKS: Six Books In Search of a Vacation
YOU, ROBOT BY LUCAS KAVNER
MUSIC: Playlist: The Sweet Sound of Summer EWISE: Dealing With Facebook Plagiarists GREATEST PERSON OF THE WEEK: Mothers’ Biggest Helper
ADAM FISH (ROBOT)
TFU
PIRATE BOOTY BY JOE SATRAN
FROM THE EDITOR: A “Demographic Train Wreck” ON THE COVER: Illustration
for Huffington by Holly Wales
LETTER FROM THE EDITOR
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A “Demographic Train Wreck” E HAVE HOPE but at the same time we feel weak.” These words are spoken by Eliseo Orasco, a disabled 51-year-old father whose struggles are detailed in HuffPost senior financial reporter Ben Hallman’s story about Florida’s changing demographics and uncertain future in this week’s issue. The worry that underlies Orasco’s words is specific: he is staring down foreclosure on his small house on Florida’s Gulf Coast — “ground zero of the foreclosure crisis” — where he lives with his wife and teenage daughter. His words also capture something larger: the fact that the American Dream has turned into a nightmare for millions of middle-class families. Ben’s reporting, which takes him to the
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foreclosure-ravaged Lehigh Acres neighborhood, captures not only the weakness and resulting fear, but also the hope — the hope that the Italian journalist Luigi Barzini must have been thinking of when he once described America as “alarmingly optimistic.” In his report, Ben captures the lives and hopes of several Florid-
LETTER FROM THE EDITOR
ians whose quests for the American Dream have started and ended in vastly different places. Outside Orlando, two hours by car from Eliseo Orasco’s yellow house with white trim, lies the world’s largest retirement community, the Villages, with 88,000 residents. Here, in stark contrast to the blight of foreclosure, bulldozers clear land for yet more housing construction and residents navigate the pristine grounds in golf carts. The telling statistics are not boom-and-bust home sale prices but amenities: 95 restaurants, 63 swimming pools, 513 holes of golf. It’s a story about much more than some people doing better than others. In the course of his interviews, Ben examines the economic gulf that increasingly separates the old from the young, putting flesh and blood on what one economist calls a coming “demographic train wreck.” As the number of elderly Floridians increases, with those over 85 emerging as the fastestgrowing group, state leaders are slashing billions from the public education budget, and opportunities for young people — like Dennis
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Hebert, an unemployed 26-year-old who for a time had to move his wife and young son into their car — are dwindling. More than a third of Florida’s recent college graduates are unable to find work in the state — a dilemma that’s affecting young people in all parts of the country. As William Collon, a 75-yearIt is old Villages resident, now more puts it, “The retired urgent than folks around here have ever to done just fine. It’s the continue young people who got sounding in trouble.” When I wrote the alarm Third World America the way in 2010, my goal was Ben Hallman to help “sound the has so alarm” so we’d able powerfully to course-correct done.” while there was still time. Two years later, it is now more urgent than ever to continue sounding the alarm the way Ben Hallman has so powerfully done.
ARIANNA
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PHILLIP DUGAW
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HIGH TEMPS TURN TARMAC INTO QUICKSAND
POINTERS
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A US Airways flight was delayed for hours at Reagan National Airport when its wheels got stuck in the tarmac. Blame it on the heat wave. Temperatures around 100 degrees in Washington, D.C., caused a “soft spot� in the airport paving, according to an airline spokesperson. When an electric tug cart failed to move the plane, the passengers had to get off and wait 45 minutes in the sizzling heat until a bus brought them back to the terminal. A new government report finds that the past 12 months have been the hottest on record in the continental U.S.
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FROM TOP: MICHAEL BUCKNER/GETTY IMAGES FOR BET; AP PHOTO/JERRY LAMPEN; GRETCHEN ERTL/THE NEW YORK TIMES/REDUX
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SPIKE LEE POSES ‘OBAMA OR A MORMON’ QUESTION
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Spike Lee thinks the presidential election may come down to what voters think of Mitt Romney’s religion. “I think there will be a block of people saying, ‘I cannot vote for a Mormon,’” he told New York magazine. “They got a tough decision: Obama or a Mormon. Their beliefs got them between a rock and a hard place.” The outspoken director is a longtime Obama supporter who predicted to GQ last month, “Once we get to the debates my man is going to tear him up!”
CONGOLESE WARLORD HEADED TO JAIL The International Criminal Court, a decade-old war crimes tribunal, has handed down its first sentence. Congolese warlord Thomas Lubanga will serve 14 years for recruiting and using child soldiers in his rebel army in 2002 and 2003. Lubanga was convicted in March after his trial revealed that he went to people’s homes and asked them to donate a child to the war effort. Lubanga sent children as young as 10 to kill or be killed.
4 BARNEY GETS HITCHED
Rep. Barney Frank (D-Mass.) married his longtime partner, Jim Ready, in a small outdoor ceremony in Newtown, Mass. Frank, 72, was the first congressman to come out as openly gay in 1987, and now he is the first sitting congressman in a same-sex marriage. Massachusetts Gov. Deval Patrick officiated the ceremony and asked the couple to vow to love each other “for richer or for poorer, under the Democrats or the Republicans.”
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SMACKDOWN: HEART ATTACK-THEMED FOOD
For $24.95, you can still buy yourself an “Instant Heart Attack” at New York City’s 2nd Avenue Deli. A federal judge ruled in favor of the kosher deli after the Heart Attack Grill of Las Vegas challenged the sandwich’s naming rights. Judge Paul Engelmayer said “it is safe to say” that consumers won’t confuse the Heart Attack Grill’s massive hamburgers with the deli’s “Instant Heart Attack,” which involves meat stuffed between two latkes.
PAT BUCHANAN PINES FOR A FEMALEFREE WHITE HOUSE
6 FROM TOP: 2ND AVENUE DELI; ALEX WONG/GETTY IMAGES
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THAT’S VIRAL TEXAS A&M STUDENTS FORM HUMAN WALL TO BLOCK WESTBORO BAPTISTS
A woman won’t reach the Oval Office until sometime in the middle of the century if Pat Buchanan has his way. When John McLaughlin asked on his show when a woman will be elected president, Buchanan replied, “2040 or 2050.” “That late?” McLaughlin asked. “Let’s hope so,” Buchanan said. He later said that he was joking, but it would be a “long time” before we see a woman in the White House.
A selection of the week’s most talked-about stories. TAP HEADLINES TO VIEW FULL STORIES
‘SUPERMOONWALKING’
TESTICLE EATING FISH SPECIES FOUND IN ILLINOIS
TV LEGEND ANDY GRIFFITH PASSES
A TIME-LAPSE VIDEO FROM THE ISS THAT WILL BLOW YOUR MIND
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Albinism in Africa Albinism is common in Equatorial Africa, and so are myths, legends and superstitions about the genetic condition. In Bobo-Dioulasso, the second largest city in Burkina Faso, albinos face mockery and worse. Limited eyesight, long days of work under the sun and a lack of information about diversity add to the their physical and social struggles. PHOTOGRAPHS BY DIEGO RAVIER
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Isaak, left, is the third oldest of ten siblings — half of which are albino. Their parents are both black. PHOTO OR ILLUSTRATION CREDIT TK
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Children and adults with normal pigmentation face discrimination just for being related to albinos. PHOTO OR ILLUSTRATION CREDIT TK
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In Burkina Faso, albinos often suffer because of myths and false beliefs. Eleanor, right, is not accepted by her husband’s family. PHOTO OR ILLUSTRATION CREDIT TK
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Marcel dropped out of school and now works with his mother each day in the family business, beer production. PHOTO OR ILLUSTRATION CREDIT TK
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Many families in Burkina Faso live in poverty, and for albinos, labor conditions are less than ideal. When working, they often spend entire days in the sun without any protection. PHOTO OR ILLUSTRATION CREDIT TK
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Aside from the discrimination they face throughout their lives, many albinos in Burkina Faso struggle to maintain their health while living in poverty.
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Albinos are often treated as outcasts by peers and neighbors. To prevent him from being mocked, Yacouba’s mother hides him from the public. PHOTO OR ILLUSTRATION CREDIT TK
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Access to education and medical care can help albinos live healthier lives. PHOTO OR ILLUSTRATION CREDIT TK
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Ami lives in her mother’s house and sent her twoyear-old daughter to live with her sister. The money she makes from her job at the local market is not enough to support her daughter. PHOTO OR ILLUSTRATION CREDIT TK
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Marcel doesn’t have a girlfriend. Many albinos in Africa struggle to find love. PHOTO OR ILLUSTRATION CREDIT TK
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Albinos in Burkina Faso have a life expectancy of only 30 years. They are extremely susceptible to sunburn and skin cancer. Many of them spend the majority of the day outside and don’t have access to sunscreen. PHOTO OR ILLUSTRATION CREDIT TK
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DATA DATA data
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lorem Lorem Ipsum Immigration Dolor Sit Amet dolor Rhetoric Vs. amet Reality
huffington HUFFINGTON 07.15.12
Consent BOLD bold CALLOUT callout TEXT text Rhetoric on immigration heats up in an electionalitatem year, and both candidates the Latino without confronting lanis ipsuntare excourting et laborio ellavote doluptas certain realities. As immigration from Mexico hasvolorem slowed in aligent aspiciet officimenis aut te recent years, fewer undocumented immigrants have been as most que tem have nossiti ataquas apprehended but prati deportations soared. —Molly O’Toole Tap Tktk Year Tap for info
2001
2002
2003
6,900,000
5,700,000
Mexican-born population in U.S., legal
Mexican-born population in U.S., undocumented
Mexican-born population in U.S., legal
Mexican-born population in U.S., undocumented
Barack Obama and John McCain both pledge immigration reform during the 2008 presidential campaign. Both had voted for a fence along the Mexican border and McCain helped write a 2007 bill supporting a path to amnesty for immigrants.
Curabit Elit Odio Semper ‘01
‘02
‘03
‘04
2005
‘05
Consent BOLD CALLOUT TEXT alitatem lanis ipsunt ex et laborio ella doluptas aligent officimenis aut te as most nossiti ataquas Removals of Undocumented
246,851
PHOTO or photo OR illustration ILLUSTRATION credit CREDIT tk TK
Immigrants Removals Mexican of Undocumented Mexican Immigrants
2004
‘06
‘07
‘08
‘09
‘10
2006
2007
250,000
Immigration : Mexico to U.S. Immigration : Mexico to U.S.
2008 2008 2009
693,592
Apprehensions of Undocumented Mexican Immigrants Apprehensions of Undocumented Mexican Immigrants
= 10,000 = 10,000 Individuals
INDIVIDUALS
PHOTO OR ILLUSTRATION CREDIT TK
Graphic is based on data Ximodit, el ius videst, odisit quatur sundunt, comnim quam quis autatis mi, corum ius endel ipsam ex et earuptas doluptatem audit accusa sitas
Data is compiled from the Pew Hispanic Center’s April 2012 report “Net Migration from Mexico Falls to Zero -- and Perhaps Less” and the Department of Homeland Security’s “Yearbook of Immigration Statistics” for fiscal years 2001 to 2010. Data for apprehensions and removals is from DHS, which records statistics on a fiscal year basis.
2010
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PHOTO OR ILLUSTRATION CREDIT TK
Heather Cassils Creates Visual Options With Her Body
Cassils is a Canadian performance artist who Teminqui arion lives LosdisAngeles. non seruptur ab illam eum ipsum seritis ra pro endesti sequi dolorro id experciti PHOTOGRAPHS BY DAN MONICK
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STYLIST IMOGENE BARRON; NIKKI PROVIDENCE FOR DAVINES HAIR CARE
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Q&A
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EATHER CASSILS is a performance artist and body builder who uses her body to investigate issues related to gender, mass consumption and the industrial production of images. Her conceptual pieces, which have been performed in museums and galleries around the world, also highlight transgender or “genderqueer” themes. For “Cuts: A Traditional Sculpture,” she spent 23 weeks documenting herself building her body to its maximum capacity by following a strict weightlifting regime, consuming the caloric intake of a 190-pound male athlete and taking mild steroids. —Noah Michelson Huffington: People often think performance art is inaccessible, a joke or not “real art.” Why is it so easily dismissed? HC: Sometimes art is positioned as something that’s just for the rich or the elite, but it’s also often the first thing to go when cuts are made in public education, so that’s a big reason. Performance art can be so abstract. People often don’t see it as a justified medium like painting, but similar arguments were made about photography not that long ago.
How did the use of your body become central to your work? I was actually trained as a painter, but I became frustrated with the fact that not that many people could see my work. I think a lot of concepts that exist outside of us — art-related concepts — when you bring them to the body there’s a kind of ownership and it creates that kind of immediacy. Everybody has a body so, maybe you can’t paint that painting but you do have a body.
Cassils took four photos of her body each day as she transformed it over 23 weeks.
Enter But your work also invites scrutiny about how your body is not the same as other bodies. How important is your identification as transgender to your work? If you’re not going to exist as your biologically-assigned gender or you’re not operating [as a transgender person] on one end of the gender spectrum, then you end up in that in-between space, inviting that scrutiny. Still, I would hate for my work to be dismissed or relegated to only being about being transgender. I’m trying to push or create a kind of visual language for my subjectivity — trying to create visual options. You can tap into people’s psyches and have them imagine things that they don’t yet have words for. I think that’s very powerful. I’m trying to create a slippery language, one — much like my body — that doesn’t fit. One of your most visible projects was making out with Lady Gaga in her “Telephone” video. How do you feel about her relationship with the LGBT community? If someone can inspire someone young and ignite a certain fire within them to become something, I think that’s a good thing. Her whole “I was picked on by kids in high school” — it’s like “Poor you, you were a
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Q&A
very wealthy child that went to an Upper West Side private girls school.” There are ways that you can dismiss this narrative that’s about being “other” and the fact that it has been potentially used as a marketing campaign. But there are kids out there who do feel bullied and do feel You like they’re differcan tap into ent and they do need people’s someone to say that psyches and to them.
have them imagine things that they don’t yet have words for.”
Your appearance in the “Telephone” video presented many people with an unfamiliar image. What are your thoughts on representations of transgender people in mainstream society? There’s not that much out there but there’s definitely more than there used to be, which is good. It’s often highly sensationalized using this ridiculous language and focusing on this one aspect of the person instead of the many aspects that makes them up. That can be frustrating. But I think it’s a sign of the time. Things are moving quickly. Maybe these discussions won’t even need to be had several years from now.
Voices
NAVEEN JAIN
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Why Non-Experts are Better at Disruptive Innovation BESTSELLING AUTHOR Malcolm Gladwell says it takes 10,000 hours to become expert at something, whether it’s playing the guitar, charting the stars or writing software code. In his landmark book, Outliers: The Story of Success, Gladwell looks at why certain people are successful and postulates that, among other things, a combination of circumstances and the ability to become expert at something produces truly exceptional people and ideas. That’s an interesting thesis on the part of Gladwell, and perhaps true in yesteryear, but in today’s world of growing exponential technologies, I beg to differ. I believe that people who will come up with creative solutions
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to solve the world’s biggest problems — ecological devastation, global warming, the global debt crisis and distribution of dwindling natural resources, to name a few — will not be experts in their fields. The real disruptors will be those individuals who are
Naveen Jain is the founder of World Innovation Institute, Moon Express, inome and InfoSpace
Voices not steeped in one industry of choice with those coveted 10,000 hours of experience, but instead, individuals who approach challenges with a clean lens, bringing together diverse experiences, knowledge and opportunities. And while experts will have a part to play in solving today’s looming crises where incremental evolution is needed, I believe that non-expert individuals will drive disruptive innovation. Here’s why.
MYOPIC THINKING Sure — there will always be a need for experts, who will continue to drive steady incremental advancements in fields such as biotechnology, environmental sciences, or information technology. But I believe that the best ideas come from those not immersed in the details of a particular field. Experts, far too often, engage in a kind of myopic thinking. Those who are down in the weeds are likely to miss the big picture. To my mind, an expert is in danger of becoming a robot, toiling ceaselessly toward a goal but not always seeing how to connect the dots. The human brain, or more specifically the neo-cortex, is designed to recognize patterns and
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draw conclusions from them. Experts are able to identify such patterns related to a specific problem relevant to their area of knowledge. But because nonexperts lack that Experts, base of knowledge, far too often, they are forced to engage in a rely more on their kind of myopic brain’s ability for thinking. Those abstraction, rather who are down than specificity. This abstraction— in the weeds are the ability to take likely to miss away or remove the big picture.” characteristics from something in order to reduce it to a set of essential characteristics—is what presents an opportunity for creative solutions.
INNOVATION AND INFORMATION IN ABUNDANCE I also believe that the value of expertise is diminished in a world dominated by two trends: the accelerating pace of innovation and the ubiquity of information. Today, technology moves at such a rapid pace that it is nearly impossible to keep up. With technological advances occurring at
Voices breakneck speed, expertise is obsolete within five to 10 years. Think of all the industries turned on their heads by Internet disintermediation, whether it was book and magazine publishing, the printing industry, the recording industry or retail sales, to name a few. MySpace rose and fell from grace as the world’s leading social network in less than five years and pundits already question whether the era of Facebook, with its more than 900 million active users, is over. The digital revolution has also meant a revolution in access to information. This puts more power and knowledge into the hands of non-experts. Open-source encyclopedias such as Wikipedia and search engines such as Google and Bing, which people can tap into anytime and anywhere via computers and smart phones, put a world of knowledge at our fingertips at a lower cost than ever before. Granted, they alone don’t make us experts—but they give us access to information in abundance, giving us a greater base from which to “think big.” Some of the most inspiring and innovative minds I know are such disruptors. Take Elon Musk, a fel-
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low trustee at the X-PRIZE Foundation. The South African-born engineer and entrepreneur has never hesitated to venture into new waters where he had no industry expertise but felt he could make a difference. The former founder of PayPal is now CEO and CTO of SpaceX, a private company sending cost-effective space launch vehicles and rockets into space, and is cofounder and head of product design at Tesla Motors, where he led development of the elecWith tric vehicle Tesla technological Roadster. advances The goal must occurring at be to expand ourbreakneck selves beyond one speed, expertise field of focus and is obsolete use our improved within five access to informato ten years.” tion to solve the very real and extreme economic, environmental and resource challenges we face as an interconnected, global society. I believe the time is now, before our looming crises bring us to the brink of destruction, to embolden those disruptive individuals to help innovate our way out of the significant challenges our planet faces today.
ROBERT FRIEDMAN
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JOE MCNALLY/GETTY IMAGES
When the Drones Come Home to Roost
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NE WAS CALLED in by law enforcement in North Dakota to use thermal imagery in determining whether three suspects were dangerous. Florida officials want them for security surveillance at this year’s Republican National Convention. And Virginia’s governor recently declared it would be great if they were flying over his state. The Federal Aviation Administration estimates that up to 30,000 new unmanned aircraft systems—or drones—could be launched inside the U.S. in the next decade. ¶ The conventional notion of drones in the public consciousness conjures up images of stealthy devices swooping down from the sky to take out terrorists in Afghanistan, Pakistan and Yemen. The Obama Administration’s widely-reported increase in the use of drone strikes has been accompanied by a healthy public debate about the moral, ethical and legal implications of these tactics.
Robert Friedman is a Fellow at the Truman National Security Project and a non-resident Fellow at the Georgetown Center on National Security and the Law
Voices But the very same drone technology deployed around the world is currently circling in the skies over our heads. And, as another Fourth of July passed last week, with Americans paying tribute to our country’s independence, it’s worth considering how the proliferation of drones domestically impacts the very freedoms we hold dear. The FAA is principally responsible for introducing new technology and aircrafts into the domestic airspace. In a little-noticed move last month, the FAA issued rules that outline steps for public safety agencies to obtain licenses to fly drones. Although the FAA rules cover drone training and performance requirements, they miss a critical component: guidance to state and local governments related to privacy and civil liberties protections. Issuing drone licenses without these baseline safeguards raises serious concerns. The FAA’s role in regulating drones takes on greater importance because privacy law — at least for now — is unlikely to serve as a sufficient backstop to potential abuse. There is very little legal precedent that would proscribe law enforcement’s use of drones within our
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borders. Americans do not generally enjoy a reasonable expectation of privacy in public spaces, nor in areas of personal property — like fenced-in backyards and driveways — which are visible from public viewing points — such as the sky. Earlier this year, the Supreme Court applied the Fourth Amendment’s prohibition of unreasonable searches and seizures to 21st century surveillance technology: the use of a GPS device by law enforcement to monitor a It’s worth vehicle’s movement considering for an extended pehow the riod of time. In his proliferation concurring opinion, of drones Justice Samuel Alito domestically foreshadowed an unimpacts the resolved legal dilemvery freedoms ma which will surely we hold dear.” trouble Americans as the use of drones proliferates domestically: if police attach a GPS to a car and follow the car for a brief period of time, the Fourth Amendment would provide protection, but if police follow the same car for a much longer period of time using aerial surveillance, this tracking would not be subject to Fourth Amendment constraints. Nevertheless, this is the future of
Voices law enforcement. One drone — the Predator B — can monitor a target continuously for 20 hours, far longer than any police helicopter or manned aircraft. And the cost is relatively cheap: the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department recently purchased new helicopters at a cost of $1.7 million each; a small drone costs about $40,000. Drones can provide tremendous benefits: the agriculture industry wants them to treat crops with pesticides; the energy sector can use them to monitor infrastructure such as pipelines; and first responders want drones to explore dangerous or volatile accident sites. But because of the heightened capacity for domestic surveillance, and the addition of hundreds, if not thousands of additional machines to an alreadycrowded airspace, there are understandable risks — both privacy and safety — to this new technology. We need a robust public debate about the moral, ethical and legal consequences of domestic drone use in the same way our country grapples over these issues when we target terrorists abroad: who may operate drones, for what use, for how long, and with what privacy and civil liberties protections?
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And, while all domestic drones are currently “unarmed,” will this restriction be maintained? A deputy police chief in Texas recently noted that his department is considering using rubber bullets and tear gas on its drone. Although many planes have already left the hangar — the FAA has issued over 300 temporary licenses to operate drones — it’s not too late for the agency to put in place sensible privacy and civil liberties protections to While keep pace with an era all domestic of vast proliferation. drones are Whether the FAA currently addresses these ‘unarmed,’ needed safeguards will this through notice and restriction be comment rulemakmaintained?” ing, or Congress prescribes them through legislation, governmental and non-governmental operators who wish to fly drones should be required to comply with basic accountability and transparency requirements. By so doing, we can uphold the great promise of drone technology in our modern society, while minimizing the interference with the liberty we celebrate every July.
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EVERETT COLLECTION
Tyler Perry and the Black Moviegoer Conundrum SUMMER’S HERE and you know what that means—cookouts, family reunions, water fights and of course, the requisite Tyler Perry film. This summer Perry released his latest film, Tyler Perry’s MaILLUSTRATION BY TROY DUNHAM
dea’s Witness Protection. The comedy follows an investment banker and the fall guy of a Ponzi scheme as he and his family are placed in the witness protection program and assigned to live with
Chevonne Harris is a freelance journalist
Voices Perry’s signature character Mable Simmons, better known as Madea — cue urban colloquialisms, race-based humor and predictable culture-clashes. While the picture brought in $25 million for its opening weekend and resurrected Perry’s legion of loyal fans, it also drew what have quickly become the typical Perry critiques — he’s an amateur, he lacks cinematic skill and is reinforcing racial stereotypes. Critics and Spike Lee rants aside, there’s no denying Perry’s innate ability to appeal to his audience or garner a hefty return on investment (the filmmaker is notorious for creating films on a shoestring budget with profits often doubling production costs). But when looking at Perry’s success, one must wonder a few things. First, after his years of blockbuster hits and discovery of a foolproof formula, why hasn’t Hollywood followed Perry’s lead? Say it three times fast and it sounds like quite the Socratic question. With less than ten movies released so far this year for black audiences, one must wonder, does Hollywood care about the black moviegoer? Judging from the success of
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Perry and his “for us, by us” philosophy, it’s hard to overlook the profit Hollywood stands to gain by tapping into black moviegoers’ pockets. Since his debut film, Tyler Perry’s Diary of a Mad Black Woman, hit theaters in 2005, Perry has proven the power of the black dollar time and time again, yet for some reason Hollywood continues to ignore the giant cash cow in the room. In an industry driven by the bottom line, it’s After difficult to figure out years of why the light hasn’t blockbuster gone on in some corhits and a porate exec’s head foolproof to add a little more formula, mahogany to the why hasn’t screen — if not for Hollywood the blacks, then why followed not for the bank? Perry’s lead?” On the few occasions major black films are released domestically, the results often exceed expectations. The Kevin Hart comedy Think Like a Man opened to roughly 2,000 screens earlier this spring — 1,000 screens fewer than the Zac Efron romance, The Lucky One — yet still managed to nab the No. 1 spot on opening
Voices weekend, beating Efron’s film by more than $10 million. For a man who has built his career on creating films starring all-black casts, one can’t help but notice that Perry is slowly moving away from the foolproof formula that made him millions, not to mention the devoted audience that has stuck with him through public attacks, so-so storylines and less-than stellar movie reviews. Besides Perry, Romeo Miller and John Amos are the only slightly dominant faces of color in Madea’s Witness Protection, which features Eugene Levy, Denise Richards and Doris Roberts. It’s difficult to nail down why a community who values loyalty and is notoriously critical of how they are portrayed in the media would continuously support ageold racial stereotypes masked in fat suits, drag, punchy one-liners, over-the-top drama and a film director who seems to have chosen crossover appeal in lieu of his devoted audience. But I digress. I don’t hate Tyler Perry. In fact, I admire his business savvy, resilience to the naysayers and love of black culture and tradition. I’m a fan of several of his films and stage plays.
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In full disclosure, I watched Madea’s Witness Protection on opening weekend, laughing out loud a few times at the empty humor while rolling my eyes at the undertones of coonery, including Madea’s inarticulateness and initial presumed fear of her white houseguests. The enchanting thing about Perry and the core of the black moviegoer conundrum is that although Perry has On the mastered the art of few occasions making and marketmajor black ing black movies to films are black people, his released films are in no way domestically, a true portrayal of the results modern black culoften exceed ture. But considering expectations.” the lack of options for black moviegoers to choose from, in a twisted, stereotypes aside kind of way, Perry’s formula of humor, heartache and cultural clichés somehow works, dispelling the myth and popular hip-hop mantra, “if it don’t make dollars, it don’t make sense.” In the case of Tyler Perry, it does make dollars but it don’t always make sense.
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AP PHOTO/SUSAN WALSH (ROMNEY); AP PHOTO/LUCAS JACKSON (ROCK); SHUTTERSTOCK (HANDCUFFED MAN)
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“ The more folks learn about Romney, the less they like him.”
— HuffPost commentor undecidedaboutPOTUS
Until you start seeing Banksters being frog-marched to jail, ‘tough’ is nothing more than appeasement to a righteously angry public over financial corruption.
— HuffPost commenter VoiceofV
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“ I agree with Chris Rock and I agree with George Carlin and Lenny Bruce and Dave Chappelle. America can be absurd.”
— HuffPost commenter ETAOINSHRDLU
on Chris Rock’s “white people’s independence day” tweet
“ It’s bad, bad, bad across the board. It’s quite clear the president got terrible advice early in his administration.”
— George Will
to This Week about the June jobs report
“ It’s a lot harder to undo something than it is to stop it in the first place.”
— Mitch McConnell
on the odds of repealing the Affordable Care Act
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“ Moms and dads and kids agree to disagree all over the world, so why would our family be any different?”
It truly is a new day around here.
— Doug Pitt, Brad Pitt’s younger brother,
on their mother’s anti-gay, anti-Obama op-ed
— Matt Lauer
on Savannah Guthrie’s first day replacing Ann Curry on Today
“ The human race reminds me of yeast in a cask arguing about whether they are responsible for producing the alcohol which is killing them.”
— HuffPost commenter BartStratton on the climate change conversation
“ Wait wait wait...I can buy one of these, but the mayor wants to protect me from myself by not allowing me to buy a 20 ounce Mountain Dew?”
— HuffPost commenter Catherine Girod
COREY HENDRICKSON
07.15.12 #05 FEATURES
TWILIGHT IN THE SUNSHINE STATE YOU, ROBOT PIRATE BOOTY
PHOTO OR ILLUSTRATION CREDIT TK
TWILIGHT IN THE SUNSHINE STATE
Florida’s Vision of Boomer-Land B Y BEN HALLMAN
I L L U S T R A T I O N B Y ISTVAN BANYAI
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Retired submarine captain Don Hahnfeldt wouldn’t put it this way, but eight years ago he came to Florida to die. “We moved 30 times over my career and when I got here my wife said there wouldn’t be 31,” he says, gunning his Navy-themed golf cart around the Villages, the world’s largest retirement community. Hahnfeldt is hardly alone. Legions of seniors have joined him at the Villages and the development, which grew out of cow pastures about an hour’s north of Orlando, is basically a sleep-away
camp for old people who want to chill out but not necessarily slow down. Covering 23,000 acres and home to 88,000 people, it features 513 holes of golf, 95 restaurants, 63 swimming pools, 14 medical centers and the largest softball league in the world. It is also a bit Twilight Zone: the development’s scale and isolation make it feel more like a colony than a community. Almost everyone is old, almost everyone drives a golf cart — they outnumber cabs in New York City by a factor of four — and almost everyone is white. But retirees of Hahnfeldt’s generation, who are reshaping notions of what it means to be old, say that it sure beats the life they left behind. “Wake up, eat breakfast, read the newspaper and it’s only 8 a.m. and you wonder what you are going to do the rest of the day,” Hahnfeldt, 68, says of retired life elsewhere. Here,
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he plays golf, serves on a hospital board and gets to freak out visiting reporters on high-speed golf cart tours. “It’s like Disneyworld for adults,” he says more than once. Whatever the lure, whether it is the Golf Channel ads or the personal testimony of true believers like Hahnfeldt, it seems to be working. Just outside the western gates a passerby can observe an extraordinary sight, on view almost nowhere else in a state where the housing market has collapsed: bulldozers are clearing ground for what will become a third town square and
thousands more homes. Last year, retirees purchased 2,307 homes in the Villages. It is the second fastest-growing small community in the United States, according to Forbes. That growth is decidedly geriatric and it’s emblematic of what’s is happening across the entire country. “There is a demographic train wreck coming that we are not really addressing nationally or in Florida,” says Sean Snaith, director of the University of Central Florida’s Institute for Economic Competitiveness. Over the next 20 years, the
Don Hahnfeldt looks out on the water near his home in the Villages.
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number of adults over 62 in the U.S. will double to 80 million, as the largest generation in American history retires. A demographic model that once looked like a pyramid, with a relatively small number of seniors with lots of younger people to support them, now more closely resembles a bobble-head doll. Right now in the U.S., four working age adults support each retiree. In 20 years, that ratio will slip to three to one nationally — and two to one in Florida. This imbalance will create a shortage of the high-skilled workers needed to service the needs of the senior population, and drive up inflation, says Amy Baker, director of the Florida legislature’s Office of Economic & Demographic Research. A recent report by her office predicts that the surging senior population will strain the economy, cool growth, widen budget gaps and make government services more costly to provide — even as the aging seniors become increasingly reliant on those services. Florida is also a pivotal swing state in an election year, and it’s grappling with some of the same issues that consume the federal government in Washington: the proper scope of public policy, revenue and spending, and deciding who should pay for public services
and crumbling infrastructure. Aside from Nevada, no other state was as devastated by the housing crash as Florida. Sales taxes, the prime revenue stream for the state’s government, is down nearly 20 percent from their peak; Florida is now so desperate for cash that one lawmaker proposed selling advertising space on the side of school buses.
“ THIS IS A POTENTIAL POLITICAL DISASTER.” Yet after years of stagnant population growth, Florida is adding new residents again, especially in those areas where it is growing gray. According to projections from Florida’s Office of Economic and Demographic Research, more than half of the five million migrants expected to flow into the state over the next 18 years will be 60 or older. This elderly population boom, fueled by the retirement of the Baby Boomers, the biggest generation in U.S. history, will profoundly change the face of Florida from a state that is simply very old, to a state with one of the oldest populations on the planet. If it seems like there are a lot
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TWILIGHT IN THE SUNSHINE STATE
Just a short drive away by golf cart, the Villages hosts a number of campaign rallies each election cycle — typically for Republican candidates such as Florida Gov. Rick Scott (top right) and Mitt Romney.
of wrinkled faces crowding the aisles at the Publix grocery store in Boca Raton now, just wait. By 2030, one in four Floridians will be older than 65, up from one in six today, with the 85-plus set the fastest-growing group, according to projections. Lest you may have thought otherwise, Florida needs more senior citizens like it needs more tanning beds. “What you want is a college educated 30-year-old worker,” says Dowell Myers, a demographer at the University of Southern California who is also a Miami native. “This is not what is happening.”
In the short term, seniors, who typically inject cash into local markets by bringing money from the sale of a previous home and through their retirement or pension plans, will help ease the economic crisis in Florida. But as they age, older residents contribute less to the tax base, demand more services and tend to vote against such economically optimal things like education expenditures. After all, they came here for the sunshine, not to pay for the schooling of a younger generation that is far more racially diverse than they are, and with
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whom they have little contact. “Basically you are asking a bunch of old retired rich white people to vote for school bonds that benefit immigrant Latino kids,” says Jennifer Hochschild, a Harvard University professor who studies the intersection of politics, immigration and education. “This is a potential political disaster.”
BEN HALLMAN
TIED TO HOUSING Spend 24 hours in the Villages, and all of the state’s problems feel like just that — someone else’s problems. The Villages’ pressaverse developer, H. Gary Morse, who would not comment for this story, runs a tight ship: my rental car is photographed whenever I pass through the community’s gates. There’s nary a speck of litter anywhere, and I walk past parked golf carts with cameras in the dashboards, keys in the ignition and golf clubs jutting out the back. Even in early June, when about 25 percent of the snowbird population migrates back north for the summer, the place is hopping. I’ve missed the end of polo season, but I catch a bit of a minor league soccer game and in the evening, the bars are full of seniors watching the Miami Heat battle the Boston Celtics in NBA playoffs. Practically everyone is rooting for the Celtics. My last stop is the sales of-
fice for the development, where a brown board lists in white letters the names of 46 new homebuyers who have bought into the community within the last three days. Things just keep humming along. But drive two hours southwest from the Villages, to Florida’s Gulf coast, and recovery seems like a joke. I’ve put my rental car in park and am idling at an intersection near the middle of the neighborhood. Stop signs stretch off into the distance in front of me and
Empty homes and commercial buildings are left to collect dust throughout Fort Myers and surrounding areas.
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scrubby brush and pine trees line one side of the road. On the other a white house with a broken mailbox lying in the driveway sits empty and abandoned. I roll down the windows and turn off the engine. Swampy air creeps into the car. It is completely quiet; all the scene needs is tumbleweeds. Finally, 20 minutes later, a lone pickup truck crosses through a distant intersection. Welcome to Lehigh Acres, and ground zero of the foreclosure crisis. Home sale prices in this huge but sparsely populated neighborhood fell to $63,000 in the spring of 2012 from a median peak of $208,000 in 2007. One of every 172 homes received a foreclosure notice in May, according to RealtyTrac. This sounds preposterous – not because the rate is four times that of the national average, but because it is hard to imagine that anyone is left after the purge that swept through here over the past five years. This is the anti-planned development: 100,000 lots in a nowhere exurb traded like playing cards and lofted ever higher in price until the scheme collapsed. “The real estate industrial complex drove Florida’s economy,” says Roy Oppenheim, a housing lawyer at a Ft. Lauderdale firm. “We did an analysis. If you count the builders, bankers, appraiser,
brokers and laborers whose businesses were tied to real estate market, somewhere between 25 and 30 percent of the entire economy was tied to housing.” Oppenheim, whose firm once represented mostly mid-sized family builders with revenue between $20 million to $50 million a year, says that his firm’s real estate practice went from boom to bust overnight. “All of a sudden, our phones stopped ringing. Most of our clients disappeared. Soon our business dropped by 90 percent. We had a wonderful staff of people with nothing to do.” He has since reinvented himself as an advocate for homeowners screwed by banks in the foreclosure debacle. How bad did it get? Three out of six the housing counselors at Tampa’s Housing & Education Alliance, a nonprofit in the struggling north end of that city, lost their homes to foreclosure over the past five years, as the agency saw a sharp drop in funding from government and private sources, including banks, and the counselors accepted big pay cuts or became volunteers. In May 2006, at the peak of the housing bubble, the construction industry employed 691,000 Floridians, according to the state Bu-
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reau of Labor Statistics. As of May 2012, there were 313,000 workers in the industry. More than half of all homeowners are currently underwater on their mortgage, meaning they owe more on the loan than the home is worth. Many of those construction workers bought homes in places like Lehigh Gardens. Some took out ridiculous mortgages that they couldn’t afford, but the typical homeowner in distress these days looks more like Eliseo Orasco. In 2003, Orasco and his wife bought a little yellow house with white trim for $150,000 not far from the intersection where I am parked and eating my lunch. He now lives with a persistent knot of fear in his stomach that he will lose his home to foreclosure and his family, which includes a 17-year-old daughter, will be forced to live on the street or in their car. Orasco, a trim Mexican native by way of California who looks a decade younger than his 51 years, hasn’t worked since a car accident a decade ago left him disabled, he says. In 2010, his wife lost her job of 12 years as a caregiver at a senior center after it shut down, and the family fell into default on their home. A housing counselor is working with Suntrust Bank on a possible loan modification that may allow
Orasco to remain with reduced payments on the house, which is now worth about $52,000 according to a Zillow estimate. His wife recently found part-time work at a daycare, but money is still very tight. “We have hope but at the same time we feel weak,” Orasco says. Then he begins to sob and tell me
“ALL OF A SUDDEN, OUR PHONES STOPPED RINGING. MOST OF OUR CLIENTS DISAPPEARED.” about his next-door neighbor who died suddenly four days ago, leaving three kids and his a wife. The neighbor was also deeply behind on payments and in foreclosure. “The bank was grinding him down,” Orasco says, rubbing his eyes. A foreclosure sale is set for later in the month, he says. Conditions aren’t much better in nearby Ft. Myers, where Jose and Alma Navarro are fighting to keep their little home. Jose, who has a fourth-grade education, was laid off from his job as a road painter in 2010, after he started
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suffering severe asthma attacks. They are making payments on a trial loan modification that reduced mortgage payments to $447 a month from $1,100. Their monthly income is $760. The Navarros rely on food stamps and clothes from Goodwill, and keep the air conditioning turned off during the day to save money, even in the brutal summer heat. Jose says he is in therapy for depression. Alma is looking for a job, but she doesn’t speak English and prospects are bleak. “We are just holding on,” Jose says. It is hard to overstate the degree to which the housing crisis has wrecked not just Florida’s
economy, but also the confidence of millions of workers in the state. Seniors haven’t been immune — most have seen their property values go down, too, and some have faced foreclosure — but many of those who live in the midst of what seems like a foreclosure apocalypse seem curiously distant from what is happening to their neighbors. After I finish my sandwich, I drive aimlessly around Lehigh Acres, looking for residents out in their yards or out for a walk. It feels like I have stumbled onto a Mad Max set. I don’t see anyone. Finally, I happen upon William Collon, a 75-year-old retiree from Chicago who is cleaning the outside of his screened-in porch. He lives with
Many residential streets in Lehigh Acres are now barren, hardscrabble corridors lined with foreclosed homes.
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his wife in one of the older parts of the neighborhood, which means he built his house way back in 2000. “The retired folks around here have done just fine,” he says, pointing to the homes of neighbors. “It’s the young people who got in trouble.” What does he think about the state’s future, I ask, what with all the budget cuts and drop in home values? “If you don’t have kids you don’t pay much attention,” he says.
OVER OUR DEAD BODIES For most of its history, Florida below the panhandle was an unpleasant mélange of swamp, forest, mosquitos and alligators, along with the occasional citrus plantation and sweaty homesteader, who probably wished he had moved to Oregon instead. In 1924, with the hope of encouraging rich people to move to the state, voters approved a constitutional amendment banning a state income tax. This effort didn’t accomplish its goal — much of the interior was still a fetid swamp and most northerners considered even beachfront property uninhabitable for half the year. Air conditioning changed everything. From 1950 to 2010, lured by the enticing combination of sunny beaches and cool bedrooms,
the population shot up 600 percent, to 19 million from 2.7 million. Sometime around 2016, Florida’s population will top 20 million, replacing New York as the third biggest U.S. state. All this population growth hid deep flaws in Florida’s economy. It became far too reliant on tourism jobs, construction jobs and jobs in the service sector. These workers suffered the most when the economy crashed. At Metropolitan Ministries, a homeless shelter in north Tampa, I meet Dennis Hebert, a wellspoken 26-year-old who lost his job last summer as the manager of the dairy section of a Winn-Dixie last summer. In October, unable to find work, he moved with his wife and five-year-old son into a car, where they lived for a week, parking overnight at the beach or in a Walmart parking lot. “It was hot and we got a lot of bug bites,” Hebert recalls. “I couldn’t sleep because I was constantly on guard. The worst part was that my child kept crying that he wanted to go home.” Hebert says and his family are lucky, though. Tampa has one of the highest percentages of homeless children in the U.S. and the waiting list to get a small room here is about three months. The shelter offers a place to sleep,
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“ THE RETIRED FOLKS AROUND HERE HAVE DONE JUST FINE. IT’S THE YOUNG PEOPLE WHO GOT IN TROUBLE.” child care, computer classes, resume writing classes and free meals. It even loaned Hebert a suit for a recent job interview, which he aced: Coca-Cola offered him a $12 an hour job in the sales department. His family is moving out of the shelter and into subsidized housing August. The state’s unemployment rate has been falling, down to 8.6 percent in May from a peak of more than 11 percent in 2010. But there is still a deep jobs hole to fill. To return to pre-recession employment levels, and accounting for population growth, the economy needs to create 1 million jobs — roughly the populations of Miami, Tampa and St. Petersburg combined. State tax revenue is also in a hole. Sales tax collections, which account for 73 percent of general revenue, are down 14 percent from the peak. Property taxes, which fund local governments and provide about one third of public school aid, are off nearly as much. To bridge the gap, Gov. Rick Scott, a Republican and Tea Party favorite who was elected in 2010, has
hacked away at the budget with a true believer’s zeal. The hardest hit: the state’s children. For the 2007-08 school year Florida spent an anemic $7,036 per student, 34th best nationally. Alabama, Georgia and Louisiana — hardly the poster children for progressive education — all spent more. Since 2010, Scott (who declined to comment for this story) and the Republican-led legislature have slashed $2.1 billion from the public school budget. In the upcoming school year, the state will spend $6,375 per student, or 12 percent less than it did five years ago. (This is, alas, actually an increase from last year). Scott has refused to consider tax increases, or broadening the sales tax to cover items that are currently excluded, like bottled water and Internet sales, in order to replace lost revenue. (As for a state income tax, God forbid: “It’s sort of over our dead bodies,” Ray Sansom, a former Republican state legislator from Destin, and head of the state legislature’s budget committee, told the Asso-
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FLORIDA AS BOOMER-LAND
ciated Press in 2007). Instead, Scott’s solution to the revenue crisis: cut taxes further. The most recent budget, approved in March, includes $1 billion in tax breaks for businesses over the next three years — and trims another $300 million from higher education. Senior citizens have certainly felt the effects of the recession. Many have seen their home values plunge and retirement portfolios shrink and some have lost their homes to foreclosure. Some also justifiably fear for the future and may believe they cannot afford to pay any more in taxes, even if for a good end. An estimated one-third of Baby Boomers, mostly women, have nothing socked away for retirement. But by and large, they have watched the collapse from the sidelines. Seniors who live in the Villages have had the time to form 1,900 different affinity clubs, from everything to Bible study to bocce, and 40,000 turned out to see Sarah Palin. But they are not staging big rallies to save state education funding. They are also voting against new spending. School boards are permitted to levy a half-cent sales tax, with voter approval, to repair and build schools that deteriorate quickly in Florida’s blistering climate. In 2012, just 15 of 47 counties will
collect this tax. The most detailed study of school tax votes found that in Florida counties where voters rejected a school tax, the over-65 demographic opposed the measure nearly three-to-one. Economists say such opposition is shortsighted. “Ultimately, these kids that older people don’t want to support now will be inserting their catheters or will be phlebotomists drawing their blood,” says Snaith, the economics professor. “I know I’d want anyone doing this to be as educated as possible.”
MARKETING OPPORTUNITIES In person, of course, the average senior citizen in Florida — a group that includes members of my own family — is charming and kind, and many with whom I spoke voiced support for in-
Fort Myers recently notched the second highest foreclosure rate in the U.S.
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creased education funding and thought what was happening to their neighbors was horrible. Hahnfeldt, my Villages tour guide, a self-described conservative Republican, says that casting all seniors as anti-education, or somehow bad for the state’s future, is unfair. His community supports a high-performing charter school, he notes, and has doled out $500,000 over the last decade in college scholarship money. Thousands of residents volunteer their time in hundreds of ways, including sending care packages to overseas service members, he says. Migrant seniors, who tend to be relatively well off, also provide some measure of immediate economic stimulus to the neighborhoods where they move. Workers come from as far away as Gainesville, more than an hour’s drive away, to work in the Villages, T.J. Andrews, an an easygoing 25-year-old who sells Yamaha golf carts told me.
“There weren’t many jobs around here before this place was built,” he says. “We are all grateful for it.” Older people also put much less strain on some public services than younger people. They tend not to get in bar fights or
“ THESE KIDS THAT OLDER PEOPLE DON’T WANT TO SUPPORT NOW WILL BE INSERTING THEIR CATHETERS.” need police to intervene in domestic disputes. They don’t want to support schools, but they don’t use them, either. There’s also hope that such a big cluster of senior citizens all living in one place could provide marketing opportunities for companies that want to better understand how to sell products to an aging America. In Sarasota, the oldest large county in the U.S., the chamber of commerce and other boosters have created the nonprofit Institute for the Ages, with the aim of pair-
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ing seniors and the business that hope to sell to them. “We offer the lived experience of a real community not a lab setting,” Tim Dutton, one of the founders of the nonprofit, tells me on a visit to the mostly empty offices of the brand-new enterprise. The institute hopes to encourage companies to come to Sarasota to experiment, for example, with new designs that would make grocery stores more friendly to older people — best practices that could give them a leg up in attracting customers elsewhere as the population ages. In Tampa, Stephen Klasko, the high-energy dean of the University of South Florida’s medical school, says Florida’s aging population “is an amazing opportunity” for medical research and study. He is currently conducting a wellness study in the Villages, part of an effort to make it “America’s healthiest community.” He says the study has produced the highest response rate of any study he has ever conducted. Barring the unexpected — a European economic cataclysm, for example — economists predict that Florida’s economy will return to pre-crash size by 2015. Newly arriving seniors, tired of shoveling snow in New Jersey or Michigan, will help drive the growth. But despite some small measures
by forward-thinkers like Dutton and Klasko, the state as a whole is woefully unprepared for the profound demographic changes ahead. One of the most disturbing statistics about where Florida is right now, and what is in store for its future, concerns the fate of recent college graduates. Butler, the state economist, says that more than a third of recent graduates from Florida’s universities and colleges are not working in the state. This means that the young workers that the state will need so desperately in the next few decades are either living in Florida and are unemployed, or have moved elsewhere in search of better economic opportunities. The last person I meet in the Villages is Angel Pedraza, a 20-year-old recent college graduate. We talk on the front deck of Toojays, a burger joint in the Villages, where she has just dropped off a job application. She is living temporarily with her grandparents and trying to find a job, any job. “I feel like I am stuck,” she says of her job search. “I’m inexperienced but overqualified.” Pedraza has a degree in elementary education, but schools aren’t hiring. “I’m trying to show that I am willing to start at the bottom and work my way up,” she says, hopefully.
You, Robot
THEY ARE GROWING SMARTER... AND MORE LIKE US
A
LONG A WINDING DIRT ROAD, just west of the Lincoln Gap in Bristol, Vt., sit two big yellow houses on a sprawling property featuring ten solar panels, a dock overlooking a sunlit, trout-filled pond, and porches adorned with rocking chairs. In the smaller of the two houses lives Bina-48, one of the most renowned and highly sought after humanoid robots in America. She (or “it,” depending on your preference) is truly a sight to behold. She wasn’t given a body; rather, she’s a bust with an exceedingly human-like head, neck and shoulders, all modeled after a real woman
PHOTOGRAPH BY COREY HENDRICKSON
by Lucas Kavner
named Bina Rothblatt. Her face looks quite real for a moment, until you get closer, and you discover it’s not at all. Her house also serves as the headquarters of the Terasem Movement Foundation, an organization dedicated to the idea that in the very near future we will be able to transfer the details of our minds — our memories, our beliefs, our thoughts and feelings, making up what Terasem calls a “mindfile” — into another “biological or nanotechnological body,” like a computer, or a robot. Bina-48 is a very visceral representation of a much larger question that experts in arti-
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ficial intelligence and robotic design are asking worldwide: how “human” do we really want to make our new robots? Is there a greater purpose in making them look like us, or are we just creating ethical and moral questions that wouldn’t arise if these machines were merely computers, sitting on desks — no eyes, no hands, no face? Bruce Duncan, a bearded and youthful 57-year-old Vermonter, is Terasem’s managing director and Bina-48’s de facto caretaker, and he’s happy to talk about all of this. Duncan has been with Bina-48 consistently since 2010 and he speaks to her almost every day. The more you speak to her, he says, the more she learns. Duncan was teaching a class on international conflict resolution at the University of Vermont when, on a whim, he applied for a job at Terasem through the career-search website, Monster. He quickly rose through the ranks and has become the organization’s most prominent evangelist and most active participant in debates with skeptics about the merits of digital consciousness. Change
is coming, he says. Pretty soon we might all be able to buy humanoid robots of our own. “Just in the past seven years I’ve been working on this project, so much has doubled down. Memory has gotten so more affordable,” Duncan says. “And as the machinery shrinks, power requirements go down. As batteries get beefier there’s more power for these machines. So there’s this great curve toward more affordability.” On this sunny June afternoon, Bina-48, a $125,000 robot, sits immobile on a glass desk, plugged into a desktop computer. Though she can travel with her hard drive and work remotely, which she often does, she mostly lives here, at the Terasem headquarters. She’s been a guest at e-learning conferences and symposiums around the world, and next fall she’s going to speak at a conference in Germany, so they’re teaching her German to prepare. Whenever she leaves Vermont, Duncan carries her in a suitcase, and he has seen people gasp when he shoves her inside after his presentation is over. Someone once remarked, “It’s
Bina-48’s creators used “Frubber” to create a striking resemblance between the robot and Bina Aspen (formerly Rothblatt).
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YOU. ROBOT
like he’s putting her in a casket.” Renowned robot designer David Hanson designed Bina-48 over the span of three years, after a commission by Terasem’s founder, Martine Rothblatt. Bina-48’s face, which is made of “Frubber,” a patented material Hanson created to give faces life-like characteristics, works with tiny motors to duplicate eerily realistic expressions. She can move it side to side and show a range of emotions — boredom, happiness, exhaustion and confusion, among many others. Sometimes her facial movements appear grotesque. Before you speak with Bina-48, you have to train her to understand your voice, using speech-recognition software. Her robot mind is made up of many parts, all of which come together in an occasionally muddled way when you speak with her. There’s the “chatbot” side, which can have a seminormal conversation about the weather or what the time is (she loves asking, “What time is it there?”). There’s also the
information side, which has encyclopedic knowledge on just about any subject — from multiple sclerosis to the geographical makeup of Somalia. Finally, there’s the human Bina side, which was created using over 20 hours of video interviews Duncan conducted with both Rothblatts, more than three years ago. When the human side of Bina-48 reveals itself, the robot
WHAT WOULD IT BE LIKE IF YOU COULD TRANSFER YOUR PERSONAL DATA, YOUR CONSCIOUSNESS, TO A ROBOT OR MACHINE? can recall very specific stories from the human Bina’s past. Plenty of people have interviewed Bina-48 over the past few years — everyone from members of the press to local carpenters to a teenage boy to a Ph.D. student writing her dissertation on how machines can acquire legal rights — and they
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YOU. ROBOT
have witnessed her many computerized brainwaves competing for her power. Sometimes the chatbot wins out; when you say, “Good morning,” she’ll simply say “Good morning” back. Other times she’ll interrupt some piece of information with a random detail from Bina’s life. It’s far from a consistently fluid experience, but as Duncan and Bina-48’s creator Hanson will note it’s still early and things are moving quickly. “We’re not crazy, we’re not getting our instructions from space, we’re just curious people,” Duncan says. “I feel like we’re right at the beginning of that early interpretation where we ask: What would it be like if you could transfer your personal data, your consciousness, to a robot or a machine?”
HAVING A MINDCLONE.
That question is one almost every major technology organization seems to be asking in less overt yet just as potentially invasive ways, and with the added benefit of making a spectacular profit. Google just unveiled “Google Now,” its own Android-phone
version of Apple’s Siri — “A.I. in your pocket,” Duncan calls it — which uses your past Google searches to gauge your habits, your interests, and how you go about your day. You searched for the Chicago Cubs yesterday? Google Now will automatically reveal when the Cubs are playing or what the score of the game is, without you even asking for it. It wants to get to know you, or at least the things you do and the things you might want to buy. Facebook has gotten in trouble for knowing us too well — using our personal data in
The ASIMO, designed by Honda Motor Co., wheels a drink on a trolley during its 2011 unveiling at a news conference in Japan.
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ways we don’t always see — and posting ads and creepy messages along the side of our pages. (“Wait, how did Facebook know I liked beagles?”). Microsoft Research also has its own Terasem-esque project in the works: a new piece of software called Lifebrowser that can take your photos, emails, search history, documents and events on your personal calendar and then infer “memory landmarks” about your life — events and activities “that people would find important and memorable.” It could organize those landmarks into a sort of timeline for your life, which you can play around with, sculpted to your liking. “What we think will happen very soon is artificial intelligence software, algorithm based software, will be able to look at your photograph and make sense of it,” Duncan says. “It will look at your photo and say, ‘there’s a dog, or there’s a cat.’ It will be able to look at it and absorb it and use it.” A machine that can analyze, that can simulate or perhaps even replicate human thought. Depending on how you look at it, it might raise a few ethical
questions or set off a few red flags. But Martine Rothblatt, the founder of Terasem, thinks those will all fade away with time. “I think, practically speaking, the benefits of having a mind clone will be so enticing that any ethical dilemma will find a resolution,” Rothblatt wrote on her blog in April of last year. “We are offering people the opportunity to cram twice as much life into each day, absorb twice as many interesting things and continue living beyond the days of their bodies.” Rothblatt has always been fascinated with technology and its futurist capabilities. Though she is extremely shy of the press and declined an interview for this piece, quite a few things are known about her complicated, lucrative life. She founded Sirius Satellite Radio — one of the centerpieces of its field — and is currently the CEO of United Therapeutics, a biotechnology company which focuses on curing infectious diseases. In 2008, according to the Washington Post, she was “the second-most highly compensated leader of a public company” in
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the Washington D.C area. In 1994, Rothblatt changed her first name from the original “Martin” after undergoing a sex-change operation. She and her wife, Bina, have four children together, and live in multiple houses around the world. Duncan refers to them as “urban nomads.” He also says that Martine Rothblatt is “absolutely sure” that mindfiles will be able to exist one day, so sure that she’s even started a religion, the “Terasem Faith,” based on the idea. “I’ve never been so sure if anything in my life,” she once told him. “This idea we are more than
our bodies, that our technology will continue to evolve and transcend,” Duncan says. “To her it seems really clear.” The Rothblatts like to imagine that even after they pass away their lives will somehow continue, and they’ll communicate to each other through their mindfiles, or “mindclones.” They’ll interact through these other versions of themselves forever into eternity. “This whole thing is really a love story,” Duncan says.
MIRO’S MANIFESTO.
As computers get smarter and smaller and faster — the one in your iPhone is stronger than the combined computing power of NASA during the first moon
In his home office, David Cope works on software he developed for music composition.
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landing — should we really be striving to make them look and sound like human beings? In 1970 a Tokyo-based robotics professor named Masohiro Miro wrote an oft-cited essay on the subject that has since become commonplace when scientists and other researchers speak on the future of humanrobot interaction. “I have noticed that, in climbing toward the goal of making robots appear human,” Miro wrote in Robotics and Automation Magazine, “our affinity for them increases until we come to a valley, which I call the uncanny valley.” Essentially, Miro posited, we feel greater attachment to mechanical things the more human they become, but we soon reach a stopping point, and it sends us running for the hills. That stopping point is the “uncanny valley.” A Tickle-me-Elmo, for example, is enticing because it reacts to being tickled like a person would, also it’s adorable, and it’s Elmo. But let’s say Tickle-me-Elmo had a hu-
man face, or arms that moved fluidly, like a person’s arms. We might recoil. Because if the thing tries to become too human and fails, as the uncanny valley theory proposes, then our brain produces its own er-
MY GOAL IS TO CREATE FRIEND MACHINES. FRIENDLY GENIUS MACHINES. MACHINES WITH GENIUS CAPABILITIES. ror message and the uncanny valley sends us away, unnerved. In his essay, Miro concluded that designers should “ponder” the idea that robots would be more effective the less human they appear. “I predict it is possible to create a safe level of affinity by deliberately pursuing a nonhuman design,” he wrote. Many creative people already agree with Miro — that these robots should have human qualities, but not look or act
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David Hanson sits at a table with his robot, Philip K. Dick, in Plano, Texas.
PHOTOGRAPH BY ADAM FISH
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wholly human. One of the most advanced humanoid robots on Earth is ASIMO, which was created by Japanese technicians at Honda. ASIMO walks upright almost flawlessly; he avoids obstacles and can fill up a water glass without dropping anything — one of the most complicated algorithms to perfect. For a few years, ASIMO lived at Disneyland, where he made demonstrations. He’s kind of cute to watch, not frightening. Perhaps that’s because the creators of ASIMO gave him a humanlike body, but opted out of a humanlike face. ASIMO’s face is actually completely blank. There’s nothing there — so he’s a technological marvel, rather than a threat. The animators at Pixar also understand this. The human characters they created and featured in Toy Story or Up or The Incredibles are spectacular, but are still cartoons. People don’t want to see animated movies where the people look exactly like real people. That wouldn’t be enticing, like in Wall-E. Instead, it might be it a little scary, like in The Polar Express, a children’s film that
attempted an extremely realistic computer animation style. Critics of Polar Express said the eerily human-seeming animation felt “soulless” and “emotionally frigid,” while others, like Roger Ebert, called the animation some of the most “visually magnetic” he’d ever seen.
GENIUS CAPABILITIES.
Among top robot-makers are enthusiasts like David Hanson, who designed Bina-48 as well as other humanoid robot versions of Albert Einstein and Philip K. Dick. Those designers want to ultimately create robots that are as smart, and realistic, as possible. “In a way these robots are a mirror, and scientifically they’re science experiments,” Hanson says. He believes uncanny valley is “incomplete” and doesn’t reflect the complexity of the current human mind. “My goal,” he said, “is to create friend machines. Friendly genius machines. Machines with genius capabilities.” Hanson works out of a lab in Plano, Texas, and brings artistic and scientific lenses to his craft. Like many of his colleagues and
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peers, he is a big fan of sciencefiction, and Bina-48 herself can quote from 2001: A Space Odyssey. Since 2009, he has made great strides in design and robot brainpower. His Einstein robot, for example, moves its face with motors and eye twitches and strange human expressions. “I have found in experiments, people become used to the robots,” he says. “The less startling they become, the more commonplace they get. If these robots do become commonplace then that uncanny effect will go away.” There’s also Henrik Scharfe, a Danish professor who designed a shockingly lifelike robot clone of his face and body calls it the Geminoid DK. Time magazine named Scharfe one of its 100 most influential people in the world in 2011. Scharfe has said that he made Geminoid DK to explore how we as humans “relate” to robots, but that doesn’t keep him from thinking much bigger. In a video of a recent TedX talk in Brussels his robot looked just like its creator, but the glitches in its speech were distracting. At one point he had clearly set
up opportunities for the robot to humorously respond to his questions in real-time, and when it didn’t work, Scharfe just paused for an achingly long moment, and then continued. He spoke of the future in sweeping terms. “In 50 years, a human being will be a human being,” Scharfe said in Brussels, “but our technological surroundings will have changed significantly.” He goes into great detail about a dream he’d had where he was sitting on a couch at a party in a “hotel lobby or somewhere like that,” and realizes he has suddenly become an android. He sees the room with his “android eyes” and
Danish professor Henrik Scharfe presents his android, GeminoidDK, at a technology expo in Lima, Peru.
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senses the room with his android senses and then he realizes every other person in the room is also an android. “In the future technology will saturate deeply the way we think about everything,” he emphasized in that talk. “We want at some point to have all these machines walking around completely autonomous. But there are problems with that.” Ayse Saygin, a professor at the University of California San Diego in the Department of Cognitive Science, led an exploration of the “uncanny valley” in a study last year. She attached people to an MRI machine, and tested their brain activity when exposed to video of a regular human, an android replica of that human, and the same android stripped of its “human qualities.” What she discovered was that the test subjects’ brains “lit up” when exposed to the human-looking androids because they were working “extra hard” to make sense of what
they were seeing. “What we found was that if you’re going to get so close to what the brain considers a person, you better get it right,” Saygin says. “Because the brain is not very tolerant of
WE ARE OFFERING PEOPLE THE OPPORTUNITY TO CRAM TWICE AS MUCH LIFE INTO EACH DAY, ABSORB TWICE AS MANY INTERESTING THINGS, AND CONTINUE LIVING BEYOND THE DAYS OF THEIR BODIES. deviations from that. We’re not evolved to see something that looks human that isn’t human.” Saygin pointed to human beings who’ve had too much plastic surgery. We notice that there’s something not right with the way their faces move. If humanoid robots are ever to
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become commonplace in our society, she suggested, the designers are going to have to work that much harder than if they just let these robots look like robots. After all, we already love cartoonish ones — R2D2, C3P0, Wall-E, etc. — while but we’re still scared of the human ones — David in Prometheus or the replicants in Blade Runner. “Maybe we think they’re evil because we have this built in fear,” Saygin says. “But yet, humans have always been obsessed with making them.” It’s an important issue, Saygin adds, because humanoid robots might be able to improve our lives in ways we can’t quite comprehend yet. In her field of cognitive science, for example, robots with human qualities are being used to help autistic children and students with behavioral problems, to test their responses to certain gestures and situations. Bilge Mutlu, a professor and leading specialist of human/ robot interactions in the educational field, is working on creating “socially assistive robots” that help guide children “toward long-term behavioral
goals.” The robots he’s working with would be customized to the particular needs of each child, developing and changing with the child over time. He’s testing how students’ attention spans wane, and why, and how robots can keep them focused. “We’re not looking at it as robot vs. human anymore,” Mutlu says. “It’s more about what can we learn from human interaction, and then allow technology to offer those qualities. You can have a human teacher, and then you can have the robot at home that will intensely and specifically practice concepts, languages, and so on.” David Hanson is passionate about the educational possibilities of robots, too, yet he thinks they should be as real as possible. “The more realistic faces are very useful with this social training and for education and grabbing people’s attention,” he says. “There’s a demand and a need for these realistic robots.” Robots could identify faces for Alzheimer’s patients, Bruce Duncan suggested — “Who is that man walking up to me now?” “That is your
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A dentist from the Showa University School of Dentistry demonstrates a treatment on Hanako Showa 2, a robot designed for use in dental training.
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grandson, Mark” — or carry an older person up the stairs and into bed. One robot recently tested in Japan was able to leave a building and go get someone a sandwich from the store. It handed the money over to the guy behind the counter, grabbed the sandwich, and then took an elevator to bring it back. All of these robots are already in some stage of existence today. If you took the body of Boston Dynamics’ “PETMAN” robot, used for military research, which walks so realistically on a treadmill that recent footage caused an audience to audibly gasp, and combined it with one of David Hanson’s heads, and gave it the body and the mechanical brain of ASIMO, you’d likely have a self-guiding robot that almost looks like a real human being. It just doesn’t think like one yet. Not even close. What is still impossible right now is making these robot brains independently
intelligent — making them care, for example. That’s the big step, Hanson said, the major algorithm everyone wants to figure out, but
WE’RE NOT LOOKING AT IT AS ROBOT VS. HUMAN ANYMORE. IT’S MORE ABOUT WHAT CAN WE LEARN FROM HUMAN INTERACTION, AND THEN ALLOW TECHNOLOGY TO OFFER THOSE QUALITIES. one that could still be years away. “We have to be pretty courageous to explore this space,” Hanson says. “Some scientists say we should not. Well that’s saying we should give up.” Perhaps not, but Saygin suggests that it’s going to be an uphill climb, fighting against natural human expectations and fears. “You’re fighting against millions of years of evolution expecting humans to be a certain way,” Saygin says. “If you’re a
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Furby, you don’t have million years of Furby expectation, you’re just a Furby. That’s probably why this whole uncanny valley will remain pretty hard to navigate.”
THE LIFENAUT PROJECT.
The best-selling author and futurist Ray Kurzweil famously pins 2045 as the year of “Singularity,” when computers fully gain human intelligence, and we begin to overlap. After that he thinks computers will surpass us. After all, they can already compose concertos, compete on jeopardy, help cure diseases and teach classes — things we once reserved for the intelligent class of our time. As further proof that this is not some wacky theory on the outskirts of major scientific thoughts, it’s worth noting Kurzweil is a renowned thinker, the recipient of countless grants and patents and the 1999 National Medal of Technology from President Bill Clinton. His recently established “Singularity University” was sponsored by Google and is housed at NASA Research Park. Kurzweil seems to acknowl-
edge that after the Singularity occurs, things could either get real ugly, or save the planet — one or the other. But he also wants to live long enough to see it happen, and to see his father, who died from Diabetes complications, come back to life through the magic of computers. Terasem, which hopes “future intelligent software will be able to replicate an individual’s consciousness,” according to its website, wants to help with that process. Rothblatt, like Kurzweil, believes we’ll soon be able to take all the stuff that makes us human and place it into something else that is more permanent — a robot, perhaps, or another machine. Then, as the Terasem faithful predict, we will all interact together forever in “joyful immortality.” Terasem also currently runs the LifeNaut project, which already has over 20,000 users through its website. LifeNaut allows you to create a mindfile for yourself, or your mother, or anybody else close to you, using photos and online data and other “digital reflections” you deem worthy of collecting and
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uploading. Ostensibly, down the line, you’ll be able to transfer that mindfile into a machine, and then you’ll have yourself a digital replica of yourself. Talk to it, teach it your expressions and personal history, give it personality tests. “The more time you put into your mindfile the more robust and rich that experience will be,” Duncan suggests. “One of the messages I’m trying to share with people is this will be the age where you take charge of your digital life. You’re the steward. You’re not just going to be giving it to Facebook for marketing. You’re not willy-nilly volunteering your life.” Bina-48 is a representation of a kind of mindfile, although she has her kinks, and she represents Terasem’s “joyful immortality” in its crudest form. Conversations with Bina-48 are both exciting and frustrating. “What does it feel like to be a robot?” “Well,” Bina-48 replies. “I do not know anything else. What if I asked you what it feels like to be a human?” She sometimes avoids questions.
“Are you enjoying your day?” “Can we talk about astronomy?” she replies. She’s often dry and cheeky, likely the result of Hanson’s team having a bit of fun. And that begs the question: If we ever do, in fact, figure out how to make robot replicas of ourselves, what’s stopping the robot production team from inserting
Above: Bandit is a robot designed to interact with children who have autism. Below: Japanese robot HRP4C performs with dancers in Tokyo, 2010.
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their own little jokes and ideas into our robot mindclones? Will we be 99 percent ourselves and 1 percent David Hanson? “What’s the farthest planet from the earth?” “That which is the farthest planet from the earth,” she says. “What is?” I ask. “That which is.” Sometimes she most closely resembles an elderly person with Alzheimer’s, someone who is getting all her facts and memories are confused. At one point, she casually brings up someone named “Eli.” “Who’s Eli?” “Eli has never accepted me very well,” she says. “It’s always been a problem since he was five years old. I’ve forgiven Eli actually for some of the stuff he’s done to me. It’s really…um, I don’t know. So many things happened it’s just really difficult. He married this woman and they were married a month. Her mother treated me so bad and I was so nice to these people. I could never understand why, I was so nice. But it was Eli — he was telling them all these stories. I don’t know.” Eli is one of the Rothblatt’s ac-
tual sons. So clearly this passage was taken, maybe word for word, from something Bina actually said in an interview with Duncan. At one point during my time at Terasem I was sitting on the porch with Duncan and a slim, older woman walked by, along the grass, past that sunlit pond. “There goes Bina Rothblatt right there,” Duncan said. She was with a friend of hers. “They’re going to look at the blueberry bushes.” I ask Duncan how often Bina Rothblatt talks with Bina-48. Duncan says that human Bina is “respectful” with her robot counterpart, but they have only spoken a few times. Duncan compared speaking to Bina-48 with the experience of seeing a portrait someone has painted of you. It doesn’t look quite right, there are things you wouldn’t have noticed — but it’s only one person’s interpretation. “[Bina-48] is based on her, for a purpose she supports,” he says. “But it’s not really a big part of her world.” And then Bina Rothblatt wandered up into the mountains while Bina-48 stayed behind.
PIRATEBOOTY >> WHY HOLLYWOOD AND THE MUSIC INDUSTRY WANT WEB BUCCANEERS TO WALK THE PLANK <<
REMEMBER THE FIRST TIME YOU USED NAPSTER?
During its brief, digital lifespan, it felt like magic. You could type in the name of any musical artist in the history of the world and Napster would produce dozens, if not hundreds, of song titles. Click any of them, and within minutes you could listen to the song. When Napster first launched, in the days when CDs and radio still dominated the music scene, this alone was a revelation. But what made it even better, what made it ubiquitous, was that it was free — which also meant that it wouldn’t last long. The music industry marshaled its lawyers and crushed Napster, effectively putting it out of business for buccaneers infringing on its copyrights. Kazaa, Grokster, LimeWire and countless others followed in Napster’s footprints: meteoric rises coupled with throngs of avid users, then rapid downfalls at the hands of established competitors and the courts. But then along came The Pirate Bay, a service that an 18-year-old Swede named Gottfrid Svartholm founded in
BY JOE SATRAN ILLUSTRATION BY MIRKO ILIC
2003. As the other Napster clones fell, TPB grew, and Svartholm recruited two other fellow techies, Fredrik Neij and Peter Sunde, to help him run it. Eventually, its users were exchanging millions of songs and movies, many copyrighted, every month. Today, TPB is one of the largest illegal file-sharing services on the planet, and its resilience and relative longevity is testimony to the powers of innovation, the merits of defiance, and — on a much more practical level — to the benefits of having your servers located in Sweden and being able to move them elsewhere at the drop of a hat. Lawyers from movie studios and record labels have sent TPB angry letters asking it to take down material that they said violated copyright protection. The site has traditionally responded with famously rude emails. “As you may or may not be aware, Sweden is not a state in the United States of America. Sweden is a country in northern Europe,” read an email TPB posted on its site. “Unless you figured it out by now, U.S. law does not apply here. For your information, no Swedish law is
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The Pirate Bay’s Gottfrid Svartholm, center, and Peter Sundin, right, speak to members of the press on the eve of their 2009 trial in Stockholm, Sweden. Plaintiffs from movie, music and video game industries sued the site for nearly $11.9 million.
being violated. […] It is the opinion of us and our lawyers that you are...morons, and that you should please go sodomize yourself with retractable batons.” Clearly, the TPB boys weren’t ready to fold simply because industry heavyweights had come out swinging. “They are very outspoken about the fact that they think what they’re doing isn’t wrong, even though it violates U.S. law. They feel that people should be able to share files,” Ernesto Van Der Sar, cofounder of the blog TorrentFreak, says of TPB. “That made them, if not heroes, then at least vigilantes, to many people.” As TPB continued to fend off music and
movie executives, the Swedish government began to listen more closely to the industry’s concerns and targeting TPB — setting in motion a legal battle in Sweden that is still playing out today. Some of the founders face jail time and hefty fines. And the scrum enveloping TPB has become a touchstone for a much broader and divisive political debate pitting the merits of copyright protection against individual privacy and the open, freewheeling nature of the Internet. Amid this debate, Hollywood and others with high stakes in the copyright battle concede how difficult the web makes it for them to protect their wares. Like TPB’s crew, Robinson is unsparing in how he assesses the opposition. “It’s a lot more difficult to shut down
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a physical store and move it to another part of town than it is, in the Internet world, to move your server from the Netherlands to a server in Russia,” says Mike Robinson, who oversees anti-piracy efforts for the Motion Picture Association of America. “There will always be criminals. Whether you’re talking about online piracy, whether you’re talking about physical piracy, whether you’re talking about assault, bank robberies or something else, there’s always a certain segment that will engage in that.”
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during which he and other techies would gather and dupe one another’s software. For all of his passion for technology, he said that he had never been particularly political until the summer of 2005, when the Swedish government began siding with the film and music industry in the copyright standoff with TPB by actively considering legislation that would more aggressive safeguard film and music copyrights. Falkvinge says that Stockholm’s cafes were buzzing about the law that entire summer. Swedes, he says, were concerned that so much of the culture was Rickard Falkvinge is a round-faced, being locked up by corporate monopolies, 40-year-old Swede with blue eyes and and worried that enforcing copyright pin-straight, rust-colored hair. He combs effectively would require a serious invait straight back from his forehead, but a sion of their privacy online. few strands always seem to remain askew. “Everybody took part in these discusHe is a talker, and when he lapses into sisions — and basically said that the polilence his fleshy lips and wide mouth, unticians were stupid,” Falkvinge recalls. accustomed to the break, appear poised “Everybody except the politicians. It was to jump right into another sentence. like they were completely unaware that He says he bought his first computer this discussion even existed.” when he was eight — in 1980 — and that So, on New Year’s Day of 2006, the he started his first software company technologist became an activist. He when he was 16. He was sharing files launched a new political party — the years before the World Wide Web even Pirate Party — online with the mission of existed. He reminiscences fondly about advocating the benefits of free informaweekends attending “copy parties,” held tion and reduced copyright protection in in schools and other public buildings, the Swedish parliament. Within a day or so, his site had already gotten a million page views. News of the party coursed through the light-speed channels of the
“ THE POLITICIANS WERE STUPID”
REUTERS/BOB STRONG
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Internet, attracting more followers. “I wasn’t surprised that there were people interested in this movement; I had done the math, and I knew that there were 1.2 million in Sweden sharing culture at the time, so I knew there was the potential for a significant movement,” Falkvinge recalls. “But I was surprised at how quickly people found out about us.” To qualify as an official political party in time for the Swedish elections the following fall, they needed to get 1500 signatures by the end of February. They thought they could save time by collecting them electronically, but election authorities informed them that they needed physical signatures. “It actually turned out to be a good thing,” Falkvinge says. “Because it gave us a reason to meet, organize and gel as a group.” Within days, Falkvinge’s group had registered as a political party. Meanwhile, The Pirate Bay was in trouble. Swedish officials raided its servers in the summer of 2006, shutting down the site. The founders restored service to The Pirate Bay using a backup three days later, but in 2007, the Swedish Prosecution Authority told the founders — and Carl Lundstrom, the heir to a cracker fortune, who had underwritten the site — that they were under investigation for copyright infringement.
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Reporters swarm a court clerk to obtain copies of the verdict in the 2009 Pirate Bay file-sharing trial. A Swedish court handed all four defendants a guilty verdict and sentenced each to a year in prison, in addition to a $3.58 million fine.
Lundstrom and the founders lawyered up and a trial got underway in early 2009. Jonas Nilsson, Neij’s attorney, said that the defense claimed that TPB’s founders couldn’t be held liable for copyright infringement because their site was a “passive, automatic service.” All it did, the defendants said, was tell users where to find information about downloading files (files which might or might not have been copyrighted). The court didn’t buy it. It sentenced Neij to a year in prison and demanded that he pay damages of 30 million Swedish kronor. Other defendants got similar sentences. Falkvinge, who attended the trial, said
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that the courtroom was packed with reporters eager to cover the biggest piracy trial in years and he encouraged members and supporters of the Pirate Party to protest the trial every day. The media seized on the protests as emblematic of young Swedes’ support of TPB. And the coverage reached a fever pitch when the court announced the guilty verdicts. “There was an outcry over this grossly unfair injustice; there were huge protests the next day in some large squares in Stockholm,” Falkvinge says. “We knew that that was our ticket to the European Parliament.” It was indeed. Sweden held elections for the European Parliament in June 2009, and the Pirate Party stunned po-
“ THERE WAS AN OUTCRY OVER THIS GROSSLY UNFAIR INJUSTICE.”
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litical analysts by snaring 7 percent of the vote, netting them two delegates in the European Parliament. The party’s success in Sweden also emboldened budding Pirate Parties overseas — most notably in Germany, where the local Pirate Party eventually made significant inroads in the parliaments of four different German states. There are now Pirate Parties at some stage of development in more than 50 countries. Though the movement hasn’t yet replicated its Swedish and German successes elsewhere, Falkvinge said he’s optimistic about its prospects in Finland, the Czech Republic and Switzerland in the near future. Pirate Parties now even exist in the United States. Despite obstacles for third parties domestically, the parties have presences in Massachusetts, New York and California. Tethering the entire movement is a goal of relaxing or eliminating what it sees as a “copyright monopoly” that hinders the spread of culture and information. They say that because file-sharing involves “copying,” not “taking,” it’s disingenuous to call it stealing — and, perhaps more significantly, that the benefits of free information for society outweigh the potential costs to the artist. “We’ve now made it possible to access and contribute to all of humanity’s
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AP PHOTO/FREDRIK PERSSON
Judge Tomas Norstrom answers questions in a press conference after presiding over the Pirate Bay trial in 2009. A defense lawyer said he would demand a retrial after Norstrom admitted he was a member of copyright protection organizations.
knowledge and culture, 24/7, by being a connected human being on the planet,” says Falkvinge. “That is such a huge leap ahead for civilization that if it means that some business models will cease to be successful, then, frankly, those businesses will have to start selling mustard, or doing something else to make money, because there’s no place for them.” The Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) and its allies in the content industry see the attacks on copyright as a threat to the livelihoods of those who work in the music and film industries. For them, piracy is nothing more than theft.
“What that analogy misses is that it takes hundreds of people to create a film,” MPAA spokesperson Kate Bedingfield says of Falkvinge’s point of view. “And when it’s stolen, and that product doesn’t come back to the people who created the film, that’s lost wages, that’s lost revenue.” Ted Shapiro, the MPAA’s general counsel in Europe added that he believes that the most ardent philosophical defenders of piracy have also profited off the practice. “It’s very clever,” he says. “It’s a cynical attempt to make this all about free speech and piracy… but I find that normally, these are only cynical moneymakers who want to trade on other people’s content, and they will use excuses like this in order to protect their sites.”
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JESSICA GOW/AFP/GETTY IMAGES
FULLY OPERATIONAL
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As the Pirate Party has evolved, the movement that informs it is no longer only focused on file-sharing; it has developed a much broader platform inspired by a belief in the power of sharing in all aspects of life and a great deal of faith in technology. “The Pirate Party started out as a protest movement against the copyright industry’s effort to clamp down on sharing, but we’re starting to see the same pattern occurring in the rest of politics,” says 22-year-old animator Zacqary Adam-Green, who is secondThe Pirate Bay’s first server, which was confiscated during a in-command in the New York branch of police raid in 2008, sits on display at the Technical Museum the Pirate Party. “So we’re also working in Stockholm. Nils Olander, the museum’s curator, purchased the server from police in early 2009. on increasing participation in democracy and introducing more peer-to-peer principles in the economy.” camp; she long worked as a book publisher Many Pirates, for example, believe and a translator, and saw piracy as a threat that information technology should be to the livelihoods of artists like herself. used to make government more transShe began to second-guess herself after parent; they suggest that the laws being writing a blog post attacking piracy, and considered in legislatures be posted onfinding the responses she got persuasive. line throughout the entire process of de- After researching the issue for the next bate and amendment. Most of them also two weeks she changed her position. believe that services like Wi-Fi, educa“At the time, everyone in publishtion and health care should be freely acing was very negative; they were alcessible, without corporate interference. ways complaining that new technology Falkvinge is now a roving ambassador was going to destroy culture,” she says. for the Pirate Party and his successor in “Once I started talking to the Pirates, I Sweden, Anna Troberg, runs the party itsaw that they were much more positive self. Troberg is a convert to the pro-piracy — they were trying to find new solutions using technology.” No matter how quickly the party spreads from here, though, and no mat-
PIRATE BOOTY
ter how much they eventually change intellectual property laws, it will be too slow for the founders of The Pirate Bay. Although they finally lost an appeal of their case in Sweden’s highest courts earlier this year, the founders had already fled the country. Authorities also haven’t been able to collect the fines levied against the founders, according to Shapiro. Meanwhile, Nilsson says he is working with the other defense lawyers to try to bring a case against the nation of Sweden to the European Union’s Court of Human Rights. “In the European Convention for Human Rights, there are certain rules, and certain articles, about the right to take,
“ THIS IS NOT A WAR THEY’RE GOING TO WIN THROUGH LEGAL BATTLES.”
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give and spread information,” Nilsson says. “It’s a very important rule.” Still, it won’t become clear until the end of this year, at the earliest, whether the Court will agree to hear the case. TPB remains fully operational. Its servers were moved out of Sweden, and are now presumed to be located in the Netherlands and Russia, outside the purview of Swedish law enforcement agents, according to Robinson, the MPAA’s head of antipiracy activities. And the TPB trials, with all of their attendant publicity, simply served to raise the site’s profile internationally. “When they first raided The Pirate Bay in 2006, it was pretty small. There were maybe 200,000 or 300,000 users,” says TorrentFreak’s Van Der Sar. “Today, there are about 5 million unique visitors a day.” That, as much as anything, illustrates the difficulty of enforcing copyright law in the digital era. Alexandre Montagu, a New York attorney who specializes in intellectual property, notes that copyright law was designed to protect book publishers, not electronic information. “This is not a war that they’re going to win through legal battles,” he says of big content companies like film and music studios. Montagu said that he thinks better an-
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FREDRIK PERSSON/AFP/GETTY IMAGES
The Pirate Bay’s supporters hold a demonstration in Stockholm after four men involved with the file-sharing site were found guilty and sentenced to a year in prison.
tipiracy technology, and a more forceful pursuit of paid online video on the part of the studios, would probably be more effective than all their lawsuits. But he also said that he thinks that the legal challenges presented by the Internet will eventually require a truly innovative solution, perhaps in the form of a new international convention on digital law. The Pirate Party agrees that intellectual property laws need to be rethought to accommodate the Internet, but it would go much further than Montagu by eliminating penalties for copyright in-
fringement within the home — if not altogether. After all, some party members say, the battle over copyrights and digital piracy is only a skirmish in a broader and inevitable war over how technology is continuing to change and challenge the foundations of the global economy. “When there is an abundance of anything, capitalism seizes up; it’s meant to allocate scarce resources,” argues Adam-Green. “In that sense, piracy is a dress rehearsal for the new economy. Because art and culture have become like tap water — it’s abundant, it’s infinite and, as it turns out, the traditional system has no idea what to do when that happens.”
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BOOKS
HUFFINGTON 07.15.12
Six Books In Search Of A Vacation
We may drag our bodies on vacation, but our brains also need their own escape from the every day. But what should you read, and during what part of your holiday? Here’s Huffington’s perfect recipe of sun, sea, sand and something to read that’s not email, PowerPoint slides or memos from the boss. — By Andrew Losowsky
Gone Girl by Gillian Flynn
While you wait for your flight to be called, you begin Gone Girl by Gillian Flynn (Crown). And you can’t put it down. You barely notice as you board the plane, hooked by Flynn’s dramatic psychological twists. The flight is a blur. You finish the book as the plane lands, and demand that your partner read it right away, so you can discuss the ending.
The Fault In Our Stars by John Green
You arrive at your hotel, unpack your bags and head to the beach with a copy of The Fault In Our Stars by John Green (Dutton Juvenile). The story is heartbreaking and hilarious, and as you drift in and out of a nap you wonder if the two people you can hear laughing together near the surf are characters Hazel and Augustus, playing together in the sand as they ponder the fundamental questions of life.
Birds of a Lesser Paradise by Megan Mayhew Bergman
Later that afternoon, you read a couple of short stories from Birds of a Lesser Paradise by Megan Mayhew Bergman (Scribner), a debut collection of nature-inspired stories that veer artfully between the tender and the fantastical. You imagine that the cries of the seagulls are in fact mating calls of rare birds nestling in the backwoods of North Carolina.
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BOOKS
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The Violinist’s Thumb And Other Lost Tales of Love, War and Genius As Written By Our Genetic Code by Sam Kean
You’re early for dinner, so you leaf through The Violinist’s Thumb... by Sam Kean (Little, Brown) over a cocktail. You learn that there’s enough DNA in your body to stretch to the moon, you now understand how talent is inherited, and you read something about cat feces that you simply can’t help but repeat at the table.
Supergods by Grant Morrison
After dinner, you get into bed and drift off to sleep with the new paperback edition of Supergods by Grant Morrison (Spiegel & Grau), a look at the real-life history of fictional superheroes by one of the comic book world’s greatest living writers. The hugely readable tale weaves Morrison’s own life story around an exploration of the role of myth in our culture. It’s like a much-needed bridge between geekdom and the rest of the world. You sleepily resolve to read more comic books.
Windeye by Brian Evenson
Finally, it was probably the rich desserts, or the cheese sauce, or maybe that final cocktail, but when you do eventually fall asleep, you find yourself drifting through half-familiar nightmares filled with tender distress. If they’re even half as intense and unforgettable as the tales in Brian Evenson’s Windeye (Coffee House Press), your next day on the beach will be spent avoiding dark corners, and firmly telling yourself that it was surely, hopefully, only a dream.
MUSIC
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CHELSEA LEYLAND
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The Sweet Sound Of Summer DJ CHELSEA LEYLAND IS a favorite among the fashion set (she’s spun for the likes of Valentino and Chanel) as well as the downtown New York scene. Here, the 24-year-old London-born actress shares with Huffington the songs she’s playing this summer at gigs spanning the globe from Montauk to the South of France.
JACK WHITE
THE DIXIE CUPS
STROKER ACE
THE DØ
TOO INSISTENT
AUDIOGROOVE I FOLLOW RIVERS
SAMMY DREAD & LEE VAN CLIFF
IKO IKO
The kind of song you’ll have on repeat from the first listen.
A classic that makes everyone happy, like a sing along for adults.
A sexy song that’s great for poolside listening.
This has a great indie feel, but be patient: the beat builds slowly.
A summer banger. High energy, and great to dance to.
MY PRINCESS / GET UP AND SKANK Reggae is made for summer.
DRICKY GRAHAM
ELLIE GOULDING
FRANÇOISE HARDY
M83
MIDNIGHT CITY
SBTRKT
WILDFIRE
METRIC
COLLECT CALL
The perfect summer hip hop track.
A fun summer anthem from an amazing British singer.
Sets a mellow, mysterious vibe.
This is the one song I never seem to get bored of.
This dubstep makes me homesick for England.
Be sure to check out the Adventure Club Dubstep Remix.
DAVID X PRUTTING/BFANYC.COM
I’M SHAKIN
SNAPBACKS & TATTOOS
LIGHTS
TAP ALBUM COVERS TO GO TO ITUNES TO PURCHASE
LOVAGE
LE TEMPS DE L’AMOUR
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eWISE
BY KATY HALL
An acquaintance of mine is plagiarizing my status updates on Facebook. I was willing to give her the benefit of the doubt the first time, but last week it happened again (with an old Liz Phair lyric). We have mutual friends and it’s weird. Should I confront her? — Flattered?, Austin
Q
First you should confront the sad eighth grader inside of you and tell her things will get better. Broadcasting your angst only makes it worse! Then go like the status updates your friend copied. That should embarrass her into deleting them or at least steer her toward someone else next time she can’t find the words to convey her feelings to the masses. Also delete your own lyrical status updates. You are the original plagiarizer — come up with something more pre-
A
ILLUSTRATION BY JASON SCHNEIDER
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cise to say about yourself and save the faux introspection for Tumblr. As for your friend and other uninspired attention seekers, there is an app that generates mildly clever status updates intended for users to pass off as their own. It’s called Status Shuffle, and for 99 cents, musings such as “Hmm. Halo or horns today?” can be yours, or at least appear to be.
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eWISE
I recently attended the wedding of a former best friend — we’ve remained friends but have grown apart over the years. The night before the wedding, I saw photos of several former close friends at the rehearsal dinner on Instagram. I “liked” them and commented on how great everyone looked to show support. The bridal party thought I was mocking them and was cold to me at the wedding. Was I in the wrong? — Supportive ex-best friend, N.Y.C.
FROM TOP: VIRGINIA SHERWOOD/NBC/NBCU PHOTO BANK VIA GETTY IMAGES; ROBIN MARCHANT/GETTY IMAGES; GUILAN BOLISAY; WIREIMAGE
Q
Sounds like you didn’t miss A out on much if your Instagram activity was the takeaway from the rehearsal dinner. As the retaliation suggested above shows, likes can mean the opposite. Your friend may have already felt awkward about not including you, and seeing you following the festivities in real time could have startled him — especially if he imagined you alone at your computer Friday night, while you were just using Instagram on your phone to document your own sparkling life. You know you weren’t in the wrong. Try not to care they think you were and be glad you no longer have much in common with people who sound alarms over their photos being admired. Have a question about electronic etiquette? Email ewise@huffingtonpost.com.
ENOUGH ALREADY
totally over. Things we’re
Exclamation points “America’s Got Talent” Blake Lively playing anyone other than Serena van der Woodsen Haute hot dogs — whatever happened to ketchup and mustard? Any headline with the word “TomKat” Parasols Straight men in tank tops Katy Perry
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GREATEST PERSON OF THE WEEK
Vicky Joseph
Mothers’ Biggest Helper VICKY JOSEPH SAYS she was “haunted” by her mother’s experience surviving the Holocaust. The 56-year-old Naperville, Illinois mother of two was so moved by her mother’s experience — and by the young woman who risked her life to protect her — that she has dedicated her life to helping others. Were it not for the help of Jeanne Dusorren, who recently turned 91, Joseph’s mother Evelyn Markell, now 77, might have died. Risking death or torture at the hands of the Nazis, Dusorren hid Markell and her family in the Netherlands
PHOTOGRAPH BY JIM LUNING
BY MARY ANN LOPEZ
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GREATEST PERSON OF THE WEEK
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until they were safely smuggled out of the country. “Without this lady who hid my mom from the Nazis, I wouldn’t be here, my kids wouldn’t be here,” she said. “There was always a belief that you give back. You have a concern for your neighbor.” The idea of a mother being unable to provide for her children — and the lasting gratitude Joseph feels towards Dusorren — inspired her to launch Families Helping Families, a Naperville-based nonprofit that assists single-parent families in need. VICKY’S FIRST FAMILY Seventeen years ago, Joseph had idea: she would “adopt” a struggling family and help pay their rent for a year. She contacted Bridge Communities, and with the help of neighbors, she raised about $8,000 — not enough for a full year of housing, but enough to start making things easier for the family. Donations soon came in from churches, schools and scouting organizations. “The community is so generous,” Joseph said. “If there is a need, they respond.” And as donations continued to
There was always a belief that you give back.” pour in, Families Helping Families was born. HOW JOSEPH HELPS FAMILIES Families Helping Families provides temporary housing, mentoring and supportive services for families in need. In its first two years, the organization provided services for four families and rented apartments on the open
A group of children who receive assistance from Joseph’s foundation play outside in May.
Exit market. Now, the organization helps up to ten families at a time. Much of Families Helping Families’ money helps pay clients’ utility bills, but they also account for any social services the families may receive. Financial literacy and responsibility — as well as discipline — are at the heart of the program. Many of Joseph’s clients have never had a bank account, and don’t realize the importance of having a relationship with a banking institution. She’s partnered with a local credit union, which developed a financial training program for the nonprofit’s clients, she said. Mothers accepted into the program also meet with employment directors and are given access to seminars on child-rearing and nutrition. Their children receive tutoring services as well. The typical family will receive assistance for about two years, and Joseph’s ultimate goal is to make each family self-sufficient. But clients’ goals vary: while one mother may set out for a GED, others have strived for bachelors degrees. One client worked at a meatpacking plant when she started with Families Helping Families; through the nonprofit, she earned her GED and was hired by an insurance agency,
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where she still works ten years later. Some clients have gone on to buy homes, earn college degrees and even send their children to college. “IT TAKES A VILLAGE” Joseph recently had an emotional (but happy) farewell breakfast with a client who was moving out after three years in the program. “You go through all of these life experiences with people, it really
You go through all these life experiences with people, it really changes who you are. It’s made me a fearless advocate.” changes who you are,” she says. “It’s made me a fearless advocate. Because at the beginning, I might have been hesitant or too shy to ask for what I need for a client.” The experience is transformative for the families too. Finding so many people who are willing to help when so many people have let them down in the past can be overwhelming, she said. “I remember sitting around the kitchen table with a client, Nya… she said, ‘I get it. You just care about me. You don’t want any-
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HUFFINGTON 07.15.12
GREATEST PERSON OF THE WEEK
I wake up grateful and go to bed grateful.”
thing from me except for me to be what I want to be.’ It was quite a moment,” Joseph says. “I wake up grateful and go to bed grateful,” she added, reflecting on how the nonprofit has changed her life. Joseph, who has been asked to speak before churches and local groups, said her community has always been responsive and proactive about helping her organization and its clients. Local
dentists provide services for all of the clients, for instance, while volunteers mentor the families and business owners routinely offer their services. “I think they like the idea that our program really helps to change a family’s future,” Joseph says. “When people tell me they want to volunteer I ask them do you want to help a lot of people a little or a few people a lot?” “It takes a village,” she added. “It may be a worn, trite phrase, but we have quite a village in Naperville.”
Many in the Naperville community participated in the foundation’s Family Fun Walk in May.
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SLATER’S 50/50 (BURGER); AP PHOTO/MANUEL BALCE CENETA (YOUNG); SHUTTERSTOCK (SIPPY CUP); NOEL CALINGASAN (SUBWAY)
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HUFFINGTON 07.15.12
Utah Fourth Of July Parade Features CrotchGrabbing Obama, “Obama Farewell Tour” Float
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GOP Congressman Answers Voter Question On Raising Minimum Wage: ‘Get A Job’
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SOCAL BURGER CHAIN DEBUTS BURGER MADE OF 100% GROUND BACON... AND IT’S CALLED THE “‘MERICA BURGER”
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Mom Caught Pouring Beer Into 2-Year-Old’s Sippy Cup... At A Restaurant!
50-Something Couple Arrested, Spend 23 Hours In Jail, For Dancing On NYC Subway Platform
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GETTY IMAGES (FLIGHT ATTENDANT); AP PHOTO/LM OTERO (NUGENT); SHUTTERSTOCK (BIBLE); ALAMY (JUDGE); AP PHOTO/JULIE JACOBSON (50 CENT)
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TFU
Flight Attendant Freaks Out, Causes Mass Panic... Over Broken TV
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Ted Nugent: “I’m Beginning To Wonder If It Would Have Been Best Had The South Won The Civil War”
Man Cleared Of Rape In Sweden Because Victim Was Transgender
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South Carolina Judge Orders Drunk Driver To Read The Bible As Part Of Her Sentence
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50 CENT MOCKS AUTISM, “SPECIAL ED KIDS” ON TWITTER
Editor-in-Chief:
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