DIGITAL LOVE | EDWARD ALBEE | SEXY BEASTS
OCTOBER 14, 2012
THE COST OF WAR Even The Most Well Meaning Efforts in AFGHANISTAN Have Failed
10.14.12 #18 CONTENTS
Enter POINTERS: Romney vs. Big Bird, Sandusky Sentenced, Sad DeVito News MOVING IMAGE DATA: Fewer Wedding Bells Ring Q&A: Adonal Foyle
THE LONG AND WINDING ROADS BY JOSHUA HERSH
Voices JEFF SORENSEN: Must-Flee Fall TV FRANK H. WU: I Should Have Paid Attention in Chinese School GILLIAN FREW: The Rise of the Renaissance Reporter QUOTED
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BORDER CROSSING
BY SUCHITRA VIJAYAN
THEATER: Who’s Afraid of Edward Albee? TV: The Brains Behind Everyone’s Favorite Zombie Show THE GREATEST PERSON OF THE WEEK: Lynda Meeks TFU
YOU HAD ME @ LOL
BY BIANCA BOSKER
FROM THE EDITOR: Hearts, Minds and Failures ON THE COVER: Photo-Illustration
for Huffington by Justin Metz
LETTER FROM THE EDITOR
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Hearts, Minds and Failures ROM AFGHANISTAN, Joshua Hersh puts the spotlight in this issue on the war efforts we rarely hear about— the American efforts to build trust among the people. These are the “hearts and minds” development projects bringing clean water, electricity, roads, hospitals and schools to the people under the assumption, as Joshua puts it, that “If you build it, goodwill will come.” Visiting a military base in Lash-
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kar Gah, he encounters deep frustration—a sense that is reflected in the latest research on the effectiveness of nation-building in Afghanistan. Hundreds of miles of new highways now connect Afghanistan’s major cities; life expectancy has risen while infant mortality rates have dropped; and millions of girls attend brand new schools across the country. Yet instead of creating goodwill and stability, the “quick-impact projects”—long considered essential to counterinsurgency—are
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LETTER FROM THE EDITOR
creating the opposite. Seemingly innocuous decisions have inflamed tribal rivalries, reflecting the harsh reality that, as one former development worker puts it, “In these zero-sum societies, one person’s gain is someone else’s loss.” All politics is local, but all local development is also political. Joshua speaks with Andrew Wilder, who spent several years leading a team of researchers through Afghanistan trying to speak directly with Afghans and tribal leaders to gauge their responses to development projects. “The problem wasn’t the tactics, it was that the entire nationbuilding strategy was ineffective,” Joshua writes. And while the failure is not discussed in polite political society, it is, as Joshua puts it, “like discovering, ten years too late, that the West had been firing blanks.” Elsewhere in the issue, Bianca Bosker writes about the world of online dating that lies beyond the more conventional matchmaking sites like Match.com and OkCupid. Bianca spotlights the ways sites from Facebook and Yelp to Nerve and Turntable are bring-
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ing people together to “share what they love to do, not who they want to fall in love with.” Through the stories of actual couples who met online—like Rayco García and Nuria Sendra, a Spanish couple now living together thanks to an Instagram photo—BiAll anca shows that the politics is universe of online local, but dating is expanding, all local with people meetdevelopment ing and bonding is also over everything from political.” retweets to witty Chinese restaurant reviews. The stories illustrate yet another step in the direction of a more grown-up Internet, where the qualities we care about most offline are increasingly reflected in our experiences online—less of a speed dating exercise, more of a cocktail party, bonding over shared interests. As one young woman puts it, “you’re not editing yourself as much… You’re just being you.”
ARIANNA
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AP PHOTO/MATT SAYLES
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BIG BIRD STARS IN NEW OBAMA AD
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Nearly a week after President Obama’s lackluster performance in the first presidential debate, his campaign came out with an ad attacking Mitt Romney’s threat to cut funding to PBS—and put Big Bird’s future in jeopardy. “Big, yellow, a menace to our economy. Mitt Romney knows it’s not Wall Street you have to worry about it, it’s Sesame Street,” the narrator says. Obama has evoked Big Bird in several speeches since the debate. “Governor Romney plans to let Wall Street run wild again, but he’s bringing the hammer down on Sesame Street,” he said at a campaign event over the weekend.
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SANDUSKY MAINTAINS INNOCENCE AHEAD OF SENTENCING
Jerry Sandusky was sentenced Tuesday to 30-60 years in prison for sexually abusing young boys, but he claimed innocence up until the end. “My wife has been my only sex partner and that was after marriage,” he said in a monologue that aired Monday. The former Penn State assistant football coach, 68, has been found guilty of 45 counts of child sexual abuse and will likely die in prison.
SAM CHAMPION GETS ENGAGED
FROM TOP: PATRICK SMITH/GETTY IMAGES; AP PHOTO/ABC, IDA MAE ASTUTE; KEVIN WINTER/GETTY IMAGES
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Good Morning America weather anchor Sam Champion will marry his longtime boyfriend, Rubem Robierb, later this year. “I’ve never been happier to share a bit of personal news!!” he tweeted, and later added that it was Robierb who popped the question. According to the New York Times, this announcement was the first time Champion has publicly addressed his sexuality.
IT’S OVER FOR DEVITO AND PERLMAN One of Hollywood’s most enduring couples is calling it quits. Danny DeVito and Rhea Perlman have separated after 30 years of marriage, their rep confirmed to Entertainment Tonight. The couple met in 1970 when Perlman went to see a friend perform in the Broadway play The Shrinking Bride and fell for Devito. In 1983, she told People that he “was a lot more fun and a lot more sexy” than other men she had dated. They have three adult children together.
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POINTERS
JORAN VAN DER SLOOT TO FATHER CHILD BEHIND BARS?
The Dutch man serving a 28-year sentence for killing a Peruvian woman and suspected of killing American Natalee Holloway says he has impregnated a woman in prison. Joran van der Sloot told Dutch newspaper De Telegraaf that “a test has proved” a woman identified as “Leidi” is pregnant with his child. His lawyer says the woman told him she is not pregnant. Van der Sloot, who is charged with trying to extort $250,000 from the Holloway family in return for bogus information about Natalee’s death, is not known for his honesty.
STACEY DASH MAKES UNPOPULAR ENDORSEMENT
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Clueless star Stacey Dash wants everyone to know she is a Mitt Romney supporter. “Vote for Romney. The only choice for your future,” the 46-yearold actress tweeted along with a photo of herself in a revealing red swimsuit. Critics were quick to hit back, and some went racial. Dash stood her ground. “My humble opinion... EVERYONE is entitled to one,” she tweeted.
THAT’S VIRAL TEXAS MOM GLUED HER DAUGHTER’S HANDS TO A WALL, FACES LIFE IN PRISON
A selection of the week’s most talked-about stories. HEADLINES TO VIEW FULL STORIES
SEXIEST. WOMAN. ALIVE.
SCOTT WIENER WANTS TO BAN PUBIC NUDITY IN SAN FRAN
THE RUMBLE IN THE AIRCONDITIONED AUDITORIUM
THE SEX TAPE THAT NO ONE REAL EVER ASKED FOR
Enter Horses When photographer JILL GREENBERG began this project, she set out to study the animals’ great physiques—and explore gender identities. Greenberg photographed the horses in makeshift studios, capturing their masculine strength, then digitally hand-painted the photos with traditionally feminine colors. We are pleased to share this sneak peek of images from her upcoming book Horses with you here.
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DATA
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Fewer Wedding Bells Ring U.S. marriage rates have declined for half a century — “through good economic times and bad,” the Pew Research Center notes. Recent Census Bureau figures continue to show that slow, steady drop over the past decade. Marital status can affect the way people vote in presidential races. In recent elections, married people have broken for the Republican while the unmarried favored the Democrat — and summer polling showed Romney leading among married voters. — Elizabeth Engdahl
GERRY YARDY / ALAMY, SHUTTERSTOCK
Source: U.S. Census Bureau, Current Population Survey, Annual Social and Economic Supplements
TAP THE YEARS 2000 AGE 18+
2011
2000 AGE 65+ 2011
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Q&A
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Adonal Foyle Made All His Teammates Vote
PHOTOGRAPHS BY GABRIELA HASBUN
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DONAL FOYLE HASN’T FOLLOWED the typical trajectory of a professional athlete. Adopted at age 15 by two professors from Colgate University in upstate New York, the Caribbean native went on to play 12 seasons in the NBA. Off the court, he’s dedicated his time to a decidedly atypical passion for a sports star—campaign finance reform. He founded Democracy Matters, a student activist group aimed at removing money from politics and promoting voter awareness. Foyle spoke with Huffington about his work, the Supreme Court’s Citizens United ruling and why he thinks voters should be outraged. —Mollie Reilly
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Foyle in his home in Orinda, California.
Enter You grew up on Canouan, a tiny island in Saint Vincent and the Grenadines. How did you become interested in American politics? Growing up in the Caribbean, politics is very immediate. When you live on a small island that’s only 500 people, it doesn’t take the law a long time to get down to you, the people on the ground, so I was always aware of politics. If you go back to the islands, from the person who’s driving the the taxi cab to the person fishing in the sea, they all are, banana farmers, they’re all aware of politics. And then, when you come to the United States and you get the opportunity to learn with people who have been involved in the civil rights movements, like Jay and Joan Mandle, who became my legal guardians—I knew it was a perfect union in many ways. Where did the idea for Democracy Matters come from? As I became more familiar with the idea of money in politics, I thought, why would young people get involved in politics when you have to buy $5,000-a-plate dinners to get close to politicians? When you have to raise money for them in order to get them to listen to you? Young people don’t have money to
Q&A
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give to politicians. We’re disenfranchised to a very large degree. This is the first presidential election since the Citizens United ruling, which allowed corporations to donate unlimited amounts to third-party groups. How has the rise of super PACs changed the game? I was disgusted with the Citizens United decision, because at its very nature, you’re giving corporations personhood and
The guys in the NBA, and at almost every level of professional sports, they’re very aware of politics.” giving them the opportunity to do unprecedented things. There’s no mechanism in place to hold people accountable. So I think what’s frustrating with Citizens United is that it unleashed even more money in a system that was already very corrupt and polluted in many ways. What sort of solution are you proposing? The first thing you have to do is educate people to get outraged when you see the kind of money that has been spent. People are
JESSE D. GARRABRANT/NBAE VIA GETTY IMAGES
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desensitized to the issue of money in politics, but we have to get our population so disgusted by it. The second thing is, it matters who gets elected to office—who appoints the judges, what their ideas are on what is fit and important in a democracy. So we have to get involved in politics so that we can elect people who can change the rules at the highest level.
Q&A
Did you ever try to get your NBA teammates involved in politics? Absolutely (laughs). I made sure they all were registered to vote in the different states and made sure they got their absentee ballots. The guys in the NBA, and at almost every level of professional sports, they’re very aware of politics. They know what’s going on. More than ever, they want to get involved. But they’re afraid of the repercussions of getting involved. So when they get the opportunity to do anything, they very much jump at it.
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Keyon Dooling of the New Jersey Nets shoots against Adonal Foyle of the Orlando Magic in 2009.
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JEFF SORENSEN
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Must-Flee Fall TV EACH YEAR, the networks vie for the viewers with a bevy of new series. Most of these fail, but a couple succeed and stay on television for at least a few years. I decided to torture myself and give many of the new pilots this year a shot, so you don’t have to.
NBC’S REVOLUTION The previews for this series intrigued me from the start. It portrays the world 15 years after all power has shut off. And the pilot has the director of Iron Man, Jon Favreau, so I was getting pretty geeked for the show to premiere. Sadly, ten minutes into it I realized it was absolutely terrible. The power just inexplicably shuts off and it fast-forwards 15 years to a future where everyone looks exactly the same, and the kids
ILLUSTRATION BY JESSE LEFKOWITZ
have grown-up into super models with perfect makeup, hair and clothing. Guns are apparently scarce because everyone uses machetes or bows and arrows. There’s a point where one guy kills 30 odd people with a machete. How did he do this? He was in the Marines. I guess I missed the fencing classes in boot camp. There is also a moment where a man running gets hit in the chest with an arrow.
Jeff Sorensen is the author of Zombies Ruined My Weekend
Voices You’d expect him to just fall down, but instead he flies backwards as if a bus has hit him. When this show is on you should just avoid the television and garden—or unplug your television and stare at your reflection in the screen. It’s more interesting.
CBS’S ELEMENTARY This show is for kids in elementary school. Get it? See what I did there? Instead of watching this mess of a series, you should switch over to the BBC’s brilliant Sherlock. Each episode is 90 minutes, and each is better than that Robert Downey Jr. movie series. I mean, really? Lucy Liu as Watson? You don’t have to be Sherlock to deduce that this show fails.
ABC’S LAST RESORT A U.S. nuclear submarine gets an order from the government through an alternative communication channel to nuke Pakistan. They question the order and can you guess what happens next? Pizza party! No, kidding, they get attacked by their own ships. They figure their last resort is to go to a resort and hole up there. I know, it sounds extremely stupid,
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but I enjoyed it. I thought a few parts were too inane to be real, but I asked a Navy buddy and he said it was accurate, such as one scene where the ship crosses the equator and everyone starts partying. Most ridiculous thing ever? It’s apparently called a “Shellback Celebration.”
NBC’S THE NEW NORMAL I didn’t mind this one because it was pretty realistic. It’s Modern Family if Modern Family wasn’t so safe. The thing This is is, there are closedthe worst show minded people who don’t accept gay peo- I have ever seen, and I’m ple, and especially counting the gay people with kids. time I watched a This show isn’t for VHS tape of me them. It shows that from a school there are people out play when I there like that, and was eleven.” doesn’t shy away from it like Modern Family. It’s also very funny, with a dark humor that I can appreciate. In fact, risky shows are almost always more fun, they just don’t win many awards because the voters are 900 years old.
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JEFF SORENSEN
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CBS’S VEGAS Dennis Quaid is the man, but this show is just plain boring. Old people will love it because old people love everything on CBS. It’s the old people channel. I gave this a shot mainly because of Quaid, but it lost me multiple times during the pilot. It’s like Justified if Justified were bland, watered down and poorly written. If you want to see an amazing Western-style show, just watch Justified.
JUSTIN LUBIN/NBC/NBCU PHOTO BANK VIA GETTY IMAGES
ABC’S THE NEIGHBORS I honestly had no idea what this show was about. I saw it on my OnDemand and turned it on. It caught me off guard to say the least (a family moves into a neighborhood occupied by aliens with famous people’s names). I finished the episode and I still am not sure what happened. I laughed, but it was just odd. I love odd, but this was really out there. It was like a single-camera version of 3rd Rock from the Sun, and everyone in the neighborhood was the clueless squinty-eyed one.
NBC’S GO ON Everyone loves Matthew Perry and this series lets him do his Chandler act, but it’s only kind of
funny. I’d only watch it again if I’m really bored, the remote is really far, I’m feeling really lazy, and it comes on NBC while I’m sitting there. Not a ringing endorsement, but it is what it is.
NBC’S GUYS WITH KIDS This isn’t hyperbole, this is the worst show I have ever seen, and I’m counting the time I watched a VHS tape of me from a school play when I was eleven. This series shouldn’t just be cancelled; the people who wrote it should go to jail. That’s it, folks. As a result of this exercise, I’ve decided to abandon watching anything on the top networks. AMC, FX, and the pay channels have the best series by far.
Matthew Perry returns to the small screen in Go On.
FRANK H. WU
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I Should Have Paid Attention in Chinese School HEN I TAUGHT IN CHINA a few years ago, I went to a unique school founded by the most prestigious university in that nation to train lawyers. It was an extraordinary institution because it followed the American Juris Doctor program and was taught entirely in English. The Chinese were doing what we have urged them to do, which is to adopt the rule of law (which we take for granted means Anglo-American common law). An American adoption of a comparable Chinese institution would be difficult to imagine. Âś At the end of the term, my students organized a trip to ILLUSTRATION BY JESSE LEFKOWITZ
Frank H. Wu is Chancellor and Dean of UC Hastings College of the Law
Voices the local beach with us professors as special guests. Once we were there, after the barbecue, they wanted to build a fire near the water and gather to play games and sing songs. But although they knew an assortment of Western pop tunes and were mourning the passing of Michael Jackson, what they wanted the group to belt out under the stars were patriotic Chinese Communist Party songs. Needless to say, I did not know even a single line. I gave them several reasons for why I would have to pass up their invitation, but first and foremost, I’m from Detroit. That’s the wrong part of the world to be learning patriotic Chinese songs. And my family was on the other side of the Communist Revolution. If I knew any patriotic Chinese songs, they probably would not be Communist Party songs. In the weeks I spent with them, my students overcame their curiosity—and their confusion. One of them eventually said, “You’re American. You just look Chinese.” In their conception, you had to be one or the other. Unlike in Taiwan or Hong Kong, where everyone
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has a cousin or two in the United States, Australia or Canada, most mainland Chinese have not encountered someone who claims to be both Chinese and American. In their newfound nationalism, that is an absurd assertion. There is no distinction between culture and politics. To be Chinese is to be Chinese through and through. Sometimes my friends who are not of Asian descent say to me, “If China beats the United States, you’ll be all set.” It’s just the opposite. If China becomes the dominant superpower and the United States is relegated to secondary status, then it means every decision One my family has made of them for three generations eventually turns out to be wrong. said, ‘You’re My grandparents fled American. China for Taiwan, my You just look parents emigrated Chinese.’” from Taiwan to America and I assimilated as best as I could. I’ve placed almost all of my bets on my homeland. I’d have a slight advantage, I suppose, in recognizing what to order at dim sum. Otherwise, an ascendant China means I would have to scramble
Voices to undo the choices I made when I was a child. They could hardly be called “choices.” Whenever I visit China, I realize my mother was right: I should have paid attention in Chinese school. Saturday mornings would have been better spent practicing the stroke order of complex ideograms, not watching cartoons on television, though I still remember the theme song of Hong Kong Phoeey, the crime fighting dog. Despite what I might like to think, I have the same prejudices as anyone else. When I meet an Asian American from Texas or the Deep South who has a twang or a drawl, I too am dumbfounded for a moment. I want to ask them how they ended up that way. They of course are perfectly normal from their own perspective. It’s not as if they wanted to be unusual to the rest of the world. They sound exactly like the people they grew up around even if they don’t quite look like them. The common observation is that the Chinese know much more about us than we know about them. As the stereotype would have it, my students in fact worked extraordinarily hard by our standards. One was reading economist Adam
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Smith’s Theory of Moral Sentiments, in English, for fun. But they also were like their peers here. Late into the night they watched the television show Prison Break, on what I assume were pirated DVDs, and they were astonished at my lack of interest in the show. They did not believe my assurances that life in the States did not resemble any of the shows of which they had become fans. I finally asked one The of them if he could fly common through the air. observation He replied, not is that the sure of my intention, Chinese know “No...” much more I then explained about us that many of us on than we know this side of the Paabout them.” cific Ocean grow up watching kung fu movies depicting Asians flying through the air. Then he understood my point. Nonetheless, whether through great thinkers of the past or prime time hits, the Chinese are becoming multicultural in spite of their nationalism. We should not be surprised when they expect to contribute as equals to the development of “rule of law.”
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GILLIAN FREW
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The Rise of the Renaissance Reporter THE PUBLISHING WORLD is facing an identity crisis. Pulitzer Prizewinning authors are sheepishly promoting their e-books on late night TV; The New York Times is paying veteran journalists to tweet; independent bookstores are shutting their doors at an alarming rate. Does all of this signal the demise of the professional writer? Out of work screenwriters, poets and copywriters might say yes. I say no, but there’s a catch. There will always be demand for good writers. The thing is, just like any successful company, today’s writers need to learn to diversify. For university professors, the old saying is “publish or perish.” For freelancers, staff reporters and bloggers, it might as well be “produce or perish.” Because with self-publishing, blogging and
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the advent of Amazon, production has taken on a whole new meaning, and it’s no longer viable to be a writer without the web. Online, content is king. Unlike with print, there’s no limit to how much information can be conveyed in a few simple keystrokes and disseminated through social media. Robbery in progress? No need to wait for the morning edition; the internet is awake 24/7. Your story, no matter the scope, can link to anywhere on the web
Gillian Frew is a freelance writer
Voices and reach almost anyone in the world. Readers can instantly respond to anything they like or (more likely) dislike. And there’s no “Continued on page A12.” This constant demand for fresh content, combined with staggering budget cuts at dailies and other print publications has given rise to the demand for the renaissance reporter: a journalist who not only reports the news, but also photographs it, uploads it, tweets it and maybe even posts some video footage for good measure. In other words, if Earnest Hemingway reapplied for that reporting job at The Kansas City Star in 2012, odds are he wouldn’t get it. The unfortunate truth is that publications can simply no longer afford to hire new (young) staff members to do just one thing, even if they do that thing really well. Nowadays, the ability to multitask is a prerequisite for almost any new job in the industry. So even if you want to get hired as a writer, you shouldn’t freeze up at the sight of a Nikon DSLR or an InDesign layout. The same goes for photographers, graphic designers and webmasters. If writers need to learn
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how to brave technology and produce proficient visuals on a deadline, artists and techies should learn the nuts and bolts of writing. In short, everybody needs to acquire new skills. To survive in today’s publishing If Ernest landscape, we as Hemingway media professionals reapplied for need to learn to help that reporting each other. An overgig at The worked web manager Kansas City may think that trainStar in 2012, ing technophobic odds are he writers to upload wouldn’t their own stories and get it.” photos is a waste of time. But just think how much time that web manager will save in the future if writers are empowered to post, edit and publish all their own content without the middleman. Not every member of the publishing industry needs to be a multimedia wizard and a master of web and print. What we do need is a shared vocabulary, and, more importantly, shared proficiency. To that end, teaching writers what a CMS does or aggregators about the mechanics of a feature story is a step in the right direction.
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“ If people are refraining from having kids because of a failing economy, how is that a bad thing? If you can barely feed yourself, why take on another mouth to feed? ... it shows a trend towards sensible decision making.”
CLOCKWISE FROM TOP LEFT: KEVIN WINTER/GETTY IMAGES; GETTY IMAGES; TOM WILLIAMS/CQ ROLL CALL/GETTY IMAGES; WILLIAM B. PLOWMAN/NBC/NBCU PHOTO BANK VIA GETTY IMAGES
— HuffPost commenter JLM226
“ When I kiss someone on camera, it’s more than a breath mint. I do the whole teeth-brushing thing. I want to give 100 percent.” — Mindy Kaling
to People
“ I told you they’d get it under eight percent—they did!” — Rick Santelli to CNBC’s
Squawk Box just minutes after the unemployment rate was announced
on the birth rate in the U.S. declining for the fourth year in a row
“ It is strange to me that the question hasn’t been asked more often to members of the Republican Party.”
— HuffPost commenter doublediamond
on Paul Ryan stopping an interview after a “strange” question relating tax cuts to gun violence
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“ Part of my moderator mission was to stay out of the way of the flow and I had no problems with doing so. My only real personal frustration was discovering that ninety minutes was not enough time in that more open format to cover every issue that deserved attention.”
— Jim Lehrer
“ The press just doesn’t know how to handle flat-out untruths.”
— Paul Krugman to This Week about the media’s
failure to fact-check Romney after the first debate
“Now there is a business that needs to be shrunk down so it can be drowned in a bathtub or a thimble. — HuffPost commenter MSaxe on the oil industry
“ At least Chavez had the patriotism to serve in his country’s military. Mitt hid in France when his country needed him most.”
— HuffPost commenter ICanoeCanEwe
10.14.12 #18 FEATURES
THE LONG AND WINDING ROADS BORDER CROSSING YOU HAD ME @ LOL PHOTOGRAPH BY SUCHITRA VIJAYAN
What Have We Won in Afghanistan?
SHAH MARAI/AFP/GETTYIMAGES
BY JOSHUA HERSH | ILLUSTRATION BY JUSTIN METZ
N LATE 2008, ANDREW WILDER set out on a hunt for answers in Afghanistan. For years, Wilder, a former development worker who had recently settled into a post at Tufts University, had watched with dismay as billions of American assistance dollars poured into programs in Afghanistan designed to help win “hearts and minds,” and bring stability to the troubled nation. New highways stretched hundreds of miles across the country, gleaming hospitals and schools sprang up in remote villages and just about everyone seemed to have a cell phone. The “hearts and minds” strategy, known as counterinsurgency, or COIN, called for a delicate balance of military pressures and civil incentives: military action against the enemy, combined with generous programs designed to win over the gratitude and trust of the people. If U.S. forces could free volatile regions from the Taliban’s grasp, policy-
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makers in Washington believed, then, together with development experts, they could earn the support of local Afghans by keeping them safe and building a lasting economy and reliable government institutions. But something wasn’t working. Afghanistan remained as volatile as ever. President Hamid Karzai’s government was in disarray, the nascent Afghan army and police force continued to buckle under the weight of their responsibilities, and a resurgent Taliban attacked seemingly at will. Within Washington policy circles, it had become clear that development plans had not done their part to improve stability, but planners couldn’t agree on what to change. Some thought the projects had to get bigger and bolder. Others, including many in the U.S. military, believed the answer lay in more discreet efforts — improving water and electricity reliability, or empowering ground-level commanders to dispense funds on smaller initiatives. Through $25,000 “quick-impact projects,” like providing work for militaryaged males digging irrigation canals, the thinking went, money could be deployed “as a weapons system,” in the words of one 2009 U.S. commanders manual. Wilder led a small team of other researchers as they fanned out across the country over several years, inspecting de-
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velopment projects in five provinces and conducting long, one-on-one meetings with tribal leaders. They looked at survey responses and analyzed data from military and civilian officials on the ground. It was “a debate which had become quite polemic,” said Stuart Gordon, a British researcher who worked with Wilder on part of the study. “Development practitioners didn’t like the military being involved in the quick-impact projects, and the military thought the development community had failed to deliver, and lives were being lost as a consequence.” Gordon and Wilder had set out for Afghanistan with a simple goal, Gordon said. “We just wanted to provide some evidence.” Their conclusions were as stark as they were unsettling: The entire strategy — whether on a grand scale or more intimate — was flawed. “Rather than generating good will and positive perceptions,” Wilder wrote with the Tufts Professor Paul Fishstein in the final report, which was published in January of this year, the development projects “were consistently described negatively by Afghans.” The researchers had found no evidence that the development projects — the big ones or the little ones, the schools or the canals — were creating the goodwill that the counterinsurgency strategy required. In some cases they actually seemed to
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PAULA BRONSTEIN /GETTY IMAGES
U.S. special envoy Richard Holbrooke, right, stands next to U.S. General Stanley McChrystal, head of the U.S. and NATO forces in Afghanistan, before the arrival of Hillary Clinton in Kabul in 2009.
leave the locals more disenchanted. “If anything surprised me, it was the extent to which, especially in the south, our resources were seen to be creating the distance between the people and the government,” Wilder said, during an interview at his new office at the U.S. Institute of Peace, a congressionally funded think tank that promotes non-violent conflict resolution. “I just thought, maybe we should be spending less money.” For years, military leaders and policymakers in Washington had been operating under the assumption that reconstruction was an essential part of
the counterinsurgency strategy in Afghanistan, and if they could just get the projects right, stability would soon follow. So far, the U.S. has plowed nearly $90 billion into the effort — including spending on infrastructure, combating narcotics and training Afghan security forces — and spent hundreds of billions more on warfighting. There’s no doubt that the people of Afghanistan harbor deep resentment toward some actions of the American military, such as the night raids and unlawful detentions that broke apart families and the drone and airstrikes that killed civilians. “Airstrikes have long been one of the biggest grievances of the Afghan public,” says Erica Gaston,
17,644
The number of U.S. service members wounded in action since the start of the Afghanistan war [SOURCE: NATIONAL PRIORITIES PROJECT]
a longtime Afghanistan researcher. But in Wilder’s eyes, it wouldn’t have mattered whether the military had made mistakes or not in terms of how effective the softer side of the war has been. For him, development was destined to fail from the start, at least as a campaign to win over the loyalties and affections of the Afghan public. In other words, the problem wasn’t just the military, it was the development strategy itself that was ineffective—and few in Washington seemed to have noticed. If money was, indeed, supposed to be a weapons system, Wilder’s findings were like discovering, 10 years too late, that the West had been firing blanks.
YOU NEVER KNOW
This past May, I traveled to Helmand Province to see for myself how these development projects had gone so awry. A heavily Pashtun province (the Taliban is Pashtun), and with a long border with Pakistan, Helmand and its immediate neighbor to the east, Kandahar, have been some of the most combustible areas in Afghanistan since the beginning of the war.
They have also drawn a disproportionate amount of America’s development spending. The U.S. Agency for International Development, the main civilian body that oversees government development programs, says that until recently it spent about three quarters of its budget in the southern provinces, including Helmand and Kandahar. My destination was a small, isolated base in the town of Lashkar Gah, in the center of the province. The short helicopter ride from Camp Bastion, to the north, lasted 30 minutes, but took almost 24 hours to arrange. A sandstorm had snarled air traffic for the entire region. “Welcome to every day of our lives,” a British officer at the base later joked. From regional bases like these, small provincial reconstruction teams (PRTs) coordinate and distribute funds for projects that they consider most valuable to the citizens around them. The PRTs are the most ambitious component of the development plan — and also its greatest weakness. Creating small teams that can engage with local residents would seem like an effective way to win hearts and minds. But upon arriving on the base, it was easy to see how that proximity could feel like an illusion. Situated right in
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the middle of the town, the base was nevertheless an alien world from whatever went on in Lashkar Gah. There were lad mags for sale at the military PX, movie nights on Thursdays, three meals a day, and the occasional Heineken or two (as a British base, beer was not banned like it is on U.S. bases). One of the consequences of living in such circumstances was that it became virtually impossible to measure the long-
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term effects of development projects. State Department and other officials there insisted that they left the base as much as they needed to, but the trips tended to be rigidly planned and heavily armed. In the parking bay, a row of white armored vehicles used by civilians were pockmarked, and most of the thickpaned windows were cracked — the result of rocks being chucked at them, I was assured, not bullets. It was not un-
The Container Conundrum
Getting all of our military supplies out of Afghanistan will require about 100,000 shipping containers, according to a July report by Foreign Affairs. Here are some numbers to give you an idea of just how massive this move will be.
AP PHOTO/DAVE MARTIN
*DATA REFLECTS METRICS AROUND 100,000 CONTAINERS, ASSUMING A TWENTY-FOOT EQUIVALENT UNIT CAPACITY FOR EACH.
SWIPE TO SCROLL
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heard of for reconstruction teams in particularly volatile areas to survey their projects — a newly constructed schoolhouse, for instance — by taking a ride over it in a helicopter. “It was a ridiculous situation,” said Sonia Pinto, a young researcher who spent more than a year evaluating Western development projects in turbulent regions of Afghanistan for a non-governmental organization. “A lot of the time, the people who do evaluations just go to the base, but they don’t go to the actual project. Instead, you send Afghan interviewers into the field and they will fill out questionnaires for the locals. It’s not proper research.” Aid workers in Kabul tell horror stories about Afghan employees who falsify data, or visit the wrong sites. “At the end of the day, you just have to trust them,” said Pinto. “You never know.” Even if they could see more, they rarely have enough time. Civilian officials do rotations of a year, or a year and a half — at one point in 2009, 40 percent of the government civilians who were based in Helmand didn’t make it six months. Many military tours are even shorter. In December 2009, President Barack Obama announced that he was dispatching 30,000 extra ground troops to Afghanistan, along with a “civilian surge” that included hundreds of fresh experts in development and governance — and lots more money. The idea, at its heart,
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was that the solution to Afghanistan’s various crises was more of everything: more troops, and more development funds. At the urging of Gen. Stanley McChrystal, then the commander of U.S. troops in Afghanistan and a determined advocate for counterinsurgency, and the veteran diplomat Richard Holbrooke, this meant a significant boost in America’s development and reconstruction budget. Already at $2 billion per year when Obama assumed office, the Afghan development budget rose swiftly to $2.7 billion, and then, by 2010, to $4.6 billion, according to the Pentagon’s Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction (SIGAR), which audits the spending. (The budget has since dropped back to $2.9 billion.) Obama believed that civilian expenditures in particular were “far cheaper,” and ultimately more enduring, as he said in a speech in early 2009 — and there was no reason to hold back. “It all came down to money,” writes Rajiv Chandrasekaran in his recent book, Little America, of the mindset of Obama’s top Afghanistan advisers at the time. Holbrooke, Chandrasekaran writes, “believed the United States needed to spend big if it wanted quick results.”
A TSUNAMI OF MONEY
The results, from a purely developmental point of view, have been impressive.
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MASSOUD HOSSAINI/AFP/GETTYIMAGES
President Hamid Karzai cuts the ribbon during the inauguration of a hydroelectric power plant north of Kabul, one of the five development projects funded by the Afghan government.
Hundreds of miles of new highways crisscross the nation, including a $2 billion Ring Road that forms an essential lifeline connecting Afghanistan’s major cities. Infant mortality rates have dropped, and the average life expectancy is up nearly 20 years. Millions of girls now study at hundreds of newly constructed schools, and 3G cell phone service has arrived in the major cities. (Residents of Kabul still remember having to drive to Pakistan to make international calls before 2001.) But as researchers and journalists began to notice, the influx of funds also exacerbated some of Afghanistan’s worst problems. Afghanistan’s weak
economy couldn’t handle the vast sums of money — in one district in the South, Nawa, U.S. development funding amounted to $400 for every man, woman and child living there. Afghanistan’s per capita income is only $300. The result was often a spike in corruption, and other unforeseen consequences. One of the most withering examples of these side effects was an agriculture project run by USAID. Started around the time of the surge, the plan had been to spend $150 million on an obscure agriculture and employment program in Helmand and Kandahar. But, as Chandrasekaran writes, when Holbrooke heard about it, his response was quick and unequivocal: “Double it.”
$571 B
The total cost to the United States of the war in Afghanistan
“It was a tsunami of money,” writes Chandrasekaran, who followed the funds as they were dispersed in Helmand. One day in the fall of 2010, he discovered, teachers in Nawa had stopped showing up at schools across the district. At $5 a day, it turned out, digging ditches for the agriculture project was far more lucrative. Earlier this year, SIGAR, the internal auditor, took a closer look at some of the apparent success stories of development, including a 2011 road construction project between the towns of Lashkar Gah and Nawa. The road should have made everybody happy, by helping farmers in Nawa reach the markets of Lashkar Gah. (“Roads pave the way to stability,” USAID declared in a brochure for another roadbuilding project this year.) But when SIGAR examined it, the project was over budget and behind schedule, particularly since the Afghan government had failed to negotiate land rights with property owners whose land would be destroyed. “The local population expressed ongoing frustration with the project,” the SIGAR report stated. Projects like this, the
[SOURCE: NATIONAL PRIORITIES PROJECT]
report went on, “may result in adverse COIN effects because they create an expectations gap among the affected population or lack citizen support.” In a formal response to the report, David Sedney, the deputy assistant secretary of defense for Afghanistan and Pakistan, wrote that false hopes were better than none at all. “Clearly, if dashed hopes can produce adverse effects, then that very hope produces positive COIN effects in advance of project implementation,” Sedney said. Another particularly calamitous road project in the South was cancelled late last year, the Wall Street Journal reported, after just 100 miles had been built, far short of the 1,200 miles that had been planned. Nearly $300 million had been spent on the project, and 125 civilians had died from insurgent attacks. But one of Gordon and Wilder’s key findings was that if the goal was stability, it often didn’t matter if the project was on schedule and wildly successful. When contractors arrive to build a road, Wilder explained, they have to make a series of seemingly innocuous choices. Some of these are straightforward: which type of gravel to use, how steep of an angle to take up an incline. But others can be deceptively treacherous.
1 in 5
Proportion of U.S. and NATO casualties this year that have been the result of attacks by trained Afghan soldiers or policemen, also known as green-onblue attacks
MASSOUD HOSSAINI/AFP/GETTYIMAGES
SOURCE: REUTERS
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“When you build roads in mountainous areas, you have to decide which side of the river you will go up,” Wilder explained. “That makes a huge difference, and it often ends up being decided along tribal lines. It can end up being very dangerous, especially in areas where there is already instability.” A road that benefited one tribe — and even earned their goodwill toward the central government — risked alienating another tribe who was left out, Wilder and his associates found. The cumulative benefit, in terms of winning hearts and minds, would be none — or worse. “In these zero-sum societies, one person’s gain is someone else’s loss,” Wilder told me. “Winners and losers are perceived to be much bigger with roads. There is lots of demand for roads, and lots of money. It’s not that they are not valued. It is the very fact that they are so valued that drives the instability.”
INFOGRAPHIC BY TIM WALLACE/HUFFINGTON
WE BUILT TOO MUCH
One afternoon shortly after I arrived in Lashkar Gah, I sat at a wooden picnic table on the base with a young American official to talk about the ultimate question that hovers over the development scheme in Afghanistan: What will happen when the Americans finally leave? Years of bloated development budgets have resulted in a spending free-for-all, but very little consideration for what
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The Road Not Taken
According to USAID, the U.S. has funded the construction of some 1,242 miles of roadways across Afghanistan. That’s enough to lay fresh roadways from Miami, Fla. to New Brunswick, NJ.
1,242 1,200 1,050 950
East Brunswick, NJ Philadelphia, Pa. Washington, D.C.
Richmond, Va.
725
Fayetteville, N.C.
475
Savannah, Ga.
350
Jacksonville, Fla.
0
Miami, Fla.
2,120
The number of U.S. service members killed in action since the start of the Afghanistan war [AS OF 10/1/12– SOURCE: DEPARTMENT OF DEFENSE]
would happen when the U.S. pulled the plug on the funding. As a result, many observers in Washington, and many Afghans as well, worry about how they could possibly sustain all of the projects that had begun under the Americans. In 2011, an internal audit of a major USAID stabilization project in Helmand concluded that any gains from the work were at risk because there were “no comprehensive transition plans.” “It probably took until this year that we got someone to really pay attention to it,” Charles M. Johnson, the director for the international affairs division of the Government Accountability Office, told me in August. “And frankly I’m still not sure they are focused enough on it.” Now, with the drawdown firmly in sight, the Americans and Brits say they are scrambling to make up for lost time. Sitting near to the base’s beach-volleyball court, where a team of Afghan interpreters were handily defeating some British soldiers, the American official, who, under tight embassy restrictions, could only speak about his work anonymously, tried to assure me that his agency had the transition firmly under control. In
recent years, the PRTs say they have shifted their tactics, recognizing much of what outside experts had been clamoring about for years: Local populations in volatile areas want security and fair government more than they want dams and roads. “We’ve still got 12 to 18 months with boots on the ground,” the official said. “This is the time to transition, while we’re still here.” This particular official’s task was to oversee the drawdown of a program that supported locally run radio stations. With the help of USAID, Afghans in Lashkar Gah had managed to establish five stations, each with their own programming mix and, in some cases, advertising. The stations offered local jobs and messages that competed with the Taliban for influence, and had accumulated a sizeable audience. PRT officials considered the program a wild success. But the stations also largely depended on funding from the west, and with the provincial reconstruction team preparing to close up shop at the end of 2014, there was no way that all five could afford to continue operating. “They don’t have a sustainable business model,” he said. “In the absence of coalition funding, it’s hard to see how they will survive.”
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JEFF PACHOUD/AFP/GETTYIMAGES
Afghan children run to school in a village near the French army base.
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TONY KARUMBA/AFP/GETTYIMAGES
LONG AND WINDING ROADS
Now the PRT had to find a way to close at least three of the stations. This had recently resulted in a series of frank and rather uncomfortable meetings with the owners of the stations that had to go. In a perverse way, the PRT’s problem was not that their projects had failed, but that they had succeeded too much. It was a problem that was plaguing development projects across the country. The looming failure of beloved western-funded projects was something the SIGAR report had specifically cited as endangering counterinsurgency hopes. USAID officials don’t dispute that sustainability has been a shortcomU.S. Army soldiers check an elderly Afghani man for hidden explosives or weapons.
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ing of theirs, but they insist that it was never neglected. “I won’t lie and say that there’s always been as robust a focus on sustainability as we would like,” said Larry Sampler, the top USAID deputy assistant for Afghanistan, in an interview. “But it’s always been there. Sustainability is a core value of development.” Last month, the Guardian reported that the Brits in Helmand faced an identical, if more unsettling, situation: They were planning to close numerous schools and clinics that they has spent millions of dollars building, because they had determined the Afghan government couldn’t afford to keep them open.
INFOGRAPHIC BY TIM WALLACE/HUFFINGTON. SOURCES: TRANSPARENCY INTERNATIONAL, SIGAR, USAID, U.N. OFFICE OF DRUG CONTROL, DEPARTMENT OF DEFENSE, OXFAM INTERNATIONAL;PHOTOS: BAY ISMOYO/AFP/GETTY IMAGES (POPPY BUDS); QAIS USYAN/AFP/GETTYIMAGES (STUDENTS)
The Splurge
Over the past 10 years, the U.S. has spent nearly $90 billion on relief and reconstruction in Afghanistan, according to the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction. Here’s a breakdown of where the funds went, and some of the sorry results of that effort.
HUMANITARIAN AID $2.37 Billion There are now more than 8 million children enrolled in schools (up from just 900,000 in the 1990s), and -- for the first time -more than a third of them are girls.
COUNTER-NARCOTICS EFFORTS $6 Billion Afghanistan still exports nearly 90 percent of the world's opium, the raw material for heroin, according to the latest U.N. figures.
OVERSIGHT & OPERATIONS $6.62 Billion
GOVERNANCE & DEPLOYMENT $22.34 Billion
According to Transparency International, only Myanmar, North Korea, and Somalia rank worse than Afghanistan for corruption.
Total: $89 .48 B
Waste, overhead and other extraneous expenses have taken their toll on the financial assistance that has poured into the country. One 2009 study by Oxfam International estimated that as much as 40 percent of all foreign aid was actually spent back in the donor's home country. Another assessment, by a former Pentagon inspector general, suggested that just 15 percent of contributions ever made it to Afghanistan.
SECURITY $52.15 Billion Suicide bombings still plague major cities, and a recent Pentagon report found no change in the number of Taliban attacks after three years of the costly surge.
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BANARAS KHAN/AFP/GETTY IMAGES
Locals collect fuel from a bullet-ridden Nato supply oil tanker in Pakistan after an attack set ablaze about 19 tankers carrying fuel for US led Nato forces to Afghanistan.
“Of course we built too much,” a British official told the Guardian. “We didn’t think about how the Afghans would pay for it. But it was understandable. Nobody is blaming the military. We wanted to show them what we could do for them, but without regard for sustainability.”
A DIFFICULT BUSINESS
In the 1980s, Andrew Wilder worked as an aid worker with Save the Children in Afghanistan. At the time, Wilder had seen that the most effective programs — in, for instance, health care — tended
by their nature to be the least promotable. Efforts that emphasized education and prevention (like instructing villagers to wash their hands after using the bathroom) had a far greater impact on infection rates than more attractive and press-ready projects like building hospitals and clinics. But as national security objectives increasingly came into play, money and attention kept shifting away from the projects that worked, and toward the ones that supposedly helped “isolate the Taliban.” It’s a problem, he says, that has plagued development spending ever since: No one’s ever held a ribbon-cutting
12,500 to 14,700
the estimated number of Afghan civilians killed during the war
BANARAS KHAN/AFP/GETTY IMAGES
SOURCE: COSTSOFWAR.ORG
PHOTO OR ILLUSTRATION CREDIT TK
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ceremony for washing hands. “Development is not a business you should get into to become popular,” Wilder said, when we met in his sunfilled office this fall. “I’m a very strong believer in the importance of development aid — by far the biggest concern I have is that the U.S. gives too little of its budget to foreign aid,” Wilder said. “My worry is that foreign aid now only gets legitimized on the basis of it promoting our national interest. Good development as a good in and of itself is no longer priority. Alleviating poverty is no longer a good — only having COIN impact or national security impact is what matters now.” Obama’s surge was supposed to be the turning point in the Afghanistan war. But its development strategy remained locked in many of the same, stale assumptions: If you build it, goodwill will come. “The best that can be said in their defense is that you had a lot of people who didn’t know what they didn’t know,” said Jeremy Pam, a former State and Treasury Department official who spent several years working on development issues in Iraq and Afghanistan. “They had this narrative that one of the problems was that the war was under-resourced, therefore, if we provide proper resources, the sky’s the limit. There was no reality constraint. One rarely heard somebody say, ‘Is that feasible? Is that overambitious? Should
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we aim for something more moderate?’” Since Wilder first started discussing his findings, two years before his final report was published, other studies have reached the same conclusions. A 2011 report by the Senate Foreign Relations Committee described the evidence to support using development to promote stability as “limited.” That same year, Mark Moyar, a former Pentagon adviser and counterinsurgency theorist, produced an independent report calling for the U.S. to vastly scale back its development projects in Afghanistan, because they were not helping to bring stability. “A lot of times, just pouring money into these projects has actually made things worse,” Moyar told me. In an interview, USAID’s Sampler suggested that the debate over the value of development for stability had become academic, and said that there is a tendency of these reports to focus on negative stories to the exclusion of positive ones. “It would be naive of us to believe that stabilization programs are going to instantaneously sprout stability,” he said. “But neither would I suggest that we should stop doing stabilization programs just because there are examples where there is still instability after the programs.” Wilder and Gordon don’t discount the possibility that development could theoretically help stabilize a country —
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DMITRY KOSTYUKOV/AFP/GETTY IMAGES
U.S. Marines patrol as Afghans dig irrigation canals to help cultivate their land.
under the right circumstances. “In the context of good institutions, of effective security, of checks and balances on the way that money is spent, of clear limits, there is the potential to do something good with development,” Gordon told me. “But none of those preconditions have really ever existed in Afghanistan.” It also didn’t help American stabilization efforts that they were consistently undermined by Western military activity. In recent years, civilian casualties caused by Americans have gone down, but deaths and disruptions from night raids, airstrikes and drones have remained a constant source of disaffection for Afghans. Last year, Nato aerial
strikes accounted for 187 deaths, or nearly half of the civilian casualties attributed to pro-government forces, according to the UN. (The Taliban is thought to be responsible for 10 times as many civilian deaths.) At one point last year, a sequence of events including the burning of Qurans at a U.S. military base and an errant airstrike that killed 16 civilians prompted President Karzai to describe the Americans as “demons.” “International forces eventually realized the devastating impact this public blowback was having for broader strategic goals,” says Erica Gaston, a longtime Afghanistan researcher who studied civilian casualties for the Open Society Foundations. “But at that point it was hard to turn back years of brewing resentment and mistrust bred by what was largely
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viewed by the population as reckless, to the point of deliberate, carelessness for Afghan civilian life.” For development work itself, Gordon continued, “The bigger problem was it was very difficult to find evidence of how effectively these things worked. You’ll be talking to a development official, and you find yourself thinking, ‘Well, this is a well-meaning individual who risked his life, has done brave and incredible things, but to suggest that this was somehow going to solve these great political problems was naive.’ In a sense, that was the great tragedy of the project.” Wilder agrees. “A lot of our aid has had a very positive impact, and in terms of promoting development objectives, there’s a lot of evidence that aid spent smartly can do a lot of good,” he said. “But if your assumption is that it’s going to have stability impact, then you’re setting yourself up to fail.” Today, even as they worry about what will happen when the U.S. withdraws, Afghans remain deeply skeptical about the Western effort in their country. Karzai’s government remains as corrupt as ever. Only Myanmar, North Korea and Somalia rank lower on Transparency International’s Corruption Perception Index. A $6 billion effort to combat narcotics growth and trade has had virtually no measurable effect. The army and police forces are still struggling with basic
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skills and competence, and the Taliban shows few signs of fading. An internal Pentagon analysis published recently by Wired found that three years after the surge, the rate of attacks by insurgents had barely budged. More than 2,000 American service members have lost their lives fighting the Taliban and its improvised explosive devices. Many thousands more have been permanently disfigured. Tens of thousands of Afghan civilians are also thought to have been killed. All of the surge troops have now come home, but there are still 68,000 U.S. troops left in Afghanistan, and they continue to die at a rate of about one per day. Eleven years after a small contingent of American special operatives and northern tribesmen routed the Taliban from Kabul, it’s hard to escape the impression that the U.S. is slinking out of town. Obama once called Afghanistan “the good war,” and invested billions in reconstruction to help turn it around. Instead, 11 years after a small contingent of American special operatives and northern tribesmen routed the Taliban from Kabul, it’s hard to escape the impression that the U.S. is slinking out of town. And when it comes to winning hearts and minds, and bringing about peace and stability, all that well-intentioned development work may have come to naught.
BORDER CROSSING
FEATURE_TITLE
In early July, Pakistan agreed to reopen the border
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crossing into Afghanistan, restoring a key supply route for NATO forces at one of the main entry points between the two countries. Photographer Suchitra Vijayan spent 24 hours at the Torkham crossing, where waves of people pass each day to work, attend school and meet relatives—always wary that violence remains a constant threat.
PHOTO OR ILLUSTRATION CREDIT TK
Photographs by SUCHITRA VIJAYAN
PHOTO OR ILLUSTRATION CREDIT TK
PHOTO OR ILLUSTRATION CREDIT TK
BORDER CROSSING
As dusk sets in, two boys rest after lugging cargo across the border. PHOTO OR ILLUSTRATION CREDIT TK
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PHOTO OR ILLUSTRATION CREDIT TK
Children come from villages by the border and from other parts of Peshawar to work, spending the night in rented rooms. PHOTO OR ILLUSTRATION CREDIT TK
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BORDER CROSSING
In Pakistan, men cross the border as the sun goes down. PHOTO OR ILLUSTRATION CREDIT TK
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Trucks wait in line to cross the border into Khyber Phaktunkhwa in Pakistan.
Some Pashtuns have families on both sides of the border and visit them daily.
BORDER CROSSING
Hundreds of children work on the border, and boys mostly ferry cargo.
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BORDER CROSSING
Though the returnee situation in Afghanistan remains a complex matter, Afghan refugees continue to trickle in every day.
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The Afghan half of the border village of Torkham is a one-road town leading into neighboring Pakistan.
BORDER CROSSING
A boy glances out of the window of a truck as it crosses into Afghanistan.
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The Durand Line, the international border between Afghanistan and Pakistan, continues to be a source of tension between the two governments.
BORDER CROSSING
Young boys regularly make trips across the border, ferrying cargo and people.
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Every day thousands of veiled women cross the border on foot.
BORDER CROSSING
The movement of people crossing the border has largely been unchecked, although passports and visas are at times required at official crossings.
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At the Torkham crossing, street vendors and hawkers cater to the transient population.
Your Great Aunt Has The Perfect Match For You (2 Steps Back)
Office Hook-Up (Spin Again)
Fly Solo At Your Best Friend’s Wedding (Spin Again)
Sign Up For Match.Com (2 Steps Forward)
17th Match.com Date (2 Steps Back)
Friend High School Sweetheart (2 Steps Back)
Twitter Stalk Witty Tweeter (1 Step Forward) Who’s The Hottie On Instagram? (Spin Again)
Message Yelp Commenter Who Loves the Same Asian Vegan Tapas Take-Out Restaurant (5 Steps Forward)
YOU HAD ME @ LOL FINDING YOUR SOUL MATE ON SOCIAL SITES BY BIANCA BOSKER ILLUSTRATION BY JASON SCHNEIDER
When Dianna Hank first met Noah Zitsman (a.k.a. “Noze”), he was a black bear with red eyes and antennae. She was “Dianna_2ns,” a pink monkey nodding her head to the twangs of an electric guitar in the Phish “room” on Turntable.fm, a musicstreaming site that lets users take turns DJ-ing to an audience of animated avatars. A fan of the band Phish, Hank, a 23 year-old Brooklynite who works at a tech startup, spends hours a day on Turntable while she’s at the office, listening to music and messaging with other Phisheads in a public chatroom. During one of these online exchanges last fall, Hank and Zitsman, discovered they’d both be at the band’s upcoming gig in Vermont. So why not meet up?
They saw each other briefly at the show, then at another concert in New York the following month and, another month after that, officially started dating. A year later, they’re still together. “With dating sites, when you message people back and forth, you’re very much crafting the message,” says Hank, who once tried unsuccessfully to find Mr. Right with an online dating service. But on Turntable, “you’re not editing yourself as much… You’re just being you.”
COURTESY DIANNA HANK
YOU HAD ME @ LOL
While traditional online dating sites offer the internet equivalent of a speed dating session, social networking sites are the cocktail parties of the web: people, in the course of their meticulous selfrepresentation online, share what they love to do, not who they want to fall in love with; they aren’t under pressure to fall head overheels; and they can bring friends along for the ride. These sites also put users in a position
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to meet a significant other without having to admit they need dating help. They offer a courtship process more akin to what people hope for offline. That is, finding love the Hollywood way: When least expecting it. Like Hank, many are signing out of their online dating accounts or looking beyond dating site profiles to try their luck on services better known as data bases for food reviews and music recommendations than soul mates. Take Ashley, a 24 year-old New Yorker, who says she would never
Dianna Hank and Noah Zitsman met on Turntable.fm thanks to their mutual love of the band Phish. Here they are together at a Phish concert.
YOU HAD ME @ LOL
dream of joining an online dating site, but carried out her latest courtship through retweets, “follows,” “@ mentions” and even continued onto a crowdfunding website before finally meeting her “Twitter crush” in person. Or 28-year-old Danielle (a.k.a. “WestVillageDanielle”), who would sooner give up the internet than online date, yet tried for weeks to track down a man on MenuPages who posted a witty review of a terrible Chinese restaurant. And then there’s Rayco García, 28, and Nuria Sendra, 35, a Spanish couple who met on Instagram following a sticker giveaway for fans of the photo-sharing app. Though the two had “never considered using websites for dating,” García sent a message to Sendra explaining why he deserved the prize. She thought it was “funny” and the two continued their correspondence. Lengthy Facebook messaging sessions and video chats on Apple’s FaceTime turned into García trekking 1,200 miles to visit Sendra in the south of Spain. They’re now moving to Barcelona together. “Online dating to me is not online dating anymore. It’s social dating and it’s a social experi-
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ence,” says Julie Spira, author of The Perils of Cyber-Dating and a professional online dating coach. The internet has become the second most common way for American couples to meet, just after being introduced by friends, according to a 2012 Stanford University study. But not all couples who find each other online do so through designated dating services and sites like Facebook, Twitter and even LinkedIn are increasingly doing double-duty as both social networks and soul mate networks. Of partners who coupled up before 2000, less than 10 percent said they had met on social networking sites. Five years later, that number had doubled to 21 percent, a University of Oxford paper reported last year. Meanwhile, though online dating sites have seen their membership grow steadily over the past several years, the share of married couples who met via an online dating service remained unchanged between 2007 and 2010 at 17 percent, according to research commissioned by Match.com. Of course, the web has been a meat market since its inception, fostering flirtations on message
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boards, through online games, and even technical support forums for decades. Of 18 “cyberspace couples” profiled in a 1998 study published in Computer-Mediated Communication Magazine, the earliest connection took place in 1991 between two 25-year-olds who met in a chat room. They were later married. Social media services are also free, boast millions more members and offer a degree of serendipity absent from the love-by-algorithm approach embraced by traditional
“THE MAJORITY OF MEN DO NOT NECESSARILY WANT A RELATIONSHIP. WHAT THEY WANT, I’M SORRY TO SAY, IS A ‘BOOTY CALL.’”
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online dating services. Each dating site boasts its own “scientific” method it claims can pluck a soul mate from the digital ether. OKCupid has a “patent-pending,” “math-based matching system” that computes the likelihood of sparks flying based on a series of questions about everything from kinkiness to cheating. eHarmony, with its “science of compatibility” matchmaking, touts a clinical psychologist founder who claims to have identified the “29 dimensions of compatibility” present in all successful relationships. But social psychology professors say what passes as “science” is really just marketing jargon. In a journal article published earlier this year, researchers likened dating sites like Match.com to “supermarkets of love.” The report cautioned that matchmaking sites, with their seemingly endless array of potential mates, could pressure singles into a shopping mentality that divides their attention, distracting them from true matches. The trouble with love algorithms, the researchers suggest, is their reliance on personality attributes that are far from the most important predictors of a relationship’s success. The qualities that do
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and her r. s i v a D e Lauri et on Twitte fiancé m
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PREVIOUS PAGE: COURTESY LAURIE DAVIS
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matter, such as a person’s way of coping with stressful situations, are all but impossible to measure online. The report concludes that searching for love on matchmaking sites is no more effective than trying to pick up strangers at a bar — or on Twitter. “To date, there is no compelling evidence that any online dating matching algorithm actually works,” Northwestern University associate professor Eli Finkel, the lead author of the study, told the Association for Psychological Science in February. “For years, the online dating industry has ignored actual relationship science in favor of unsubstantiated claims and buzzwords, like ‘matching algorithms,’ that merely sound scientific.” To be sure, social dating has its own shortcomings. Unlike Chemistry.com or OKCupid, social media sites don’t offer a pool of singles all looking for love. Figuring out if an Instagram user is in a relationship or looking for one is often a matter of pure guesswork. And though Twitter or Turntable might offer a more organic way to break the ice, it can be uncomfortable approaching someone for a date on a site
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he or she is not necessarily using for that purpose. Social dating also risks mixing business with pleasure: confining flirtations to a site designed specifically for flings avoids the awkwardness that can result from having a client stum-
Some tweets exchanged by Davis and her fiancé, Thomas Edwards.
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ble across a winky-face emoticon sent to a Twitter crush. And yet, the popularity of social dating implies that real connections can be brokered, at least at the start, virtually. Though Facebook stalking is nothing new, the skyrocketing popularity of niche social networking sites is fueling the rise of social dating by bringing people together over a shared interest, rather than a shared desire to date. Sites such as Instagram, which grew 17,319 percent be-
SEARCHING FOR LOVE ON MATCHMAKING SITES IS NO MORE EFFECTIVE THAN TRYING TO PICK UP STRANGERS AT A BAR.
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tween July 2011 and 2012, offer a place to digitally rub shoulders with like-minded strangers and, in the course of discovering a mutual love for Roaring Twenties nostalgia, find Mr. or Mrs. Right. “As our lives are spent more online, we date more online, too,” says Laurie Davis, the founder of online dating consultancy eFlirt Expert who met her her fiancé, also a dating guru, on Twitter. She notes she has many clients who are dating online, but choosing to forgo dating sites in favor of Facebook, Twitter and the like. “We live a lot of our social lives on Facebook, Twitter and sites like that, so since dating is inherently a part of our social life — it only seems natural to find love that way as well.”
Yelp, A Love Story
Four months after Rachel Grier, 38, was engaged to be married, she walked in on her fiancé with another woman. Devastated, Grier “went into daredevil mode.” She went sky diving, took pole-dancing lessons, and terrified herself on roller coasters at places she discovered and reviewed on Yelp, a customer-review website.
COURTESY NURIA SENDRA; INSET: COURTESY PHILLIPE GONZALEZ
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ndra of Racyo García and Nuria Se d are now Spain met on Instagram an er. moving to Barcelona togeth
Grier, who lives in Emeryville, California, also took the plunge and subscribed to online dating sites Match.com and Chemistry. com ($41.99 and $39.99 for a one-month membership, respectively). But a series of awkward dates quickly soured her on the
prospects of finding love through web. Too often, people were not who they seemed in their profiles and expressed more interest in “for tonight” than forever. “On Match and Chemistry, the majority of men do not necessarily want a relationship. What they want, I’m sorry to say, is a ‘booty call,’” says Grier, using a euphemism for casual sex. “I gave it up
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and thought I’d do it the old fashioned way. Back on Yelp, Grier’s distinctive and prolific reviews earned her “Elite” status on the review-sharing site and — along with an eye-catching profile picture of her in a strappy black top — lots of male attention. Grier says she’d receive “three or four flirtatious messages every other day” from men on Yelp hoping for more than a restaurant recommendation. And she soon discovered that while on Chemistry. com and Match.com she knew only what the men would reveal in their profiles, on Yelp, she could see what they did in their spare time, how well-spoken they were in their reviews and, thanks to the public nature of Yelp’s “compliments” system, anyone else they might be flirting with at the same time. Like online dating sites, these niche sites have built in filtration systems. Only instead of relying on people to self-report as nonsmokers or gym-rats, review sites offer up the matter of a user’s life for the public to sift through. Are they adventurous eaters? Awful spellers? Sports obsessed? A look through Yelp reviews — or even 140 character tweets – can yield incriminating evidence.
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Grier recalls being intrigued by an attractive man in Los Angeles who had messaged her via the site. Then she read his reviews. “I started thinking to myself, ‘Oh my God, I don’t know if he’s an airhead or what, but he’s not totally smart,” Grier recalls. “You can tell a lot about a person’s intelligence level based on what they write.” More than a few of the notes Grier exchanged through Yelp’s private messaging service turned into longer correspondences, and there were three men she actually met in person, though not before weeks of extensive back-and-forths online and on the phone. Grier says she had to have each man’s email address, cell phone number, full name and workplace before agreeing to get together offline (a vetting process through which she discovered one Yelp suitor was, in fact, married). Of course online daters aren’t known for their honesty, either: In a survey of online dating profiles, researchers from Cornell University
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and the University of WisconsinMadison found 80 percent contained at least one fiction. Yelp, for its part, acknowledges that many Yelpers have used the site for romance, but maintains that it is in no way designed for dating and that matchmaking is not something it’s built features to help foster. Though Yelp might be an unorthodox way to meet, traditional dating rules still apply. “My rule is, if I text you and you don’t get to me within a few hours, then you’re too busy to have time for me,” explains Grier. “Also, for me to be comfortable
THE INTERNET HAS BECOME THE SECOND MOST COMMON WAY FOR AMERICAN COUPLES TO MEET.
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meeting with you, I have to talk to you at night because if you can’t talk to me at night, then there’s something you’re hiding.” About a year after joining Yelp, in April of this year, Grier opened her Yelp inbox to find a note from a 31 year-old in Livermore, California congratulating her on having her post highlighted as “Review of the Day.” Grier “thought he was cute,” and they started messaging. A month later, they met at a get-together hosted by Yelp for its Elite members. “I guess you could say it was love at first sight,” says Grier, who adds that four months later they are a couple and “totally happy together.” Grier argues she’d probably still be single if she’d been limited to a pool of men that satisfied a checklist of attributes or had relied on sites’ “sophisticated” matchmaking algorithms — the same ones debunked by the Northwestern University study, which suggests Grier’s now-boyfriend might have been booted in favor of someone only superficially compatible. “I never ever would have been paired up with him on Match or Chemistry because we’re total opposites,” says Grier. Her boyfriend is seven
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years younger, lives two hours away and is a laid-back vegan. She she works out twice a day and is a self-described “carnivore.”
COURTESY RACHELGRIER
“Online Lust”
The anonymity and unfamiliar social circles that make social networking sites an attractive place to date can just as easily be milked to find one night stands as they can to find “The One.” Some of the pitfalls of traditional online
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dating sites, like the “booty call” mentality that irked Grier, still exist for social daters. Though many couples claim to have found true love through Instagram’s photo sharing app, Adam, a public relations professional in Manchester, UK created a shadow Instagram account without any personally identifying information for one simple purpose: sex. For Adam, Instagram is “more of an online lust thing than a dating service.” “I’m not trying to meet friends
Rachel Grier met her boyfriend on Yelp.
COURTESY RACHELGRIER
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on Instagram, I’m mainly trying to get laid, if it did lead to that,” explains Adam, who asked to be identified by his first name only. “It’s sort of the darker side of Instagram, one that is completely grounded in physical attraction and lust.” In the hopes of making his profile easier for women to find, Adam includes hashtags such as “single,” “horny,” “sex,” and “stud” in the photos he uploads of him, say, mugging for the camera. He also uses a pseudonym and says if his real-life friends ever found it, it’d be “game over” for his reputation. If all goes according to plan, a local lady will come across his picture, like what she sees, and use the username he’s provided in his Instagram profile to chat him on Kik, a private messaging app sometimes used for sex-chats, or “KikSex.” She will perhaps send him a photo and maybe agree to meet. Adam in turn tries to find women nearby by searching photos tagged with a specific location, such as “Manchester,” or, if that fails, he’ll try a Briticism such as “arse” that’s more likely than “ass” to turn up someone who, if
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not nearby, is at least in the UK. On any site with a sizable following, the sex eventually materializes. Savvy socialdaters, who know this, can use clues from around the web to vet someonebefore they meet and avoid an Adam – unless that’s the kind of romance they’re after. Grier, for example, discovered one Yelper was married by searching the web for the work email address he gave her. And before Hank and Zitsman first met in person, their relationship progressed through the ex-
Rachel Grier and her boyfriend on their first date at an event for Elite Yelp members at San Francisco’s Twin Peaks.
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change of increasingly intimate bits of digital information. First, Hank and Zitsman swapped email addresses — though not to their primary accounts. Next came cellphone numbers, and, finally, Facebook friend requests. As Hank’s experience illustrates, Facebook profiles — the virtual ID cards of the internet that tie offline identities to online ones — have given social dating a boost by making it more feasible to vet strangers online. With its emphasis on real names and real-
“SOCIAL MEDIA SITES DO A BETTER JOB OF APPROXIMATING THE NATURAL HUMAN EXPERIENCE THAN DATING SITES.”
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world friendships, Facebook has reduced anonymity online and created virtual “IDs” that people can use to scope out an attractive Yelper or Instagrammer before ever meeting face-to-face. Sure it’s easy enough to fake a Facebook profile, or remove “chainsaws” from one’s list of interests, but the social network has nonetheless been used as an imperfect-but-important safeguard against nefarious Lotharios. A 2012 report from the Pew Research Center found Facebook users actually exhibit “higher levels of social trust.” “People give out their email addresses because it feels safer than giving out your Facebook profile, which has your real name and whole identity,” says Hank. She notes she first “wanted to be friends” with Zitsman “to see his pictures, and make sure he didn’t seem like a crazy person, or that it wasn’t an account made yesterday by a fifty year-old murderer who was going to kidnap me.”
A Sea Of “Wingmen”
The different rules of decorum that exist for different social media services make some more conducive to social dating than
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others. While messaging strangers is frowned upon on Facebook, on Twitter, where public sharing is the norm, making new friends is encouraged. See someone talking about your favorite sports team? Jump right in and say something. Which is precisely what Damien Basile did. Basile, a 32 year-old digital strategy expert for a boutique consulting company, didn’t know Christina Coster, 31, when he first tweeted at her three years ago. He had been searching for other Twitter users to follow and Coster, a freelance event planner and health care professional, caught his eye because her Twitter profile picture, though tinier than a postage stamp, was “cute.” Call it love at first site. “Facebook is really only close friends and family…You’re not going to send someone a friend request on Facebook if you don’t know them or haven’t interacted with them,” says Basile, who broke the ice with Coster by sending a public tweet that included her username. “On Twitter, I’d allow anybody to follow me and I interact with a lot of people I don’t know.” “It’s more for strangers inter-
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ested in the same topics as you,” Basile adds. Coster and Basile’s courtship spanned several social media services. Public tweets directed at one another turned into privately “direct messaging” on Twitter, then chatting on AOL Instant Messenger. They eventually met in person thanks to a mutual friend’s Foursquare check-in. Three years later, they’re still going steady. Though Basile once joined the personals section of online sex and culture magazine Nerve.com in the “far past,” he soon tired of traditional online dating sites, which he calls “so formulaic” with their “plug this in, make a statement about this” approach. Twitter, and communities like it, can serve as a sea of “wingmen” who can help singles meet the friends of their online friends, notes Coster. “Twitter for me was like having another group of friends who could set me up with people,” says Coster. “I would look at Twitter and social media in general as a new group of friends to introduce you to their friends. People say a great way to meet people is through their friends…That holds true online or offline.”
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Best of all, because Coster and Basile both use Twitter for work, neither of them had to go anywhere, fill out anything, carve out time to exchange flirty messages, or pay a cent to meet. Not only do singles benefit from the convenience of searching for love through social networks, but they’re spared the emotional baggage associated with taking the plunge to join an OKCupid or Chemistry.com for a lovelife intervention. Some old-school dating sites are actually trying to ape social media’s accidental success in the field. Basile’s old haunt reflects the sea change in online dating with
“ONLINE DATING TO ME IS NOT ONLINE DATING ANYMORE. IT’S SOCIAL DATING AND IT’S A SOCIAL EXPERIENCE.”
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a design that borrows more from Twitter than eHarmony: Nerve. com has reinvented Nerve Dating to take a cue from the Foursquares and Facebooks of the world and has supplemented the traditional checklists, algorithms and profiles with brief user status updates a la Facebook meant to serve as icebreakers. “Social media sites do a better job of approximating the natural human experience than dating sites in their old form,” says Nerve chief executive Sean Mills. “Social media had a huge influence on us in figuring out that the idea of sharing actively would work in a space designed for meeting new people.” For their part, it’s unlikely social media sites will do much to encourage matchmaking on their sites. “It’s going to start to offend other people…You do get typecast into a certain category — Pinterest is for women, this one’s for that, this one is for casual sex — and I don’t know that you can be all things to everyone on any single social networking site,” says Spira, the online dating expert. But that doesn’t matter. There are plenty of places to find love online.
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Exit Who’s Afraid of Edward Albee?
PASCAL PERICH/CONTOUR BY GETTY IMAGES
BY GAZELLE EMAMI
The 84-yearold playwright’s seminal work, Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, turns 50 on Oct. 13.
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Exit DWARD ALBEE, 84, inches his way through his apartment by cane, settling into one of many leather chairs that fill the Tribeca loft with its overwhelming scent. Talk to him, and he will run circles around you. Prickly and quarrelsome, you’d think Albee were out for blood if it weren’t for a mischievous gleam in his eyes, and the occasional, almost imperceptible, wink. “I hope I haven’t been difficult,” Albee said, as we ended. “I’m just having a little fun.” If Albee is difficult, it’s only in the challenge he presents: to speak and engage thoughtfully with those around you; to be alive in your language. The author of Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? — celebrating its 50th anniversary on Saturday — is regularly referred to as one of the great American playwrights for his scathing examinations of the human condition, often punctuated by sadism, aggression and weakness. Albee carves his way through The Zoo Story, A Delicate Balance, Three Tall Women and some 25 other plays with razor-sharp dialogue. “A playwright... is his work,” the three-time Pulitzer Prize-winner
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KEYSTONE-FRANCE/GAMMA-KEYSTONE VIA GETTY IMAGES
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said last year, and Albee lives by this maxim, demanding the same level of acuity in his conversation as he does in his writing. “Always be specific,” he recommends, generally. He has reason to belabor this point. As a playwright, Albee’s work is fully realized when it reaches
Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton star as Martha and George in the film version of Virginia Woolf.
Exit the stage, at which point misinterpretation becomes a real possibility. (It’s always a possibility, but for other reasons, Albee says: “Some people have written that it’s hard to understand my work, but they’re not very intelligent. If you’re stupid you will misunderstand what I’m saying.”) He’s advised young playwrights to write “so precisely that [the actors and directors] really have to be creative to go away from the author’s intentions.” Take one direction he wrote for a character in A Delicate Balance: “Speaks usually softly, with a tiny hint of a smile on her face: not sardonic, not sad... wistful, maybe.” “I’m not one of these playwrights who thinks directors and actors should have free rein to do whatever they want to do,” Albee says. “If they want to do what they want to do, they should write their own plays.” When a play has on occasion escaped his control, Albee’s solution is simple: never work with that director again. “And I discourage other people from working with them,” he adds. Albee’s most popular and critically acclaimed work to-date, Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, has had
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many occasions to be misread over the years. The play, which was first staged at the Billy Rose Theatre in New York when Albee was 34, took him from well-regarded off-Broadway playwright to household name and Tony Award-winner. His three Pulitzer Prize wins notably do not include Woolf (while it was in contention, the committee decided to give no drama award that year). On Oct. 13, a revival of the play
If [directors and actors] want to do what they want, they should write their own plays.” — which first ran at Chicago’s Steppenwolf Theater — will open on Broadway for the fourth time at the Booth Theater, 50 years to the date of its premiere. As is usually the case with a major production, Albee chose the director (Pam MacKinnon), the cast, the writers, and no changes to the text were made without his permission. “It’s quite good,” Albee says, in a a rare show of approval. “I think you’ll like it.” Woolf’s plot rests in the deeply comedic, deeply sad barbs George and Martha — a professor and his
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VIRGINIA WOOLF THROUGH THE YEARS
LEFT TO RIGHT: API/GAMMA-RAPHO VIA GETTY IMAGES; TIM WHITBY/WIREIMAGE/GETTY IMAGES; TARGET PRESSE AGENTUR GMBH/GETTY IMAGES; MICHAEL BROSILOW
THE FILM Opening: 06.22.1966, Los Angeles Starring: Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton
THE TURNER TAKE Opening: 03.20.2005, Longacre Theatre, New York Starring: Kathleen Turner and Bill Irwin
wife, the daughter of the university’s dean — throw at one another while hosting a new, younger professor and his wife, Nick and Honey, for a boozy, 2 a.m. nightcap. “Braying” Martha and George, the “cluck,” as they affectionately call one another, engage in a series of ugly “games” aimed right where it most wounds the other, eventually pulling their guests into the fray (the game: “get the guests”). This, in a time when America’s idea of a marriage drama was The Dick Van Dyke Show. Over the years, productions of Woolf have struggled to hit the play’s sweet spot, between the intellectual and the emotional, or the
THE GERMAN TAKE Opening: 12.18.2011, Theater am Kurfuerstendamm, Berlin Starring: Katja Riemann and Rene Luedicke
THE LATEST Opening: 10.13.2012, Booth Theater, New York Starring: Tracy Letts and Amy Morton
“mind and the gut,” as Albee has put it. He told Rakesh H. Solomon, author of Albee in Performance, that the first, Tony Award-winning Broadway production in 1962 skewed a little too emotional. But it’s the most widely-known version of Woolf that’s strayed furthest — the 1966 film starring Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton, who were two years married at the time. Soon after its release, Albee said in an interview in the Paris Review that “only the emotional aspect shows through. The intellectual underpinning isn’t clear.” While Albee has been kind to the film, he says “they fucked up a lot, too.” “They changed whole sections, and they were not faithful to my intention,” he gripes. One of the biggest leaps came in the hiring
Exit of Elizabeth Taylor, who won an Academy Award for her performance. Taylor was in her early 30s at the time, playing Martha, 20 years her senior. “She’s much too young, she looks wrong, but why not hire her? Whose aesthetic is that?” Albee asks. “Not mine. I believe the comparative question came up, ‘Do you want Bette Davis or Elizabeth Taylor playing Martha?’ My answer was and would be Bette Davis.” Albee naturally isn’t as hard on the productions he has had control over: “Most productions that I allow to happen are good jobs,” he says. “As long as they’re honest and try hard, and succeed to a certain extent, and tell the truth and don’t lie, that’s all you can ask.” Tracy Letts, who won a Pulitzer Prize for his 2008 play August: Osage County, stars in the current revival, giving a performance that’s been called one of the most revelatory Georges yet. He told the Wall Street Journal, “George and Martha are part of our cultural fiber, and we see them reflected throughout this culture in ways we don’t even recognize.” Perhaps it’s because much of Woolf exists on a subtextual level. Its themes emerge in moments
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that could slip past you, like when George picks up a book and reads a line aloud — “And the West, encumbered by crippling alliances and burdened with a morality too rigid to accommodate itself to the swing of events, must eventually fall” — then laughs “ruefully” and hurls it away. “I always write about politics — sometimes it’s rather disguised,” Albee says. “How could you write
I believe the comparative question came up, ‘Do you want Bette Davis or Elizabeth Taylor?’ My answer was and would be Bette Davis.” about the country and your people if you don’t talk about politics among many other things?” An outspoken liberal, Albee should have as much to write about his country as ever. “We’re in terrible trouble, morally, politically, and intellectually, in this country, and I’m desperately worried about it,” he told the Telegraph last year. More worried than at any point previous? “Probably. And also less,” he adds, his eyes flickering.
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TV
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The Brains Behind Everyone’s Favorite Zombie Show
GENE PAGE/AMC/EVERETT COLLECTION
BY CHRIS HARNICK
HEN WALKING DEAD creator Frank Darabont left the show last season, amid reports of an unceremonious firing, cast, crew and fans of the hugely popular show were stunned. Rumors alternately attributed it to Darabont’s inability to adjust to the pace of a weekly show and his refusal to accept budget cuts (further speculation
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blamed the budget cuts on “greedy” AMC darling Mad Men). Darabont (The Shawshank Redemption, The Green Mile) was quiet following his exit, but later told TV Guide, “I was really given no choice. I don’t understand the thinking behind, ‘Oh, this is the most successful show in the history of basic cable. Let’s gut the budgets now.’ It’s a little more complicated...
A walker (zombie) scene from season 2 of The Walking Dead.
JOHN SHEARER/WIREIMAGE/GETTY IMAGES
Exit but that’s as far as I want to go.” Some couldn’t see a way forward without their fearless zombie leader, while others called it the best thing that could’ve happened to the show. “The Walking Dead has always needed a televisionsavvy hand to guide it,” wrote Scott Meslow in the Atlantic, pinning some of the show’s weaknesses on Darabont’s unease with the TV format. “And fortunately for AMC, newly appointed showrunner Glen Mazzara is much more qualified than Darabont for the job.” Now, fans can judge for themselves: Season 3 of AMC’s horror series — premiering Sunday, Oct. 14 — is the first whose conception and execution will be entirely under the helm of executive producer and showrunner Glen Mazzara. “Whenever I write a script, I want people on the edge of their seat,” Mazzara told Huffington. “That’s my voice, and that’s what I want the show to be.” Fans and critics had lamented the slow pace of the second season, which almost exclusively took place on a farm. Mazzara, who previously wrote and produced for FX’s highdrama series The Shield, says that upcoming episodes will be different. “I think it was my job going into
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Season 3 to better integrate all of the things we love about The Walking Dead so that you don’t have to wait too long for some humor or a scare or a thrill or a heartfelt scene,” Mazzara said. “I wanted to the show to be unpredictable. I wanted the show to be thrilling.
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This will be the first season of The Walking Dead with Glen Mazzara (The Shield) at the helm.
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We talk about everyone’s demise to the chagrin of all of the actors. There will be major character deaths throughout Season 3.” I wanted the show to stay very far ahead of the audience so that they have no idea what’s coming next.” In the Season 3 premiere, Rick Grimes (Andrew Lincoln) and his fellow zombie apocalypse survivors find a prison and decide to call it home (“This prison is ours,” Rick declares). The prison arc, which originated in the comic book, will occupy a good portion of the plot. “Our group has worked hard to find this prison, and that’s not something they’re going to give up any time soon,” Mazzara said. “As writers and producers, we love that prison. I wanted [the characters] to be stumbling through a desolate world where a prison seems like a reasonable place to hide.” The show — based on the comic series of the same name from Robert Kirman, Tony Moore and Charlie Adlard — is not a straight adaptation of the books, with liberties taken to make it a world of its own. However, the prison saga is a significantly darker entry in the comic series, and The Walking Dead is expected to reflect that mood this
year. Dead prisoners are the least of their troubles as new (living) characters come into the mix, who may pose more dangers. Just glance at the tagline (“Fight the dead. Fear the living.”) for hints. Most rewarding for readers of the comic book will be the arrival of a new villain, The Governor (David Morrissey), and Michonne (Danai Gurira), a fan-favorite character who favors a katana over a gun. “She’s a warrior and sees right into the heart of people,” Mazzara said of Michonne. “I think people will be excited to follow her because she, in some ways, becomes one of the hearts of the show.” Meanwhile, other characters who have enjoyed prominent play on the show will see their storylines cut short. TV Line reported in August that a series regular will become “zombie kibble” this season, and Mazzara assures us there will be more deaths to look forward to. “We talk about everyone’s demise to the chagrin of all of the actors,” Mazzara said. “There will be major character deaths throughout Season 3 — I can’t possibly say who or where, but I guarantee all of them will be surprising.”
FUN FACTS
76
The total number of walkers (zombies) Rick killed in seasons one and two combined.
160
The largest number of walker extras used in one day to-date from all seasons.
14
The largest number of days to complete an episode (season one’s two-hour pilot, “Days Gone By”).
218
The total number of walker extras used in the season three premiere episode, “Seed.” SOURCE: AMC
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eWISE
What happens when your friends and/or business clients lie to you about their activities or obligations and you catch them via social media? Do you call them out on it and risk losing a friend/client? — Ryan, via email
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This is why it is best to abstain from social media while lying about your whereabouts. If you tell a friend you can’t make dinner because you’re stuck at the office, no need to Instagram your evening at a Jay-Z concert. But when you’re lied to, pick your battles as you would with any lie. Some lies are harmless or originate with people we don’t care about, and some can corrode trust and friendships or damage
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ILLUSTRATION BY JASON SCHNEIDER
BY KATY HALL
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business relationships. You just have to decide what you’re willing to put up with from friends and colleagues and reconsider relationships that cause unneeded drama. If simply pointing out someone’s self-documented lie results in the loss of a friend or client, the relationship probably falls into the painfully dramatic category to start with. And there are ways to call someone out without being too obnoxious— you can always “like” an incriminating photo or status update and see if an apology follows.
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eWISE
My friend is the mother of a toddler and has created a Twitter account for her daughter. She sent an email to our friend group asking everyone to follow the child. Is there a nice way to tell her I don’t have any interest in reading the made-up musings of a 2-year-old? My friends feel the same way! — Blech, Brooklyn
Q
Sounds like someone was removed from the group email thread. No need to tell your friend that her idea makes you want to vomit. Just don’t follow the kid. Or follow her— who cares? The mother of a two-year-old will likely lose steam for the project in a matter of days, anyway. If she does persist and the tweets are more than you can stomach, some Twitter apps, such as Tweetdeck, allow you to customize your feed by filtering out tweets that contain certain words or user handles. Just be sure to express enthusiasm for appropriate displays of motherly pride, such as photos and videos she shares on her own Facebook account or over email. You don’t want your friend to think you are slighting her and her daughter, just their social media strategy.
ENOUGH ALREADY
totally over. Things we’re
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Have a question about electronic etiquette? Email ewise@huffingtonpost.com.
Jim Lehrer Waiters who offer pepper before you’ve tasted the food Chris Brown/ Rihanna drama Botox in your 20s Ruffles TV shows that think they’re subversive Flavored water Pumpkin beer
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You have to really make it clear that you can be what you want in life. It’s like they don’t ever hear it.”
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GREATEST PERSON OF THE WEEK
Lynda Meeks
The Sky’s the Limit
BY EMMA DIAB
THERE SHOULD BE nothing unusual about Lynda Meeks, army veteran and licensed pilot, sitting in an airplane. But this time, her view was a bit different. The back of a passenger seat replaced the vast expanse of sky in her field of vision, and the closest thing to a control feature was the light panel above her head. She might have to get used to this — after all, she was thinking of PHOTOGRAPHS BY BILLY DELFS
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trying a career outside of aviation. Meanwhile, as the voice of the male pilot of her flight blared facts about their destination from the speakers, a little girl sitting near Meeks turned to her mother and said, “Mommy, why aren’t there any girl pilots?” That was enough of a “sign from above” for Meeks to not only continue her career as a pilot, but to work to inspire young girls to pursue aviation — or any challenging goal they set their mind to — through her organization Girls With Wings.
GREATEST PERSON OF THE WEEK
Founded in 2005 by Meeks, the Girls With Wings mission, or “flight plan,” focuses on motivating girls through educational presentations as well as scholarships for older aviation students to aid in funding the cost of a pilot’s license. More recently, Meeks organized the hands-on “Aviation Inspiration Day,” where girls learn about what it means to be a pilot firsthand as groups are shuttled into a plane and take to the sky.
SKYWARDS Meeks, who was “deathly” afraid of heights (“a lot of pilots are, believe it or not,” she explains) decided to be a
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Meeks and her nieces, Delaney, left, Kate, middle, and Marie, right, at the flight school in Medina, Ohio, where Meeks is an instructor.
Exit pilot simply because it was the most difficult way she could challenge herself within the U.S. Army. “It wasn’t until I was getting ready to graduate from college that we had to pick a branch, and someone leaned down to see what I was putting on my wish list and said: ‘You know aviation is the toughest branch to get into, if you don’t put it first, you’ll never get it.’ And I’m like, ‘Really? You think I can’t get it? Okay.’ So I erased it and I put it first,” she said conspiratorially. Meeks favors this anecdote when she gives her presentation to groups of girls. “You have to really make it clear that you can be what you want in life,” she says. “It’s like they don’t ever hear it.” Meeks attended flight school in 1993 and was trained by the U.S. Army. She dabbled in military intelligence, was an army flight officer shuttling weapons-laden aircrafts for the purpose of South American counter drug operations, and was an officer in the National Guard. Meeks left the military after six years of service and continued her career in aviation as a commercial airline pilot for a regional airline in 2000. After about three years, Meeks started flying for a fractional airline, which
GREATEST PERSON OF THE WEEK
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is like a timeshare for business jets, and upon being laid off in 2010, is now a flight instructor and flies a jet for a private owner.
GIRLS WITH WINGS The little girl who wondered aloud about the lack of female pilots made a pretty astute observation. Though the first woman received her pilot’s license in 1910, only about six percent of pilots are women in the U.S.
“It’s always strange to talk to somebody and have them say, ‘Oh, you’re a pilot? You mean like a real pilot?’ As if there were any other kind.” today. Meeks is incensed by what she views as a disparaging inequality — sure, there is nothing stopping a woman from becoming a pilot, but she says there is not enough encouragement, either. For her part, Meeks began selling aviation-themed merchandise geared for girls — pink airplane t-shirts and even bejeweled airplane toe rings are on sale at the GWW online store. “I’ve been a pilot for 20 years,” she says. “It’s always strange to talk to somebody and have them say, ‘Oh,
COURTESY OF LYNDA MEEKS
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you’re a pilot? You mean like a real pilot?’ As if there were any other kind,” she huffs, recalling with some disdain all the cups of coffee she’s been asked to fetch when mistaken for a flight attendant. Her presentations to groups of girls, in classrooms or at Girl Scout troop meetings, are usually the first time any girl has seen a woman pilot. Meeks walks them through the basics of navigation, of flying and controlling an aircraft. “I show them if something seems overwhelming and you’ll never be
GREATEST PERSON OF THE WEEK
able to figure it out, what you do is to break it down into little pieces,” Meeks says. “That’s the lesson for everything you want to do in life.” Meeks has been asked if she is “a boy hater” by critics and has been told that her program seems unfair. “I’ve tried to give it to both and what ends up happening is the boys, once they find out I [was] in the army, want to know if I shot anybody and what kind of weapons I had on my helicopter. That dominates the conversation,” she says. “The boys are so assertive that the girls just really get lost. It’s better to have the room full of girls so they just feel really free to express themselves.”
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Three Girl Scouts pose in Meeks’ various uniforms. Left to right: army helicopter pilot, army officer and pilot.
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GREATEST PERSON OF THE WEEK
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Meeks and her nieces at the flight school in Medina, Ohio.
SET FOR TAKE-OFF Meeks says she hopes she is doing some good for women in aviation with her organization. “I really do think that women completely have the capacity to become pilots, and very good pilots,” she says. “Look at being a doctor. It used to be, ‘Oh my God, look a woman doctor, how insane!’” Meeks hopes to expand Aviation Inspiration Day to other airports around the country. She has also published a children’s book called Penelope Pilot, and looks to expand with a series about women in other
I show them if something seems overwhelming and you’ll never be able to figure it out, what you do is to break it down into little pieces. That’s the lesson for everything you want to do in life.” aviation-related jobs, such as mechanics or air-traffic controllers. And after 20 years of being a pilot, Meeks’ passion for her career has not waned. “I love it. I just love it,” she says, a smile in her voice. “To take off when it’s dark and to climb up above the clouds and see the sunrise. I mean, it’s a religious experience.”
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