THE HUFFINGTON POST MAGAZINE
HEARTBROKEN
Tragedy in Newtown
DECEMBER 23, 2012
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12.23.12 #28 CONTENTS
Enter POINTERS: An End to Gun Violence, Engel Kidnapping, Fallon Rumors MOVING IMAGE Q&A: Giada De Laurentiis
Voices NATHANIEL FRANK: Is Homosexuality a Sin? JASON LINKINS & RYAN GRIM: FactCheckers Sputter to Explain How Social Security Works DEVON CORNEAL: Beautiful Man Clothes QUOTED
FROM TOP: AP PHOTO/JASON DECROW; SANKEI VIA GETTY IMAGES
AMERICA GRIEVES
Exit FILM: The Best of 2012 CULTURE: The Worst Word of 2012 GREATEST PERSON OF THE WEEK: Kevin Robinson 25 QUESTIONS: Zero Dark Thirty TFU FROM THE EDITOR: After Newtown
DAM LIES
BY TOM ZELLER JR.
ON THE COVER: Photograph
by Mario Tama/Getty Images
LETTER FROM THE EDITOR
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After Newtown HIS WEEK’S ISSUE largely focuses on the tragedy in Newtown, bringing together essays and moving photos to capture the horror and heartbreak of that day. In his introduction, Saki Knafo presents a snapshot of Newtown — the “rolling green hills,” the “Christmas wreaths hang-
ART STREIBER
T
ing from the old wooden doors of the church,” idyllic features that became the backdrop for an incomprehensible act. Knafo writes about the semi-automatic way the story ripples outward, spurring community meetings, political promises, standard-issue excuses and anxiety among gun-owners, some of whom wonder if “the government will finally deprive them of the right to acquire weapons designed to kill dozens with a
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LETTER FROM THE EDITOR
squeeze of the trigger?” Elsewhere in the issue, Peter Goodman writes of the natural tendency, and the folly, of trying to make sense of such violence. In the wake of Newtown — just as in the wake of Tucson, Aurora, etc. etc. etc. — we’ve cycled through the usual questions about the shooter: “Who raised him? Was he in the military? Did he play video games? Was he in a cult? Did mental illness take him to this dark place, and did we miss the warning signs along the way?” But as Goodman writes, it’s our familiarity with this line of questioning, the fact that there is a cycle, that is the real tragedy. Because even if we could answer all those unanswerable questions, we’d still be left with one incontrovertible fact: “This man woke up in a country in which virtually anyone can easily access weapons — with little more effort than is required to put gasoline in the tank of their car — that give them the power to murder people.” Lisa Belkin, considering the massacre as a parent, writes that the natural urge after such a tragedy — “to grieve and hold our
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children close” — is not enough. Not when the numbers testify to the depth of our national crisis: Of all the children killed by guns in the 23 wealthiest countries in the world, 87 percent are American
In the wake of Newtown, we’ve cycled through the usual questions about the shooter. But as Goodman writes, it’s our familiarity with this line of questioning, the fact that there is a cycle, that is the real tragedy.” kids. The way we confront this crisis has everything to say about us as parents. But Belkin goes further: It’s not just about us as parents, but about us as citizens, about what kind of country we want to live in and raise our children to inherit. If we cannot take care of our most vulnerable citizens, we forfeit “the right to call ourselves a civilized nation.”
ARIANNA
POINTERS
OLIVIER DOULIERY-POOL/GETTY IMAGES
Enter
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OBAMA: ‘THESE TRAGEDIES MUST END’
In a speech to those grieving the tragic killings in Newtown, Conn., President Obama pledged to put a stop to gun violence. “These tragedies must end, and to end them, we must change,” he said. “We will be told that the causes of such violence are complex, and it is true. No single law, no set of laws can eliminate evil from the world or prevent every senseless act of violence in our society. But that can’t be an excuse for inaction.” Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) said she will introduce an assault weapons bill on the first day Congress reconvenes next year, and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) has signaled gun control laws would be up for debate.
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2
POINTERS
22 FRAT MEMBERS CHARGED AFTER STUDENT DIES
About a month after freshman David Bogenberger was found dead at a fraternity house at Northern Illinois University, 22 members of the frat have been charged with hazing-related counts, the AP reported. Five face felony hazing charges, and 17 face misdemeanor hazing charges. “We have no desire for revenge,” the family said in a statement. “Rather, we hope that some significant change will come from David’s death. Alcohol poisoning claims far too many young, healthy lives.”
RICHARD ENGEL KIDNAPPED FOR 5 DAYS
FROM TOP: GETTY IMAGES; AP PHOTO/AMATEUR VIDEO; AP PHOTO/FAMILY PHOTO
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NBC’s chief foreign correspondent was freed this week after being kidnapped for five days in Syria. “It was a traumatic experience,” Engel said. “We’re in good health. We’re OK.” Engel and his crew were not physically tortured, but did experience psychological torture, such as being asked to choose who would be shot first.
JETBLUE DELIVERS FAREWELL LETTERS FOR NEWTOWN BURIAL JetBlue jumped in this week to help the family of Noah Pozner, a six year old killed in the shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School. Noah’s aunt asked airlines via Twitter if they would help deliver letters — to be buried with Noah — from family members who were unable to attend the funeral. “It’s the least we can do to help a family that’s been so tragically affected,” JetBlue tweeted. Noah’s aunt tweeted back her thanks, saying, “My friends at @JetBlue really took a risk taking on this huge responsibility and we will all be eternally grateful.”
Enter
5
POINTERS
PRIVATE EQUITY FIRM PULLS OUT OF GUN BIZ
Cerberus Capital Management announced it will sell its investment in Bushmaster, the gun manufacturer that made the assault weapon used in the Newtown massacre. Cerberus will “immediately” begin selling off its assets of the Freedom Group, which has purchased Bushmaster and other top-selling brands.
JIMMY FALLON TO REPLACE JAY LENO?
6 FROM TOP: AP PHOTO/ALEX BRANDON; PAUL DRINKWATER/NBC/NBCU PHOTO BANK VIA GETTY IMAGES
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There could be another late-night squabble in our future — NBC execs are exploring the option of replacing Leno with Late Night host Jimmy Fallon in 2014, the NY Daily News reports. Conan O’Brien took over The Tonight Show in 2009, but only for seven months before Leno moved from primetime back to his original slot. Fallon riffed on the incident earlier this year: “If there’s one thing I’ve learned from Dave and Conan, it’s that hosting this show is a one-way ticket to not hosting The Tonight Show.”
THAT’S VIRAL ‘I AM ADAM LANZA’S MOTHER’
A selection of the week’s most talked-about stories. HEADLINES TO VIEW FULL STORIES
ANONYMOUS GETS THE BEST OF THE WESTBORO BAPTISTS
FOX ANCHOR BOOGIES DURING COMMERCIAL BREAK
SOMEONE TRIED TO KILL JUSTIN BIEBER
SNL’S MOVING TRIBUTE TO THE NEWTON SHOOTING VICTIMS
Q&A
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HEIDI GUTMAN/NBC NEWSWIRE
Giada De Laurentiis on Guy FieriGate, and Her Favorite Celebrity Chef “If you’re going to Guy Fieri’s restaurant and you want to get Thomas Keller-style food, you’re not going to get that. That’s not what he’s about.”
Giada De Laurentiis is the host of Food Network’s Giada at Home and author of Weeknights With Giada.
FOR THE FULL INTERVIEW, VISIT HUFFPOST LIVE
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The Week in Photos From Michigan to New Delhi, ahead find our selections of this week’s most compelling images. London, England 12.11.2012 Japanese artist Mariko Mori’s “Tom Na H-iu II” is displayed at The Royal Academy of Arts.
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Winchester, England 12.11.2012 Winchester Cathedral choristers enjoy the artificial ice rink set up alongside the church. PHOTO OR ILLUSTRATION CREDIT TK
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Baltimore, Maryland 1216.2012 Denver Broncos running back Knowshon Moreno kicks the air in celebration of his touchdown during the second half of a game against the Baltimore Ravens.
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Lansing, Michigan 12.11.2012 People queue up for entrance to the Michigan State Capitol’s House Chamber, where a vote was scheduled to take place on right-towork legislation. Republicans won, making union dues voluntary in the state. PHOTO OR ILLUSTRATION CREDIT TK
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London, England 12.13.2012 A man climbs out of the Serpentine lake after an early morning swim, as extremely cold weather conditions gripped the UK. PHOTO OR ILLUSTRATION CREDIT TK
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Madrid, Spain 12.16.2012
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Health workers hold a sign reading “Resistance� during a protest against cuts to public health care and the privatization of hospitals. About 4,000 operations have been suspended in Madrid since the strikes began.
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London, England 12.14.2012 A Sainsbury’s employee inspects an automated sorting area at the store’s Waltham Point distribution depot. The supermarket chain makes more than 1,800 deliveries a week to its 83 stores in the London, Hertfordshire and Essex regions. PHOTO OR ILLUSTRATION CREDIT TK
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Cairo, Egypt 12.14.2012 A man holds up a Quran as supporters of Egyptian President Mohamed Morsi and Muslim Brotherhood members chant around him during a rally. PHOTO OR ILLUSTRATION CREDIT TK
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AP PHOTO/MUHAMMED MUHEISEN
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Maaret Misreen, Syria 12.12.2012 A Syrian boy is wedged between men as they wait outside a bakery shop to buy bread. PHOTO OR ILLUSTRATION CREDIT TK
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Gaza City 12.16.2012 Masked Palestinian militants from Islamic Jihad complete a training exercise on the outskirts of Gaza City. PHOTO OR ILLUSTRATION CREDIT TK
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New Delhi, India 12.11.2012 Blind athlete Durga Midya races during the 18th National Sports Meet for the Blind. PHOTO OR ILLUSTRATION CREDIT TK
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Pyongyang, North Korea 12.16.2012 North Korean military members bow before an image of Kim Jong Il on the eve of his first death anniversary, during a national meeting of top party officials. PHOTO OR ILLUSTRATION CREDIT TK
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Voices
NATHANIEL FRANK
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MARK WILSON/GETTY IMAGES
Is Homosexuality a Sin? WHEN SEN. MARCO RUBIO (RFla.) said earlier this month that his faith teaches that homosexuality is a sin, he was clearly speaking to social conservatives. But with the 2016 election in mind, he was simultaneously moderating his rhetoric, so he also said that while his faith “informs” him “as a policy maker,” he would never use it “to pass judgment on people.” It’s a logically dubious position. If a set of judgments about people informs you as a policy maker, then how can you avoid judging people, and equally importantly, why should you? Rubio, who has called for Republicans to appeal more to minorities and immigrants, was trying to soften his moralizing as part of a new brand of Republican
Sen. Marco Rubio
thinking after the party’s White House bid failed decisively last month. The brand takes the one page from the George W. Bush playbook that the GOP still finds useful: the so-called “compassionate conservatism” embodied
Nathaniel Frank is the author of Unfriendly Fire: How the Gay Ban Undermines the Military and Weakens America
Voices by the principle of “hate the sin, love the sinner.” As Rubio put it, “there isn’t a person in this room that isn’t guilty of sin.” This is small consolation for gays, who shouldn’t have to feel that expressing their love sexually is a shameful transgression that’s tolerated merely because other evil things are, too. But Rubio was trying to walk a fine line that’s increasingly tough for Republicans to pull off: salvaging their coalition of evangelicals and more moderate conservatives by moralizing and not moralizing at the same time. There’s a better way to walk this line, but it’ll require genuine leadership from smart conservatives who are willing to persistently explain to their religious base what the Bible really asks them to believe, cleansed of the perverse interpretations peddled in recent decades by a politicized religious right. The Bible, both the Old and New Testaments, actually contains two different kinds of sin. One is an act considered morally wrong because it’s hurtful or dangerous. This includes obvious violations of the social contract, such as murder and theft, as well as
NATHANIEL FRANK
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sentiments that are discouraged because they can lead to unfairness or harm: greed, envy, idleness and arrogance. The second kind of sin is a violation against social conventions. This is where the word “moral” comes from, as in “social mores.” These refer to practices and beliefs widely
Rubio was trying to walk a fine line that’s increasingly tough for Republicans to pull off: moralizing and not moralizing at the same time.” shared by your community, but which are not intrinsically beneficial or harmful. These mores exist as a way to bind the community together, often in opposition to another group. Which kind of sin is homosexuality, according to the Bible? Certainly in an era of tribal rivalries and high infant mortality, procreative sex was encouraged as necessary to population growth. This, at least, is a popular explanation of how both masturbation and homosexuality became taboo in biblical times and would place them in the moral category of intrinsic harm.
Voices Instead, what becomes clear from actually reading the Bible on homosexuality is that the antigay taboo is, above all, a badge of team membership — of a piece with opposition to outsiders and nonbelievers. Leviticus appears to condemn same-sex desire unequivocally, forbidding “lying with a man” as an “abomination.” But the word normally translated as “abomination” is more properly understood as simply “taboo” — something forbidden by custom, largely because it’s associated with other groups. Indeed, the literal meaning of “taboo” is “set apart.” The Old Testament taboo against homosexuality appears in a passage that’s all about the duty of Jews to honor and obey God, meant to set them apart from pagans. It begins with God telling the Israelites to worship only him and follow only his rules and not those of the whacky Egyptians and Canaanites just because they may pass through their lands. In other words, when in Rome, do not do as the Romans do, or you’ll mark yourself as a member of the wrong team. Like the Hebrew scriptures, the New Testament appears to condemn homosexuality in no uncertain terms, most notably in Paul’s
NATHANIEL FRANK
letter to the Romans, which bemoans men who relinquish their natural function and “burn in their lust” for each other. But it turns out that this desire is not so much the cause of harm but the punishment for a much greater violation: denying God. Like the Jews, Christians threw homosexuality into a bucket of no-nos to solidify their team membership against nonbelievers and outsiders. Looked at in proper context, the biblical taboo against same-sex desire was a product of one key fact: that foreigners and apostates practiced it. That fact, above all else, appears to be what made it unacceptable, more than anything intrinsic to same-sex acts, such as their association with depopulation. The distinction between moral rules designed to prevent harm and moral rules meant solely to mark team membership is critical, and blurring it — as the religious right has done for decades — is itself a moral transgression that creates more harm than it prevents, and not only for those who are wrongly judged but for politicians like Rubio who continue to think they must square a circle instead of reexamining the shape altogether.
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Voices
JASON LINKINS AND RYAN GRIM
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GLOWIMAGES / ALAMY
Fact-Checkers Sputter and Flop Attempting to Explain How Social Security Works
gaggle of fact-checkers recently attempted to bring clarity to the question of whether Social Security adds to the deficit. Much as they did during the campaign, the fact-checkers have instead confused what is in fact quite a simple issue. Social Security, by law, does not add to the deficit. It is not a driver of long-term debt. We’ve been over this. The reason no one can get it right is because in this season of the fiscal cliff, no one is getting anything right. It’s a
Jason Linkins is a political reporter and Ryan Grim is the Washington bureau chief for The Huffington Post.
Voices full-on headless chicken panic. Everyone needs to calm down, about a lot of things, but especially about Social Security, which does not even have to come up during the “fiscal cliff talks” because it’s irrelevant to the situation and will only complicate everything needlessly. Sweet nutty, here comes the Associated Press, relying on a familiar line of reasoning, arguing that the program does in fact add to the deficit because the government “spent that money on other programs, reducing the amount it had to borrow from the public, including foreign investors... In return, the Treasury Department issued special bonds to Social Security. The bonds are now valued at $2.7 trillion. They are accounted for in two Social Security trust funds, one for the retirement program and one for the disability program. The bonds pay interest like other Treasury notes and are backed by the full faith and credit of the U.S. government.” Social Security adds to the debt if it spends more money than it takes in, so let’s look at how that’s doing in the most recent fiscal year (see graph). Okay, then! To say that Social Security added to the deficit because it handed
JASON LINKINS AND RYAN GRIM
money to the federal government is the same as saying that foreign investors or grandmothers or pension funds who bought U.S. bonds added to the deficit. Besides, what did the AP think the U.S. government would do with the money? Invest it in tech stocks? Hide it in a mattress? Replenish its gold supply? Of course it spent the money. Instead of confusing itself and its readers, the AP could simply have referred to a 2011 Senate hearing, chaired by Max Baucus (DMont.), during which two of the foremost Social Security experts — one liberal, one conservative — answered the question. Nancy Altman, head of Social Security Works, which opposes cuts to the program, read the law to the lawmakers. “Social Security is not part of the budget. So that $14.3 trillion debt that we are at, the limit that you are going to have to raise… if you cut Social Security, that $14.3 trillion does not change. It does not
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Voices put any room into the debt limit.” Baucus turned to Charles Blahous, a Social Security trustee who is also with the conservative Hoover Institution. “Do you agree with that, Dr. Blahous?” “I do agree with that,” he said. Let’s talk once again about Social Security solvency, shall we? The way Social Security works is that current workers make contributions, from their paychecks, to current retirees. (Too many people have been led to believe that they are “paying in” to their own Social Security savings — contributions will be made by a younger generation.) The solvency of Social Security is at risk if the following two things happen: 1) the number of recipients overwhelmingly outnumber the number of contributors and 2) American lawmakers forget how to do math. What we refer to as the “Social Security solvency crisis” refers to a large population of Americans (the “Baby Boom Generation”) entering their retirement years at a time when the number of contributors is less than ideal. Hopefully, someone at some point is going to remember how to solve a simple math problem, raise or remove the income caps on contributions, and then
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we’ll never have to worry about Social Security solvency again. And let’s not forget when Ronald Reagan and Tip O’Neill reformed Social Security, it’s more than possible they were aware of the Baby Boom generation. In fact, one of them, Nancy Altman, worked on the commission that reformed So-
Social Security, by law, does not add to the deficit. The reason no one can get it right is because here in this season of the fiscal cliff, no one is getting anything right. It’s a full-on headless chicken panic.” cial Security. So we asked Altman, a baby boomer, if she was aware in the 80s that she existed. She said she was, and that other people were, too. So they took the Baby Boom into consideration. That’s why it’s solvent late into the 2030s. Knowing this makes all the handwringing from fact-checkers all the more dumb. Calm down, learn the subject guys, and do try to keep on task — discussing matters that are actually germane to the fiscal cliff while we are having to talk about it every single day.
Voices
DEVON CORNEAL
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ALTRENDO IMAGES/GETTY IMAGES
Beautiful Man Clothes WE TOOK LITTLE DUDE to a family wedding — his first — and to mark the occasion with the solemnity it deserved, I spent a night trying to assemble an outfit for him from a collection of ratty jeans and outgrown button-down shirts. Watching me with curios-
ity as I tried to identify the pants with the fewest stains, Little Dude asked, “Mommy, will I get to wear beautiful man clothes?” Not entirely sure what the right
Devon Corneal is a lawyer and mother living in New Jersey.
Voices answer was, I said, “Yes.” Inside, I thought, Crap, what are beautiful man clothes? and How do I get some? and When did five-yearold boys start caring about what they wear? Up until that moment, I assumed boys would wear whatever was put in front of them. This had generally been the case with my son. Except for a request for truck designs on his underwear and t-shirts, he would wear almost anything. As I looked at the khaki pants and the white shirt that technically had buttons even though the sleeves were a tad too short, I saw them in a new light. Was it possible my little car-obsessed boy was branching out? Was he a budding fashionista or just a kid who paid attention to what he saw in the mirror? Was my cavalier attitude towards his clothing a sign that I was pigeonholing him into a gender stereotype that didn’t apply to him? I am obscenely practical when it comes to kids and clothes. As long as you grow out of them, I buy them on sale, at a consignment shop or accept hand-me downs. I won’t spend more than 10 bucks on a shirt that may or may not make it through a given
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season. I stockpile clothes from yard sales and save them until Little Dude grows into them. I do cave on underwear though, because, ewwww, gross. On everything else, there’s nothing a good washing won’t cure. So even though I felt a little guilty about the patchwork outfit I had chosen — it was acceptable but not beautiful — I was certain no one would care or notice and
Little Dude thinks those are beautiful because they symbolize what it means not only to be a man in general, but also to be the man who looms largest in his life.” that he would forget about wanting something more visually appealing. Honestly, I thought, it was just an outfit. I packed and we boarded our flight. Later that night I told Dapper Husband about Little Dude’s question. I was cavalier, even flippant. Dapper Husband was not. He took Little Dude’s question seriously because he understood something that I did not. Where I saw a little boy being a too in-
Voices terested in clothing, Dapper Husband understood that this was not about style. It was about a boy wanting to dress like his dad. Little Dude watches his dad get ready for work in the morning and that ritual involves something more than a ripped pair of jeans and a cement mixer t-shirt. It requires slacks, a belt, the occasional coat and tie. Little Dude thinks those are beautiful because they symbolize what it means not only to be a man in general, but also to be the man who looms largest in his life. I think that is beautiful. Which is how I found myself at a mall outside of Chicago a few hours before the wedding buying Little Dude his first jacket and tie. We steered our son to a well-known children’s clothing store and left 30 minutes later with a garish tartan tie (Little Dude’s choice), blue blazer (my husband’s pick), a belt (on sale!) and a new white shirt that fit him perfectly. I cringed at the price tag and wondered if I could make his birthday party a semi-formal. I let my misgivings go once we got back to our hotel. Little Dude listened as his dad explained how to tuck in his shirt and buckle his belt. He put on his socks and
DEVON CORNEAL
shoes and sat patiently as my husband knotted his tie and told him when it was ok to unbutton his jacket. I had nothing to contribute to this tutorial, having never mastered the art of the Windsor knot or how to match a patterned tie to a differently patterned shirt, so I sat on the sidelines, an observer to a rite of passage. I took pictures to capture this step away from childhood.
This wasn’t about fashion or beauty, it was about belonging.” I watched as my green-eyed boy walked over to the mirror and puffed out his chest. He tugged on his tie and stared at himself with a look of sheer delight. He was so proud, it made my heart hurt. I looked over at the outfit I had originally chosen, still hanging in the closet, and wondered how I could have been so wrong about something so important. This wasn’t about fashion or beauty, it was about belonging. Clothes don’t make the man (or the boy), but sometimes they make a moment.
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Voices
QUOTED “Are we really prepared to say that we’re powerless in the face of such carnage, that the politics are too hard?”
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“ Now you’re winning.”
—HuffPost commenter SantaMonican on Charlie Sheen donating $75,000 to a girl with cancer
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—President Obama in response to the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting
The Rush Limbaughs and the echo chambers around the country have really manufactured this.
— Senator Tom Harkin,
(D-Iowa) discussing the fiscal cliff on HuffPost Live
“ The greatest chefs in the world are men. The greatest interior designers, clothing designers and hair stylists are also men. I agree with this gender bias. However, the media still depicts only women baking, using household products and eating yogurt.
—HuffPost commenter Richard_Riggs on the gender-neutral Easy-Bake oven
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QUOTED
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I use a Mac, actually, at home. I’ve always used Mac, an iPhone, and an iPad. —Young Sohn, Samsung’s chief strategy officer in an interview with MIT’s Technology Review, as Samsung’s bitter legal battle with Apple over mobile technology patents drags on
“ I wish to god she had had an M4 in her office.”
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—Rep. Louie Gohmert
(R-Texas) to Fox News Sunday, speaking of Sandy Hook Elementary School principal Dawn Hochsprung, who was killed in the shooting
“ You don’t earn a cent when someone does a song about having ‘Moves Like Jagger.’” —Mick Jagger
on the Late Show with David Letterman, when listing the top 10 things he has learned after 50 years in the music business
“ One of the nine most powerful judges in the country doesn’t know the difference between lovemaking and murder. This is a serious problem.”
—HuffPost commenter onasphere
on Antonin Scalia defending legal writings some view as anti-gay
AP PHOTO/ALEX BRANDON
12.23.12 #28 FEATURES AMERICA GRIEVES: TRAGEDY AT SANDY HOOK DAM LIES
AMERICA GRIEVES: TRAGEDY AT SANDY HOOK HUFFINGTON REFLECTS ON THE INCOMPREHENSIBLE SHOOTING AT AN ELEMENTARY SCHOOL IN NEWTOWN, CONNECTICUT.
N E W T O W N ,
C O N N .
It is hard not to be struck by the beauty of the town. The rolling green hills, the Christmas wreaths hanging from the old wooden doors of the church, the stone sidewalks gleaming in the rain. As is often the case when an armed madman decides for incomprehensible reasons to destroy as many lives as he can, it happened in a place where even any act of violence would have been hard to comprehend — but then again, what happened in Newtown would have been incomprehensible anywhere.
According to many reports, this particular incomprehensible act has so far done more than any other in recent memory to motivate the public. People who have never suffered as a result of gun violence, and who have never given much thought to it, have been organizing community meetings aimed at petitioning elected officials to ban assault weapons. In urban neighborhoods around the country where people have rarely, if ever, felt totally secure, gun buyback events have seen an uptick in participation. And on the AM dial, the conservative stations have been abuzz with calls from listeners who fear that this could
be a watershed moment: Will the government finally deprive them of the right to acquire weapons designed to kill dozens with a squeeze of the trigger? In Newtown, the outward response has had little to do with politics. People have been lighting candles and placing stuffed animals on the sidewalk and doing whatever else they can to simply show their support. Four days after the shooting, a local man named John Fleming stood on a corner across the street from the school. “I just can’t seem to concentrate at home,” he said. “This is something I can’t quite figure out yet.” — Saki Knafo
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AP PHOTO/JESSICA HILL
Sandy Hook Elementary School, Newtown, Conn. 12.14.2012 Jillian Soto tries to get information about her sister, Victoria Soto, 27, the first-grade teacher who was killed after managing to hide her students in a closet, saving their lives.
AMERICA GRIEVES: TRAGEDY AT SANDY HOOK
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The weather was gloomy two days after the massacre as Newtown resident Palmer Chiaepetta walked with his sons Jonathan, 2, and Jackson, 8.
MARIO TAMA/GETTY IMAGES
AMERICA GRIEVES: TRAGEDY AT SANDY HOOK
Newtown, Conn. 12.16.2012 Mourners gathered at a memorial for victims near the school on Sunday.
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AP PHOTO/DAVID GOLDMAN
AMERICA GRIEVES: TRAGEDY AT SANDY HOOK
Newtown High School, Newtown, Conn. 12.16.2012 A memorial service sounds over a loudspeaker outside Newtown High School as mourners gather outside to listen. PHOTO OR ILLUSTRATION CREDIT TK
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AMERICA GRIEVES: TRAGEDY AT SANDY HOOK
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St. Rose of Lima Catholic Church, Newtown, Conn. 12.14.2012 Connecticut Gov. Dannel Malloy bows his head during a moment of silence at a vigil service held at St. Rose of Lima Catholic Church on the day of the shooting.
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St. Rose of Lima Catholic Church, Newtown, Conn. 12.14.2012 A crowd of hundreds gathered outside of St. Rose of Lima Catholic Church during a healing service held in memory of the victims. PHOTO OR ILLUSTRATION CREDIT TK
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Newtown, Conn. 12.15.2012 A Newtown resident holds a sign as she sits at an intersection up the road from the scene of the shooting. PHOTO OR ILLUSTRATION CREDIT TK
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P E T E R
S .
VOICES
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G O O D M A N
Gun Control Reform Is Long Overdue AFTER THE SHOCK AND THE HORROR comes the speculation: Why did an obviously disturbed young man enter an elementary school in Connecticut and gun down scores of people, many of them children? We will root through his background for clues: Who raised him? Was he in the military? Did he play video games? Was he in a cult? Did mental illness take him to this dark place, and did we miss the warning signs along the way? We will piece together an approximation of a workable narrative that somehow inevitably ends with this man going into a school and doing what he did — because the ending is the one part we can get fully right.
But there is really only one fact that makes such violence comprehensible: This man woke up in a country in which virtually anyone can purchase weapons — with little more effort than is required to put gasoline in the tank of their car — that give them the power to murder people. That is the one fact that demands to be changed. The impetus to make sense of unspeakable tragedy is a basic part of humanity. Something both terrible and extraordinary has happened, something we are eager to avoid envisioning as the fate for our own children, so our minds search for the particulars that might render this situation unique. We try to distinguish this young man from any other young man who might enter our own local elementary school.
Peter S. Goodman is executive business editor of The Huffington Post
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But the underlying tragedy of this latest American catastrophe is how familiar this sort of spectacle has become. The television coverage and the reactions of prominent people all seem to unfold along the lines of a preconceived script: shock and heartbreak, then biographical inquiry, before we stick the story on the guy who pulled the trigger and move on. We know what to do, what to say, what to ask, because we have been here before far too many times, absorbing the images of horrifying violence and imagining what it would be like to hear the news if those children were your own. This is insane. It is madness that we continue to allow such bloodshed to unfold, occasioning predictable dismay while the gun lobby keeps buying off our politicians and ensuring that the rules never change. As I type this, we do not know what prompted this man to kill those people in that school, but we know that the next disturbed person with similarly murderous inclinations will be able to get their hands on the means to follow through. In every country, some people lose their jobs and become en-
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This is insane. It is madness that we continue to allow such bloodshed to unfold, occasioning predictable dismay while the gun lobby keeps ensuring that the rules never change.�
raged. Some suffer mental illness and seize on fantastical notions. They are spurned and hatch crackpot schemes and seek revenge. In every country, some people are disturbed, broken-hearted or angry enough to murder. What is special about this country is the extent of the damage that such people are able to inflict when the urge comes. As we inevitably speculate and sift through biographical facts in this process of seeking reassurance, there is one fact above all others that needs to be altered: We have to make it harder for people to get their hands on guns.
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Sandy Hook Elementary, Newtown, Conn. 12.14.2012 Connecticut State Police lead a line of children away from the school in the aftermath of the shooting. PHOTO OR ILLUSTRATION CREDIT TK
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Sandy Hook Elementary, Newtown, Conn. 12.14.2012 A distressed woman talks to a state police officer at the scene of the shooting outside the school. PHOTO OR ILLUSTRATION CREDIT TK
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Newtown, Conn. 12.16.2012 A woman lays flowers at a makeshift memorial for the victims on Sunday. PHOTO OR ILLUSTRATION CREDIT TK
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Newtown, Conn. 12.15.2012 Firefighters pay their respects at a memorial held the day after the shooting near the elementary school. PHOTO OR ILLUSTRATION CREDIT TK
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St.HUFFINGTON Rose of Lima 12.23.12 Catholic Church, Newtown, Conn 12.16.2012
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A woman makes the sign of the cross at the makeshift memorial outside of St. Rose of Lima Catholic Church before the Sunday Mass.
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Sandy Hook Elementary, Newtown, Conn. 12.15.2012 Lt. J. Paul Vance of the Conn. State Police is swarmed by reporters as he hands out the list of victims of the shooting. PHOTO OR ILLUSTRATION CREDIT TK
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Reliant Stadium, Houston, Texas 12.16.2012 Number 99 of the Houston Texans J.J. Watt flashes his glove with a simple tribute for the victims of the massacre prior to the game against the Indianapolis Colts. PHOTO OR ILLUSTRATION CREDIT TK
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L I S A
VOICES
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B E L K I N
Gun Control Is a Parenting Issue MORE THAN A DOZEN CHILDREN went to elementary school last Friday and were dead before lunch. White House spokesman Jay Carney said it was not the day to talk about gun control. I disagree. That’s all we should talk about. We are heartbroken, yes. But saying that will fix nothing. It won’t bring anyone back, and it won’t keep this from happening again. And of course we know the parents of Newtown could have
been any one of us. That’s important to remember, but it isn’t enough, because the knowing doesn’t change the fact that we could still be next. So we can’t just do as we did after Columbine, after Virginia Tech, after Aurora. We can’t just grieve and hold our children close. We have to demand that our country earn the right to call itself a civilized nation. We need to do this because our central job as parents — maybe our only job, really — is to keep our children safe so they can grow up. Easy access to guns keeps us from doing that job.
Lisa Belkin is the senior columnist on life, work and family at The Huffington Post
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A study in the Journal of Trauma and Acute Care Surgery found that the gun murder rate in the U.S. is almost 20 times higher than the next 22 richest and most populous nations combined. Every one of those nations has stricter gun control laws. And then there’s this fact: add together all the gun deaths in the 23 wealthiest countries in the world and 80 percent of those are American deaths. Of all the children killed by guns in those nations, 87 percent are American kids. Please don’t tell me that if only the staff at Sandy Hook Elementary School were also armed that this would have ended well. It might have ended differently, but concealed weapons in the teachers lounge is not the way we want to raise our kids. Jose Luis Nunez had a handgun in order to protect his son. The four year old accidentally shot himself in the face with it in Houston last Tuesday. Joseph V. Loughrey had one for the same reason. His 7-year-old son Craig died earlier this month outside of Pittsburgh when that handgun accidentally went off while the boy was getting into his safety seat in front of a gun store.
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Our central job as parents — maybe our only job, really — is to keep our children safe so they can grow up. Easy access to guns keeps us from doing that job.”
And that was just during the week of the Sandy Hook shooting. The same week that the NRA proudly tweeted it had reached 1.7 million “likes” on Facebook. We cherish individuality in America. We see raising children as no one else’s business, and we have never managed to band together as a “parenting” bloc. It is time. Guns are a parenting issue, and we need to control them in the name of the children who died. Even more, we need to do it in the name of their mothers and fathers. So cry. Comfort your kids. Curse, and pray. Then pick up the phone, a pen, a keyboard, or your checkbook and make your demands heard.
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Newtown, Conn. 12.14.2012 Parents leave a meet-up area after being reunited with their children following the shooting. PHOTO OR ILLUSTRATION CREDIT TK
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Newtown, Conn. 12.14.2012 People embrace at a firehouse serving as a meet-up point for children and their families following the shooting. PHOTO OR ILLUSTRATION CREDIT TK
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The White House, Washington, D.C. 12.14.2012 An emotional President Obama wipes his eye as he addresses the Sandy Hook shooting in the briefing room of the White House. PHOTO OR ILLUSTRATION CREDIT TK
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Newtown, Conn. 12.16.2012 A police officer relocates items from a memorial in the middle of a busy intersection to the nearby St. Rose of Lima Catholic Church. PHOTO OR ILLUSTRATION CREDIT TK
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Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints, Newtown, Conn. 12.15.2012 Robbie Parker, father of six-yearold victim Emilie Parker, center, is embraced by his brother-in-law Robert Garrett, right, as he looks over a statement he prepared for a news conference on Saturday. PHOTO OR ILLUSTRATION CREDIT TK
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Trinity Church, Newtown, Conn. 12.16.2012 A woman hugs her daughter on the steps of Trinity Church.
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Newtown, Conn. 12.16.2012 Newtown resident Dilma Steiner visits a sidewalk memorial for the victims. PHOTO OR ILLUSTRATION CREDIT TK
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DATA
Congress’ Gun Control Report Card
CHART: CHRIS SPURLOCK; SOURCE: PROJECT VOTE SMART
BETWEEN 2008 AND 2012 all but 25 members of the incoming 113th Congress established voting records on gun control. The NRA uses those records to create a grade for each member. This table, based on Project Vote Smart data, shows an inverse of those grades. High grades indicate a history of voting for stricter gun restrictions; low grades indicate opposition to restrictions.
OVERALL GRADES DEMOCRATS:
REPUBLICANS:
INDEPENDENTS:
B+ D- A
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Charlotte Bacon, 6 Daniel Barden, 7 Rachel Davino, 29 Olivia Engel, 6 Josephine Gay, 7 Ana M. Marquez-Greene, 6 Dylan Hockley, 6 Dawn Hochsprung, 47 T H E
V I C T I M S
Madeleine F. Hsu, 6 Catherine V. Hubbard, 6 Chase Kowalski, 7 Nancy Lanza, 52 Jesse Lewis, 6 James Mattioli , 6 Grace McDonnell, 7 Anne Marie Murphy, 52 Emilie Parker, 6 Jack Pinto, 6 Noah Pozner, 6 Caroline Previdi, 6 Jessica Rekos, 6 Avielle Richman, 6 Lauren Rousseau, 30 Mary Sherlach, 56 Victoria Soto, 27 Benjamin Wheeler, 6 Allison N. Wyatt, 6
ARE NUCLEAR REGULATORS FAVORING SECRECY OVER SAFETY?
D A M
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by TOM ZELLER JR.
ILLUSTRATION BY MARTIN GEE
RICHARD H. PERKINS AND LARRY CRISCIONE are precise and formal men with more than 20 years of combined government and military service. Perkins held posts at the Department of Energy and the National Nuclear Security Administration before joining the Nuclear Regulatory Commission’s Division of Risk Analysis in 2008. Criscione landed at the agency a year later, after five years aboard the USS Georgia as a submarine warfare officer. ¶ Now both men are also reluctant whistleblowers, stepping out publicly to accuse the NRC of being both disconcertingly sluggish and inappropriately secretive about severe — and in one case, potentially catastrophic — flood risks at nuclear plants that sit downstream from large dams.
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Larry Criscione was a submarine warfare officer before joining the NRC.
COURTESY OF RICHARD H. PERKINS
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A number of nuclear safety advocates who have looked into the matter in recent weeks have echoed their complaints, and a collection of documents obtained by The Huffington Post — including a four-year-old internal communication plan for NRC officials seeking to headoff criticism of its handling of the dam threat, as well as detailed correspondence between Criscione and NRC leadership on the issue — appears to lend credence to the engineers’ concerns. Taken together, the documents and charges shed new light on an agency that has been repeatedly criticized for allowing plant owners to delay crucial safety improvements for years, and for diligently withholding information not as a way of protecting the public interest, but as a way of protecting itself. “When you’re working with sensitive information, you just don’t talk about it, so what I’m doing I find to be both perverse and uncomfortable,” Perkins said. “But I had to do it.” The NRC argues that it has worked swiftly and diligently to address the safety issue that prompted the engineers to speak out, which concerns the risk that certain nuclear power plants would experience severe and potentially catastrophic flooding should nearby dams succumb to mechanical or engineering failures — or even to the increasingly
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Richard H. Perkins’ review of dam-flood threats was only released in part to the public by the NRC.
“ … WHAT I’M DOING I FIND TO BE BOTH PERVERSE AND UNCOMFORTABLE.” unpredictable whims of Mother Nature. Further investigation of the issue is underway, the NRC says, as part of an industry-wide review of U.S. plants sparked by the earthquake and tsunami that caused multiple nuclear reactor
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meltdowns at a facility in Fukushima, Japan, last year. Details relating to the flood threat have been appropriately withheld, sometimes over many years, the agency says, in order to prevent terrorists or other nefarious actors from somehow exploiting it. Scott Burnell, a spokesman for the NRC, calls the matter one of incomplete context.
HUFFINGTON Tokyo Electric12.23.12 Power employees check out the No.4 reactor in Fukishima which was damaged in the earthquake in 2011.
“It’s fair to say that when you draw a Venn diagram of safety issues and security issues, you will find areas of overlap where the line might not be as bright as one might think when looking at the situation from the outside,” Burnell said. “If you don’t have the full context it can be very difficult to draw that bright line.” But Perkins and Criscione, who raised alarms on the issue independently of one another, say they believe that defense is bogus, and that the agency is invok-
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“ OUR MANDATE IS TO PROMOTE SAFETY, AND SOMETIMES THAT INVOLVES WITHHOLDING INFORMATION FOR SECURITY’S SAKE.” ing security concerns in order to hide its failure to address a persistent and wellunderstood safety threat. “It is hypocritical for the NRC — or any government agency — under the guise of security, to withhold information from the American public concerning a potentially significant public safety vulnerability, yet take no real action to study and correct the supposed security vulnerability,” Criscione said. “If we believe there is a security vulnerability, we need to take measures to address it and not merely withhold it from public discussion.”
REDACTIONS AND INACTION
Perkins was tasked in 2010 with spearheading what he says was always supposed to become a publicly available review of the dam-flood threat at U.S. nuclear power plants. Instead, he says, NRC management pushed back almost immediately to exclude certain information from the analysis. As a career government employee accustomed to the careful handling of nuclear-related information, Perkins says
the static came as a surprise. In his estimation, none of the information he and his team had compiled would normally be withheld from the public, though he added that he could not discuss specifics without jeopardizing his job. When the report was completed and shared internally at the NRC in July 2011, Perkins said he felt he had ultimately prevailed in keeping most of the information he considered pertinent in the report. But he was chagrined when a public version was released last March with substantial portions of the document blacked out. The NRC has argued that the redactions were appropriate, and made in consultation with other government agencies, but Perkins is skeptical. “Our mandate is to promote safety, and sometimes that involves withholding information for security’s sake,” Perkins said. “To keep bad people from knowing how best to attack us, say, or to prevent our adversaries from knowing how we might come after them, or to buy time while a serious vulnerability is corrected. These are all reasons that you might redact information,” he continued. “But the redactions by the NRC did not promote safe-
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AP PHOTO/MARY ANN CHASTAIN
A 2005 photo of the Oconee Nuclear Station in Seneca, S.C., one of the oldest nuclear power plants in the United States.
ty in any of these ways. The actions have, in fact, allowed a very dangerous scenario to continue unaddressed for years.” An unredacted version of Perkins’s report, obtained by The Huffington Post in October, revealed that much of the blacked-out information was publicly available in other documents and websites already published online, including simple maps of where nuclear plants stood in relation to upstream dams or
the height of flood walls designed to protect safety equipment. Threats of varying significance were identified in Perkins’s analysis at the Ft. Calhoun station in Nebraska, the Prairie Island facility in Minnesota and the Watts Bar plant in Tennessee, among more than two-dozen others. The document also cited analyses by Duke Energy, owner of the Oconee Nuclear Station in South Carolina, that were performed as far back as the early 1990s, suggesting that the NRC had known for some time about the flood threats. Those analyses showed that the
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five-foot flood wall protecting crucial safety equipment at Oconee would prove inadequate in the event of a catastrophic failure of the Jocassee Dam, located 11 miles upstream on Lake Keowee. If that dam failed completely, the report suggested, floodwaters as high as 16.8 feet would inundate the Oconee facility, and a meltdown would be a virtual certainty. A timeline released by the NRC on Thursday in response to a Freedom of Information Act request suggests that the agency was aware of the dam flood threat at Oconee as far back as 1994, but over the following two decades, Duke repeatedly said it regarded the odds of the Jocassee Dam failing as exceedingly slim. NRC staff continued to raise concerns with Duke over that long time period, but at no time did the agency threaten to shut the facility down, or otherwise force the company to fully assess and correct what appeared to be a risk of unusually high magnitude. By 2008, NRC had even prepared an internal communications plan to deal with potential questions relating to the vulnerability, which was still unaddressed. The plan, a heavily redacted version of which was released this week by the NRC in response to a Freedom of Information Act request, suggests that by at least 2005, NRC staff had “discovered that the licensee had erroneously computed a
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An arial view of the Jocassee Dam in South Carolina.
random rupture frequency for the Jocassee Dam, a frequency significantly lower than what could be justified based on actual data.” The communications plan also revealed that virtually all plants facing similar threats from upstream dams — nearly three dozen — had used Duke’s faulty arithmetic as a guide in predicting their own vulnerabilities. By NRC’s own calculus — which was blacked out in the public release of Perkins’s report — the odds of failure in any given year of a large rock-fill dam like the one at Jocassee were about 1 in 3,600. For the Oconee plant, that amounted to a one
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Nuclear reactor operators Chris Heniz, left, and Roger Patterson respond to an emergency scenario on a simulator of a digital control panel at Oconee Nuclear Station in Seneca, S.C.
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in 163 chance of a catastrophic flood in any one of the 22 years remaining on its operating license — a risk the agency itself described as being “an order of magnitude larger” than Duke’s estimate. David Lochbaum, a nuclear engineer and safety advocate with the Union of Concerned Scientists, a Cambridge, Mass.-based advocacy group, calculated that the 34 reactors highlighted in Perkins’s analysis are downstream from a total of more than 50 dams — half of them roughly the size of the Jocassee Dam. “Assuming the NRC’s failure rate applies to all of those dams,” Lochbaum noted in an analysis posted to the group’s website, “the probability that one will fail in the next 40 years is roughly 25 percent — a 1 in 4 chance.” The NRC told The Huffington Post that ongoing re-analysis of flooding hazards from all sources — required by the NRC as part of its post-Fukushima safety analysis — “will determine whether any additional mitigation measures or plant modifications are required for every U.S. nuclear power plant.” And both Duke Energy and the NRC have repeatedly insisted in interviews that steps have been taken to ensure the safety of the Oconee facility. “Not every solution to an issue is visible to the general public,” said Burnell, the NRC spokesman, who added that the agency cannot discuss informa-
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Jim Riccio is a nuclear analyst with Greenpeace.
tion that was officially redacted from Perkins’s report. “Duke’s actions to date, both at Oconee and Jocassee,” Burnell said, “continue to show the plant can keep the public safe if something occurs at Jocassee.” Sandra J. Magee, a spokeswoman for Duke Energy, said the company is continuing to look at flood protection enhancements with the NRC through the industrywide response to recommendations made by the NRC’s post-Fukushima Near-Term Task Force. “Oconee is in compliance with the station’s licensing basis for external flood events,” Magee said. “We have anticipated the maximum flooding scenario and the plant has the means to safely shutdown and cool the reactor units.”
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But nuclear safety advocates have questioned these assertions — particularly given that the NRC continues to redact and withhold key information related to the threat. “You can’t have it both ways,” said Lochbaum, who reviewed the un-censored version of Perkins report and concluded that the redactions were spurious. “If it was a true security threat, the NRC and the operator would be obliged to quickly remove the threat. If they had done that at any point over the last 15 years, there would be no need for redactions. “Google searches will turn up plenty of pictures of Jocassee from the air and ground,” Lochbaum added. “I did a YouTube search and even came across a 10-minute documentary about building the dam.” Jim Riccio, a nuclear analyst with the environmental group Greenpeace, which first obtained the unredacted version of Perkins’ report, said the emerging paper trail has eroded the NRC’s credibility on the issue. “The Commission has failed its most basic mission to adequately protect public health and safety,” Riccio said, “and it cannot be trusted to speak honestly about the risks that nuclear power poses.” The internal dissonance was not lost on Perkins, and he says he began to suspect that his agency’s circumspection on
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Rep. Donna Edwards of Maryland forwarded Perkins’ letter to the NRC, requesting answers.
the dam risk issue had more to do with protecting the commercial operators it oversees — and perhaps its own regulatory reputation, given the many years the threat has existed. By September, Perkins says he felt it was his duty to speak out. He submitted a letter to the NRC’s Office of the Inspector General, the agency’s internal watchdog, charging that that the NRC was essentially involved in a cover-up. “The Nuclear Regulatory Commission staff may be motivated to prevent the disclosure of this safety information to
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Aerial views of the Taum Sauk hydroelectric reservoir after it was breached.
NATIONAL AGRICULTURE IMAGERY PROGRAM (NAIP), USDA
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the public because it will embarrass the agency,” Perkins wrote. “The redacted information includes discussion of, and excerpts from, NRC official agency records that show the NRC has been in possession of relevant, notable, and derogatory safety information for an extended period but failed to properly act on it. Concurrently, the NRC concealed the information from the public.” In an interview last week, Perkins said he has no knowledge of the status of any probe that might have been launched by the IG. Officials at the IG’s office say they cannot discuss ongoing investigations. Perkins did share a copy of his letter with his congresswoman, Rep. Donna Edwards (D-Md.), whose spokesman, Dan Weber, said it was forwarded by Edwards’s office to the NRC’s chairwoman. “Rep. Edwards requested responses to the concerns raised in the letter and to be kept informed regarding any action taken,” Weber said. “The NRC confirmed receipt of Rep. Edwards’ request and we’re awaiting their response.” When asked whether any part of him believes there could be a legitimate reason for NRC to keep parts of his report from the public, Perkins became animated. “I could so easily answer this question — I’m dying to answer that question,” he said. “But I cannot answer that question without going into the area that
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An aerial photo comparison of the Taum Sauk upper reservoir before and after failure, showing the scour path.
I am not allowed to talk about.“ I will say that, when you’re a regulator, and you’re dealing with these safety issues, the public not only should be able to watch what you’re doing, they actually must, in accordance with the law, be able to see what you’re doing,” Perkins added. “We don’t work for nuclear operators, after all. We work for the American people.”
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“ IT’S THE TWO OF US AGAINST THE ENTIRE FEDERAL GOVERNMENT. WE’RE GOING TO TRY OUR BEST — IT’S ALMOST AN EVEN FIGHT.” BUREAUCRATIC WHEELS TURN SLOWLY
Criscione was not directly involved in Perkins’s review of the dam risk issue, but when that review was first floated in early 2010 within NRC’s risk analysis division, where Criscione works, he began following its progress keenly. In explaining his interest in the topic, he points to decades spent working and camping at — and later taking his family to — the Johnson’s Shut-Ins State Park in the Missouri Ozarks, one of the most popular outdoor recreation areas in the Midwest. In December 2005, the Taum Sauk hydroelectric reservoir above that campsite broke through its impoundment and sent roughly 1 billion gallons of water and a 20-foot tidal wave roaring down from Proffit Mountain. The 12-minute deluge completely destroyed the camping area, shaved a gargantuan swath of thick forest to bare rock and dirt, destroyed the home of the park superintendent and dragged him and his family for a quarter mile. “The destruction at the site was incred-
ible,” federal investigators noted at the time. “All of the trees in the path of the flowing water were stripped off the earth’s surface. What remained were large rocks and exposed bedrock surfaces. The flowing water removed soil from the valley floor, and created large scour holes.” While sustaining numerous injuries, the superintendent and his family survived, and the campsite, given the chilly time of year, was otherwise deserted. But the incident stuck with Criscione, a mathematical man who says he recognized a could-have-been-me moment in the disaster. It was eventually attributed to improperly placed and malfunctioning sensors that allowed the reservoir to fill beyond safe levels. When he learned of the dam issue facing the nation’s nuclear power plants, Criscione says he felt compelled to make certain the threat was clearly understood by the American people, even if it meant risking his job. “One of the most unfortunate aspects about safety is that when an engineer does stand his ground and sacrifices his career over a safety concern — and by doing so, prevents a disaster — no one ever knows,” Criscione said. “We cannot know of something that did not occur.
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We cannot know of something that was prevented. Had a technician or engineer gone to the press in November 2005 and got the sensors at Taum Sauk fixed, he would have never known the ordeal from which he spared the superintendent and his family. All he would know is that he pointlessly sabotaged his career due to a tinge of conscience.”
HUFFINGTON Rep. Ed Markey of Mass. 12.23.12 is a strong advocate of nuclear safety.
After learning of the heavy redactions in Perkins’ report, Criscione’s own twinge of conscience, he says, prompted him to independently investigate the dam flood risk issue. Four days after Perkins filed his complaint with the Inspector General’s office, Criscione dispatched a lengthy letter to the NRC’s chairwoman, Allison MacFarlane. The letter included dozens of attachments of unearthed internal correspondence between the Nuclear Regulatory Commission and Duke Energy re-
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garding the flood threat at Oconee. Both the letter and the documents were obtained independently by The Huffington Post, and while Criscione and NRC officials said they could not comment on their contents, they independently confirmed that the materials were genuine and were being addressed internally. The Huffington Post has made Criscione’s letter and the attached documents available here. By itself, Criscione’s 19-page letter to
“ WE DON’T WORK FOR NUCLEAR OPERATORS, AFTER ALL. WE WORK FOR THE AMERICAN PEOPLE.” NRC leadership provides an exceptionally detailed summary of the flood issue facing Oconee — and what amounts to more than two decades of dithering by both the licensee and federal regulators. Criscione prefaced his letter by quoting a former Navy admiral, who shepherded the development of the nation’s nuclear submarine force: A major flaw in our system of government, and even in industry, is the latitude
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to do less than is necessary. Too often officials are willing to accept and adapt to situations they know to be wrong. The tendency is to downplay problems instead of actively trying to correct them. The archive of attached letters suggests that NRC began nudging the Oconee operators to clarify and address the issue with increasing urgency at least 6 years ago, but that Duke Energy repeatedly pushed back. In a letter sent in September 2008, the company insisted that “there is no evidence to suggest that a Jocassee Dam failure is credible.” NRC officials made clear that they did not agree with that assessment, and in a 2009 response to Duke’s letter, the agency again laid out its concerns. Among them: That the plant’s critical safety equipment is protected from floods only to a height of 5 feet. That Duke’s own analysis from 1992 showed flood heights from a failure of the Jocassee Dam ranging between 12 and 17 feet. That Duke’s calculations of the odds of a Jocassee Dam failure were low “by an order of magnitude.” But the agency did not take a hard stance and force Duke to rectify the situation immediately — a timidity that, according to Criscione’s letter, sparked internal objections beyond his own and those of Perkins. In one instance in 2009, a protestation was filed by a deputy director within the Division of Risk
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Assessment, who was quoted as saying, “I remain concerned that this approach is not in the best interest of public health and safety and security, regulatory stability, and our role as a strong regulator.” The deputy director’s official objection, called a “non-concurrence” in NRC parlance, further argues: No other potential initiating event at Oconee is as risk significant. The probability of core damage from a Jocassee Dam failure is three times higher than the sum total probability of core damage from all initiating events. Duke has acknowledged that, given a Jocassee Dam failure with subsequent site inundation, all three Oconee units will go to core damage; that is given a dam failure, the conditional core damage probability is 1.0. ... For a Jocassee Dam failure, using potentially optimistic assumptions, Duke estimates that containment will fail approximately 59 to 68 hours after dam failure without mitigating actions. Under the dam break conditions, resultant flood waters and infrastructure damage would affect public evacuation and potentially affect emergency operations facility response capability. Duke has not demonstrated that its radiological emergency plan actions can be adequately implemented under these conditions. In his letter to NRC leadership, Criscione underscored the deputy’s as-
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sertion that “conditional core damage probability,” or CCDP, is 1.0. “Like all probabilities, CCDP must be a number between 0 and 1,” Criscione wrote. “A value of 0 means that given only that specific event, there is no chance that core damage will occur. A
“ I DON’T THINK THAT WHAT HAPPENED IN FUKUSHIMA CAN HAPPEN HERE.” value of 1 means that given that specific event (e.g. a failure of the Jocassee Dam) then core damage will certainly occur. For most initiating events (e.g. tornadoes, loss of offsite power, fires) the CCDP is typically a very small fraction on the order of one ten-thousandth to one-tenth. “1.0 might not sound big,” he wrote. “But it’s enormous.” Asked directly whether, as of today, the Oconee plant could withstand flooding that arises specifically from the wholesale failure of the Jocassee Dam, Scott Burnell, the NRC spokesman, was equivocal. “NRC continues to conclude appropriate actions have been taken at Oconee to address potential flooding issues and that the plant is currently able to safely mitigate flooding events,” he said. “Ongoing re-analysis of flooding haz-
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ards from all sources, required by the NRC as part of the post-Fukushima lessons learned effort, will determine whether any additional mitigation measures or plant modifications are required for every U.S. nuclear power plant.” Asked in a follow-up whether the “flooding events” the Oconee plant was able to mitigate included the failure of the Jocassee Dam, Burnell would only invoke the same language: “The NRC, with all the information available today, continues to conclude Duke has taken appropriate actions to ensure Oconee can safely mitigate flooding events,” Burnell said — though he added: “That statement in no way precludes additional flood mitigation actions on Duke’s part, and the NRC will ensure any further work, whether based on existing information or the upcoming flooding re-analysis, meets applicable standards to further enhance Oconee’s ability to operate safely.” Both Perkins and Criscione remain unconvinced of that — and both continue to take issue with the NRC’s longstanding policy of keeping information relating to the dam threat from the public. Criscione says he received a minor reprimand from his superiors for releasing his letter to NRC leadership to members of Congress without properly stamping it, as nearly all documentation relating to the dam threat has been, as “Official Use
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Only.” Beyond that, however, he says he has no idea whether his complaints will result in any swifter action. “If the safety vulnerabilities which the Jocassee Dam poses to the Oconee reactors were being swiftly and adequately addressed, then I would accept the argument that there is no need to publicly broadcast a potential security vulnerability,” Criscione said in an interview last week. “But no action, to my knowledge, has been done to address the supposed security vulnerability and the actions taken to address the safety vulnerability have thus far been disjointed and inadequate. “I believe the reason for this disjointed approach,” he added, “is because the withholding of all this information from the public has resulted in there being no public pressure to countermand the pressure exerted on the NRC by Duke Energy.” In his letter to NRC leadership, Criscione notes that the odds of a Jocassee Dam failure, based on NRC calculations, appear to be similar to those of being dealt a straight in a hand of poker — somewhat rare, but not unthinkable. And Criscione adds that, as a young teenager attending summer camp at that ill-fated campground in Missouri, he drew an even less likely hand — a flush — in the first poker hand he was ever dealt. “My poker career has gone downhill ever since,” he wrote, “but I know from personal experience that being dealt a hand that beats a straight is credible.” If that’s the case, he reasons, then the
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potential failure of the Jocassee Dam must be a credible threat as well.
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HARD LESSONS
Among the myriad lawmakers to whom Criscione copied his letter to NRC management and its various attachments was Rep. Ed Markey (D-Mass.), a long-time crusader for nuclear safety. A Markey spokeswoman confirmed that the congressman’s staff has requested and received multiple briefings and background materials from the NRC on the topic in response to Criscione’s questions and the documents Markey’s office has received over the past several months. Markey also has a long-standing and pending request with Congress’s investigative arm, the Government Accountability Office, related to the resilience of the nation’s nuclear reactors to extreme weather events such as large floods. “The key question for all five NRC commissioners is whether they will support making all the safety recommendations of the Near-Term Fukushima Task Force,” Markey said in an emailed statement, “including those that will address nuclear reactor resiliency to severe earthquakes, floods and other extreme weather, mandatory.” In a wide-ranging hearing on postFukushima lessons held this past March before the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee, lawmakers asked NRC commissioners about a report prepared by David Lochbaum of the Union of Con-
NRC commissioners William Magwood (above) and George Apostolakis (below) believe an incident like Fukishima would not happen at a U.S. plant.
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cerned Scientists, which said in part that unless the NRC strengthens measures to prevent and mitigate threats that the nation’s plants were not designed to withstand, “it may be only a matter of time before a similar disaster happens here.” Several of the commissioners insisted that the UCS was wrong. “I think that our infrastructure, our regulatory approach, our practices at plants, our equipment, our configuration, our design bases would prevent Fukushima from occurring under similar circumstances at a U.S. plant,” said commissioner William D. Magwood. “I just don’t think it would happen.” Another commissioner, George Apostolakis, concurred. “I disagree with the statements from UCS,” he said. “I don’t think that what happened in Fukushima can happen here.” Given that the agency has known for years that a tidal wave could be conceivably unleashed from Lake Jocassee should the dam holding it back fail, causing a meltdown nearly identical to what happened in Fukushima, Greenpeace’s Jim Riccio suggests that the NRC has essentially been lying to Congress. “Rather than address the threat, NRC commissioners have misled Congress and delayed action to reduce these risks,” Riccio said. “The American people deserve better from the Obama administration’s nuclear regulators.”
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For his part, Criscione says that, while he can’t be sure, he suspects that there are engineers not unlike him inside Duke Energy, who may sense a duty to speak out, but are restrained by fear of reprisal. “They are pushing to get Duke Energy to do the right thing — but for the sake of their careers, they need to be careful on how hard they push,” he said. “I, however, have the luxury of being a union-represented federal employee.
“ NOT EVERY SOLUTION TO AN ISSUE IS VISIBLE TO THE GENERAL PUBLIC.” Although I, too, need to be careful and diplomatic in my actions, I am in a much better-protected situation than them. It takes a lot of courage for them to come forward, whereas for me it merely requires a little bit of disgust.” Perkins, meanwhile, remains similarly resolute in his convictions that speaking out was the right thing to do, though he’s uncertain about whether it will really make a difference. “It’s the two of us against the entire federal government. We’re going to try our best — it’s almost an even fight,” he joked. “We realize what an incredibly uphill battle we have in front of us. These things never really work out for the whistleblower.”
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The 30 Best Films of 2012 BY MICHAEL HOGAN, CHRISTOPHER ROSEN AND MIKE RYAN
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Exit arrowing down the best movies of 2012 is a more difficult task than you might assume. This year was one of the strongest in recent memory, with well-crafted indies like Moonrise Kingdom and Beasts of the Southern Wild succeeding alongside major studio films like Les Miserables, Argo and Lincoln. There wasn’t a J. Edgar or War Horse to be found among the anticipated fall releases, making it nearly impossible to keep a list of best 2012 movies to 10 entries. Which is why HuffPost Entertainment has listed the 30 best movies of 2012 for your reading pleasure. As compiled by Huffington Post executive arts and entertainment editor Michael Hogan, entertainment editor Christopher Rosen and senior writer Mike Ryan, these 30-plus films represent the best of 2012’s narrative offerings. (To keep the list at a manageable level, documentaries were left off, but 2012 had its fair share of great ones, including How to Survive a Plague, Searching for Sugar Man, Bully, Central Park Five, Side By Side, Knuckleball! West of Memphis, Mea Maxima Culpa, Detropia among many others.) Below, find the best films of 2012, ranked in descending order. Plus, stick around after the Top 30 for three polarizing wild-card entries that didn’t make the official cut, but were beloved by Hogan, Rosen and Ryan for different reasons.
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30. RUBY SPARKS & CELESTE & JESSE FOREVER (TIE)
Two actress-scripted, unconventional indie love stories co-starring Chris Messina for the price of one! Ruby Sparks and Celeste & Jesse Forever were released within nine days of each other over the summer, and while both owe a lot to previous films — Sparks, written by and starring Zoe Kazan, was like the love child of Adaptation and Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind; Celeste & Jesse, co-written by and starring Rashida Jones, was like (500) Days of Summer and Scenes from a Marriage — each was a fresh take on the tired rom-com genre. More like these, please. — Christopher Rosen
29. THIS IS 40
Someday, we’ll look back at this movie and give thanks that Judd Apatow and Leslie Mann had the guts to not only bare the ugly underbelly of their generally blessed and loving marriage but also invite us to laugh at it. For now, though, we’re condemned to suffer through critical sniping about “west of the 405” privilege (that’s Los Angelese for “I wish I could afford to live in Brentwood”) and the 30 minutes Apatow should have left on the cutting room floor. Can
Exit Hollywood’s king of comedy help it if Melissa McCarthy, Megan Fox, Charlyne Yi, Jason Segel, John Lithgow, Albert Brooks and Chris O’Dowd all insist on being in his movie? Then there are Mann and Paul Rudd, who portray the ups and downs of contemporary middleaged marriage with a level of accuracy that’s liable to induce PTSD episodes in any parent born between 1962 and ‘72. — Michael Hogan
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28. THE SESSIONS
Having banked boucoup cred with his creepy/terrifying supporting roles in Winter’s Bone and Martha Marcy May Marlene, John Hawkes takes on leading-man duties in The Sessions. This being a John Hawkes movie, however, that leading man sleeps in an iron lung. Based on the life of Mark O’Brien, a poet and journalist paralyzed from the neck down by polio, the film follows O’Brien’s sexual awakening, at age 38, and subsequent effort to lose his virginity with the help of a “sexual surrogate” played by a frequently naked Helen Hunt. Along the way, O’Brien shares his hopes and doubts with his priest, the blessedly open-minded Father Brendan (William H. Macy). Given the cuckoo premise, it’s amazing how gentle the film turns out to be. — MH
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SLEEPWALK WITH ME
Comedian Mike Birbiglia based Sleepwalk With Me on his stand-up routine-turned-This American Life episode about his relationship issues and the pesky sleepwalking problem that once caused him to jump through a hotel window. That grim tale aside, Sleepwalk With Me is the funniest movie of the year. — Mike Ryan
26. THE GREY
Remember this movie? Yeah, the one where Liam Neeson fights with wolves. Released way back in January — a month not exactly known for its stellar movie slate — The Grey surprised audience by not being a schlocky vehicle for Liam Neeson to fight wolves. Instead, it’s a much more surreal, almost-meditation on the human instinct to survive. There were complaints about the ending — spoiler: it never actually showed the human versus wolf fight the trailers teased — but those of us who had been paying attention to
the rest of the movie already knew that a literal fight wasn’t the point. — MR
25. THE CABIN IN THE WOODS
The Cabin in the Woods — filmed before Chris Hemsworth became Thor, but released a year after because of financial troubles at MGM — is the most surprising “horror” movie to be released in the last decade. Horror would not be the accurate genre to define Cabin, really, but there’s never been a movie quite like Cabin before. Now, if the last 58 words look like a filibuster for blurb writing
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Land is like Frank Capra by way of “How do you like them apples?” — CR
22. PARANORMAN & WRECK-IT RALPH (TIE)
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This was the Year of Channing Tatum, and Magic Mike was the most Channing Tatum of all Channing Tatum movies. Tatum cowrote the stripper drama and based it on his own experiences as a dancer. (Of course he did.) Credit to director Steven Soderbergh for bathing the film in dingy yellows (a color that will forever recall Tampa) and getting the most out of Matthew McConaughey. As Dallas, the strip club’s emcee, McConaughey is playing McConaughey playing McConaughey. All right, all right, all right. — CR
purposes, they very much are. Because even nine months after the film’s release, we still wouldn’t dare spoil anything about this gem. — MR
23. PROMISED LAND
Free from the shackles of Jason Bourne, Matt Damon gets back
to his Good Will Hunting roots in Promised Land, a folksy yarn masquerading as a social statement about the dangers of fracking and the decline of America’s small towns. Directed by Gus Van Sant and co-written by Damon and co-star John Krasinski (from a story by Dave Eggers, obviously), Promised
For adults, Wreck-It Ralph and ParaNorman are two of the most interesting animated films of the year, but for different reasons. ParaNorman disguises itself as a children’s movie, then unleashes a deeply disturbing and emotional third act; Wreck-It Ralph, with it’s sappy-sweet story, is very much a movie for kids, but the movie is littered with so many classic arcade and gaming Easter eggs that... well, let’s just say, if you’ve forgotten the Contra code, you’ll know it again after Wreck-It Ralph. (OK, fine: it’s up-up-down-down-left-rightleft-right, B, A, Start.) — MR
21. THE IMPOSSIBLE
The true story of a Spanish family who gets torn apart by the tsunami that struck Thailand in 2004, The Impossible looks like one of those schmaltzy, triumph-ofthe-human-spirit movies that make audiences cry. What sets it apart is that director J.A. Bayona stages the tsunami like Roland Emmerich and the aftermath like Eli Roth — all on a budget of less than $40 million. Held up by a strong
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performance by Naomi Watts — pushed to physical limits in ways that recall James Franco’s work in 127 Hours — The Impossible works because it stays small. It’s not about the millions of people displaced by the natural disaster; it’s just about a family. — CR
20. HOLY MOTORS
Premiering at the Cannes Film Festival in May to rave reviews, Holy Motors is, well, bizarre. But not bizarre in the sense that it leaves the viewer bewildered as to what just happened. As we see our protagonist, Mr. Oscar (Denis Lavant), chauffeured around Paris acting out elaborate, strange scenes that he calls “appointments,” we, as a viewer, just accept that this is Mr. Oscar’s life. It’s a movie better absorbed than analyzed. Not to mention that it’s worth watching just for the midway impromptu accordian jam session. Did I mention that this is a bizarre movie? — MR
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19. THE PERKS OF BEING A WALLFLOWER
Faithfully evoking the glorious moment in American teenage history when geeks suddenly became cool, Stephen Chbosky’s adaptation of his own novel tells the story of Charlie (Logan Lerman), a confused loner who finds
FLIGHT
There’s not a lot about Flight that’s inherently remarkable: man has an addiction problem, man struggles with addiction problem, man reconciles addiction problem. But! That man happens to be played by Denzel Washington, who gives a driven performance as a commercial airline pilot. And, most important, the first act of the film — depicting a harrowing plane crash sequence — will make you think four or five times before booking your next flight. — MR
acceptance among a group of arty proto-hipsters led by two step-siblings, Patrick (Ezra Miller) and Sam (Emma Watson, in her first major postHermione role). Despite the occasional corny miscue — and Watson’s wavering allegiance to her character’s American accent — the film strikes all the right emotional chords, bringing us back to a time when
the right song, played in the right person’s car, really could change everything. — MH
17. 21 JUMP STREET
Channing Tatum’s character curses science during 21 Jump Street, but what else could explain how this reboot of an out-dated television series wound up being one of the year’s
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in the years before World War I. (Spoiler alert: The kids are proto-Nazis.) His latest, Amour, may show more compassion to its characters, but the upshot is no less grim. Jean-Louis Trintignant and Emmanuelle Riva play a loving elderly couple whose lives are disrupted by illness and the inevitability of death. Trintignant, Riva and Isabelle Huppert, as their daughter, are in top form, and Haneke approaches the story — based on a situation that befell his own family — with oh-so-European seriousness. You may not want to watch, but you won’t be able to turn away. — MH
THE DARK KNIGHT RISES & THE HUNGER GAMES (TIE)
When blockbusters get serious. Both Gary Ross and Christopher Nolan proved that not all superhero movies have to be brightlycolored, all-ages romps like Marvel’s The Avengers. The Hunger Games and The Dark Knight Rises were serious endeavors that managed to be entertaining films. Thanks to Ross’ direction, The Hunger Games was like Terrence Malick-light; Nolan, meanwhile, turned the most superhero-y entry of his Batman trilogy into an epic worthy of those directorial comparisons he gets to David Lean. Also, can Selina Kyle and Katniss Everdeen team up for a spinoff? — CR
funniest movies? It was science, along with Tatum’s comic timing and puppy dog charm, Jonah Hill’s acerbic cockiness and Dave Franco, James’ brother, an ambitious stoner for the 21st century. — CR
16. AMOUR
Michael Haneke’s last film, The White Ribbon (2009), traced the roots of the Third Reich by focusing on daily life in a provincial German town
15. PITCH PERFECT
There were certainly better movies released in 2012, but none were as aca-perfect as Pitch Perfect. An intoxicating amalgam of Bring It On, Glee and Mean Girls, Pitch Perfect made Rebel Wilson a star, put “Bright Lights Bigger City” on perma-repeat (just me?) and included two stand-up-
Exit and-cheer moments: Wilson’s rendition of “Turn the Beat Around” and the rousing, John Hughesian finale. — CR
13. THE MASTER
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For a brief moment in September, after its heavily hyped debut at the Toronto International Film Festival, The Master looked like the film to beat this awards season. Then the public got a chance to weigh in and decided there was no there there: the performances were too weird, the story made no sense, the Scientology stuff wasn’t juicy enough. But there are reasons to think that P.T. Anderson’s long-anticipated follow-up to There Will Be Blood will enjoy an afterlife as a Vertigo-style critical darling. For one thing, the 70mm cinematography is dropdead gorgeous. And the same unconventional storytelling that confused viewers makes this a film of daring originality, one whose unanswered questions — about kinship, addiction, mind control and fate — resonate long after its flaws have been forgotten. — MH
12. LIFE OF PI
How do you film a bestselling book about a boy and a live tiger stranded on a life boat for 227 days? If you’re Ang Lee, you hire an unknown first-time actor, build
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a giant water tank in Taiwan and order up some ground-breaking CGI effects so you don’t have to work with an actual jungle cat. And, for good measure, you shoot the whole thing in 3D. The fact that Life of Pi even exists is a miracle — 20th Century Fox tried to pull the plug during preproduction, only to be talked out of it by Lee. The fact that it’s one of the most moving, visually
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sumptuous and financially successful movies of the year is a testament to Lee’s singular vision and unflappable spirit. — MH
11. MARVEL’S THE AVENGERS It’s not just that The Avengers was good — it’s remarkable that the movie exists in the first place. First planted in the original Iron Man as a post-
Tom Hooper’s dreamed dream of mixing live, on-set singing with A-list performers and set pieces straight out of Christopher Nolan’s Batman trilogy succeeds thanks to its cast. Anne Hathaway is a lock to win Best Supporting Actress, and Les Miserables provides Hugh Jackman with his best role ever. Forget Wolverine; for the rest of Jackman’s career, his name will be Jean Valjean. (Or prisoner 24601 if you’re Javert.) — CR
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credits scene, the formation of this film made its way though five Marvel movies before it reached a culmination this past summer. What was most impressive about Joss Whedon’s direction wasn’t so much the action scenes, but the fact that he took so many characters and gave each one a distinct individual arc. — MR
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10. LOOPER
If my future self from 30 years in the future suddenly appeared in front of me, I would at least make sure that my future self had seen Looper one last time before I shot myself in the chest. — MR
8. SKYFALL
Mendes. Sam Mendes. That’s how the director of the latest James Bond adventure should be introducing himself now that Skyfall has become a license to print money, earning a record-breaking $152 million in the UK and close to $1 billion worldwide. The secret to 007’s success is simple: leavening the gritty realism of Daniel Craig’s first two outings with a bit of the old Bond wit. Mendes also had the wisdom to cast Javier Bardem as a sexually ambivalent villain, give living legend Dame Judi Dench plenty of screen time and enlist Adele to sing the theme song. Best Bond ever? Never say never. — MH
MOONRISE KINGDOM
Set in the summer of 1965, Moonrise Kingdom marries Wes Anderson’s meticulously designed retro-sensibilities with what Don Draper would have described as the pain from an old wound. (You might describe it as nostalgia.) The result is like a perfect summer cocktail: light and fizzy with a sneaky amount of depth that lingers on long after it’s finished. Kudos to Anderson for getting great performances out of the two teens at the center of the film (Kara Hayward and Jared Gilman), but veterans like Bill Murray, Bruce Willis, Edward Norton and Frances McDormand hold things together by being appropriately deadpan and melancholy. — CR
7. SILVER LININGS PLAYBOOK Silver Linings Playbook is one of those rare movies that can actually be called “the feelgood movie of the year!” with a straight face. To wit: This dysfunctional family comedy
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about a mentally unstable former high school teacher (Bradley Cooper, in a careerbest performance) and his equally broken love interest (Jennifer Lawrence), actually ends with a dance competition. It’s the heart-clutch moment of 2012. — CR
5. DJANGO UNCHAINED
The embargo on reviews of Quentin Tarantino’s follow-up to Inglourious Basterds doesn’t lift until late December, so for now we’ll just say that Jamie Foxx, Christoph Waltz, Kerry Washington, Samuel L. Jackson and Leonardo DiCaprio star in a pre-Civil War slavery revenge fantasy that will change the way you think about American history. — MH
LINCOLN
The first trailer was a dud — remember all that noise about Daniel Day Lewis’ squeaky voice? But low expectations served Lincoln well, allowing it to arrive not with the usual Spielbergian thud of pre-ordained importance but instead with a pleasantly surprising splash. With an unapologetically brainy script by Angels in America playwright Tony Kushner and a lead performance by Day-Lewis that history is all but guaranteed to remember as “Oscar-winning,” Lincoln feels less like a modern multiplex experience and more like a night at the theater when absolutely everything goes right. — MH
4. ARGO
Argo has a little bit of everything: spy thriller thrills; real-life political intrigue; a foreign crisis; and, of course, inside Hollywood hijinks. Ben Affleck directs and stars in this (mostly) true story of a joint CIA
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and Canadian effort to sneak six Americans out of Iran after they fled the now-captured American embassy in 1979. A riveting thriller, Argo alleviates its tension (rivaled only by Zero Dark Thirty) by having Alan Arkin and John Goodman play movie-industry professionals fronting a fake studio, which was created as a cover to sneak the six Americans out of Iran as part of a movie crew. The plan, like the movie, was so crazy, it actually worked. — MR
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3. BEASTS OF THE SOUTHERN WILD
Visually stunning and boldly unorthodox, Benh Zeitlin’s Beasts of the Southern Wild spins a fearsome and intoxicating tale of life beyond the borders of civilization, inviting viewers to an endangered bayou community where freedom, passion and survival trump all other concerns. First-timers Quvenzhané Wallis, who was six years old when the movie was filmed, and Dwight Henry, who almost didn’t make the movie because he was worried about neglecting his New Orleans bakery, form one of the most unforgettable daughterfather combos in cinematic history, and the first-rate screenplay, score, set design and cinematography seal the spell. — MH
ZERO DARK THIRTY
How did Kathryn Bigelow follow The Hurt Locker, which won Best Picture and Best Director at the 82nd Annual Academy Awards? With a movie that tops it in almost every way. Zero Dark Thirty, Bigelow’s globe- and decade-spanning docudrama about the search for Osama bin Laden mixes the obsessive nature of David Fincher’s Zodiac with the clear-eyed suspense of Michael Mann’s Heat. The result is 2012’s best film, a feature that will be studied for years to come — not just for Bigelow’s filmmaking prowess (the third-act raid on bin Laden’s compound in particular), but because of Mark Boal’s well-researched script and Jessica Chastain’s star-making performance. Her character is, after all, the “motherf--ker” who found bin Laden’s house. — CR
+ THE ONES WE LOVED DESPITE THEIR FLAWS
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The Wild Cards BATTLESHIP
Battleship is not a “good” movie, per se. But there’s an everpresent vibe that Battleship knows it’s not a good movie. It’s not supposed to be a good movie. This is a movie based on a board game. Actually, it’s not even a board game — it’s just two people reciting letters and numbers to each other. Really, you think that you could make a better Battleship movie? No other movie his year absolutely owns what it is more than Battleship. — MR
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PROMETHEUS
It’s hard to imagine any movie billed, however informally, as Ridley Scott’s sequel to Alien living up to fans’ impossibly high expectations. So maybe it was inevitable that Prometheus would become the subject of angry recriminations and at least one hilarious Internet video cataloguing every single WTF moment. But it would be a shame if viewers’ occasional (OK, constant) confusion blinded them to the spellbinding cinematography, the mind-bending set design and the terrible beauty of Michael Fassbender’s performance as David the amoral android. Moreover, there is still a chance that at least some of the loose ends will be
CLOUD ATLAS
TIME Magazine called Cloud Atlas the worst movie of the year. HuffPost Executive Arts & Entertainment editor Michael Hogan couldn’t even make it through to the end. Yet for all its flaws, no film in 2012 was more epic in scope and scale than Cloud Atlas. The film was so large it needed three directors (The Wachowskis and Tom Twykwer) and about 3,000 years to tell its story. Buoyed by the best Tom Hanks performance in nearly 10 years, and loaded with actors in multiple roles, Cloud Atlas seemed to do the impossible: make Halle Berry interesting, and turn David Mitchell’s unadaptable novel into first-rate entertainment of the oxymoron variety. Cloud Atlas is an intimate epic, an effortless tightrope walk and one of 2012’s best, despite people saying it’s one of the worst. Sorry, TIME (and Mike). — CR
tied up in the sequel, if Scott ever gets around to shooting one. Like The Master, this is a movie that invites you to
watch again and again, if not to ponder its unanswerable mysteries than to visit its entrancing world. — MH
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CULTURE
The Worst Word of 2012 (The #YOLO Phenomenon) BY ZOE TRISKA
ILLUSTRATION BY MARTIN AND CARRIE GEE
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Exit f I have to hear or see “YOLO” one more time, I’m going to rip out my eyes and ear drums (I’m a big fan of hyperbole). For those of you have been locked in a closet with no internet all year, YOLO is an acronym for “You only live once.” I must admit, I initially fell victim to the allure of YOLO. Have I uttered this word aloud? Yes, yes I have. I admit to you, dear readers, I even had a YOLO-themed weekend. You’ve got me. I mean, look at how funny this meme is! I fell for YOLO initially, along with the rest of online America. And boy, did America fall hard. It is printed on shirts, Zac Efron has a tattoo with the acronym on his hand. A lot of other randos have it tattooed on them as well. Hipsters have started saying it out loud in yet another effort to maintain irony. It was short-listed for the 2012 English Word of the Year by the Oxford American Dictionary. And more tragically, it resulted in the death of a young aspiring rapper, Ervin McKinness, who tweeted, “Drunk af going 120 drifting corners #FuckIt YOLO” minutes before he died in a fiery one-car crash. But this travesty of a word”
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PAUL HAWTHORNE/GETTY IMAGES
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This travesty of a ‘word’ needs to stop. Any acronym that is used as much as this one is bound to be MISused and OVERused.” (I’m going to count this acronym as a word, because people actually say “YOLO” out loud) NEEDS to stop. Any acronym that is used as much as this one is bound to be MISused and OVERused. But where did YOLO even come from? And why has it gained so much momentum this year?
Average Joe star Adam Mesh is credited with creating the term YOLO on the third season of NBC’s reality show in 2004.
JOHNNY NUNEZ/WIREIMAGE/GETTY IMAGES
Exit According to KnowYourMeme. com, the earliest pop culture use of the YOLO acronym is attributed to Adam Mesh on the third season of NBC’s reality show Average Joe (yikes). The star launched a YOLO clothing line in 2004. (Mesh later tweeted at me: “When I created the word it was meant as inspiration to live life to the fullest. Disappointed in current use. I have moved on.”) In July 2006, the band The Strokes came out with a single called “You Only Live Once.” They then launched “Operation YOLO,” asking fans to request their song on American radio stations. However, the person we really have to thank for this trend is Degrassi star-turned-rapper Drake. On Oct. 23, 2011, he tweeted “You only live once...YOLO” with a picture of himself on a balcony overlooking a city. The next day, tweets with the keyword “YOLO” rose significantly. A Google Insights graph also suggests that searches for “YOLO” rose significantly between October 2011 and November 2011. Then, Drake’s single “The Motto” played on the radio on Halloween 2011, with the official music video following on Feb. 10, 2012. “The
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Motto” contains the lyrics “Now she want a photo, you already know, though/ You only live once: that’s the motto n***a, YOLO.” Look, I love Degrassi as much as the next human being, but Drake
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With a tweet and a song lyric, rapper Drake made YOLO as popular as it is today.
Exit can’t be for forgiven for this atrocity. He created the “motto” of 2012: YOLO, perhaps the dumbest phrase to live by of all time. So, let’s get to usage. There are essentially two ways that a person can use YOLO: ironically or as a way to be nonchalant about doing really asinine things. Example 1 (ironically): I’m going to the mall today!! #YOLO
Example 2 (a way to be nonchalant about doing really asinine things): I’m getting super drunk toniteeeeee. Pounding shots!! #YOLO Example 1 (ironically): Buying a fake fur vest! #YOLO
Example 2 (a way to be nonchalant about doing really asinine things): Trying heroin for the first time at my friend’s house #lol #yolo I imagine by now that you get the hang of it. You know, the first example was kind of funny for a while, but it got old after about eight months. The second example just doesn’t make any sense. If we truly only live once, then why would you endanger your life by doing really stupid things that could kill you? YOLO has definitely received a backlash, but it’s not enough to kill the word altogether. So, come on, y’all! I need your help. Don’t en-
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JUST SAY NO TO #YOLO
Ahead, we’ve collected some examples of nonsensical YOLO usage on Twitter. We have been kind enough to keep these people anonymous:
Possibly literally having a heart attack #YOLO
Didn’t pre-heat the oven #YOLO
Pooping in a public restroom is #YOLO
The handicap bathroom stall at gander mountain is the size of bedroom. #RandomTweet #YOLO
Tazing random people and yelling “Pikachu” #YOLO Listening to Christmas because #YOLO Omg. Worst pain ever…. Just dabbed my wound with alcohol. #YOLO
I’m brushing my teeth in bed because I’m so cold. #YOLO Tweeting and speeding #YOLO No idea what I’m doing #YOLO
able the use of YOLO among your friends, family and other loved ones. You hear a coworker jokingly say “YOLO” when mentioning expense reports? GIVE THAT MAN THE DIRTIEST LOOK YOU CAN MUSTER! A friend says “YOLO” when talking about how smashed she’s getting this weekend? SHUT HER DOWN! We can do this! Here’s to the disappearance of YOLO in 2013. Do you agree?
© 2012 COLUMBIA PICTURES INDUSTRIES, INC.
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25 QUESTIONS
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Will Zero Dark Thirty’s Intensity Give You an Aneurysm? (AND 24 OTHER URGENT QUESTIONS)
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25 QUESTIONS
he details of Kathryn Bigelow’s follow-up to The Hurt Locker —Zero Dark Thirty — have been shrouded in almost as much mystery as the actual mission to kill Osama bin Laden. The script (written by Mark Boal, who also wrote The Hurt Locker) was completed before bin Laden’s death — so, yes, some serious revisions had to be completed before filming began. Zero Dark Thirty opened in limited release on Dec. 19, but won’t be out in wide release until Jan. 11, 2013. But seeing as it’s topic du jour, we’ve decided to go ahead and answer every question that you could possibly have about Zero Dark Thirty. —Mike Ryan
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What is a zero dark thirty? According to the production notes, it is military speak for 12:30 a.m.
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How many times is the phrase “zero dark thirty” spoken in Zero Dark Thirty? Zero. In what year does Zero Dark Thirty begin? Zero Dark Thirty begins on Sept. 11, 2001, in an absolutely gut-wrenching scene — notable because there are no visuals, only jumbled audio of people calling from inside the World Trade Center.
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In what year do we first meet the characters that we will be
following? We meet Maya (Jessica Chastain) and Dan (Jason Clarke) in 2003 at an undisclosed location. Dan is in the process of teaching Maya how to aggressively interrogate (read: torture) a suspected terrorist.
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Does Zero Dark Thirty sugar-coat its torture scenes? No. The scenes of Americans torturing suspected terrorists are brutal. In one scene, a water-boarded detainee eventually defecates himself. Honestly, it’s hard to watch. Wait, if this takes place in 2003, how do we get to the assault on bin Laden’s compound in 2011? Zero Dark Thirty follows Maya (and Dan, intermittently) all the way through to
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25 QUESTIONS
09 08 the eventual raid of bin Laden’s compound. And, yes, a lot of things happen along the way.
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©2012 ZERO DARK THIRTY, LLC.
If the original script was written before the raid on bin Laden’s compound, what did the original script focus on? How the United States let bin Laden escape from Tora Bora. Is there a lot of character development in Zero Dark Thirty? Not really. Maya looks slightly uncomfortable during the first “aggressive” interrogation, but she ends up using some of the same techniques later. And we never learn much about her personal life — except that she doesn’t have much of one.
What’s the most intense scene in Zero Dark Thirty? The entire last act of the film, which chronicles the raid on bin Laden’s compound in Abbottabad, Pakistan.
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On a scale of one to 10, how intense is the raid on bin Laden’s compound? A sustained nine. Honestly, considering the length, it’s the most intense sequence that I’ve seen in a movie this year. And the most interesting part is that, at least from what I’ve read about the actual assault, the action sticks to what really occurred. Are you trying to tell me that, in the events that inspired Argo, there were never any Iranian police cars in hot pursuit of a commercial airliner as it tried to take off from an Iranian airport? Yes. I am.
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Jessica Chastain plays Maya, a member of the team of spies and military operatives who secretly devoted themselves to finding Osama bin Laden.
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What is the last thing you expected to see in Zero Dark Thirty? Area 51.
© 2012 COLUMBIA PICTURES INDUSTRIES, INC.
Is Zero Dark Thirty your favorite movie of the year? It’s between Zero Dark Thirty and the aforementioned Argo — fictional car chases and all.
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If Kyle Chandler co-starred in a third movie about the CIA, would that be one of your favorite movies, too? Apparently, I am a sucker for CIA movies that happen to co-star Kyle Chandler. When you build a statue of Kyle Chandler in his honor, will it be the Chandler from Zero Dark Thirty or Argo? To
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25 QUESTIONS
be honest, my statue will probably commemorate the Chandler from Early Edition.
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As in Argo, are there humorous moments to break the tension? Good lord, no.
Considering the intensity of Zero Dark Thirty, who is the most welcome face to see? Chris Pratt as a Navy SEAL. Seriously, thank you, Chris Pratt, for at least delaying my Zero Dark Thirty stress-related aneurism.
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Joel Edgerton (left) and brother Nash Edgerton play the SEAL Team Six soldiers raiding bin Laden’s compound.
There were rumblings from Republicans that Zero Dark Thirty would be a very pro-Obama movie. Is that the case? Obama appears in the film only once — in a televised interview — but the film is pretty scrupulously non-partisan.
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25 QUESTIONS
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Who is the highest ranking official we see portrayed in Zero Dark Thirty? The highest ranking official we see is CIA Director Leon Panetta, played by James Gandolfini. (Panetta has since been promoted to Secretary of Defense.) If anything, the Obama administration comes off as overly cautious, which, seen through the eyes of the ultra-aggressive Maya, is not a good thing.
20 How many of the characters from Zero Dark Thirty will reprise their roles in its sequel, This is 40? This is 40 is in no way related to Zero Dark Thirty. Chris Pratt did, however, appear in The Five-Year Engagement, produced by This Is 40 writer-director Judd Apatow.
© 2012 COLUMBIA PICTURES INDUSTRIES, INC.
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Does Kenny Loggins sing the theme song to Zero Dark Thirty? Though it would be completely inappropriate in this case, Kenny Loggins should sing the theme song to every movie. (I would at least consider an argument for Survivor.)
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What movie will win the Academy Award for Best Picture? Les Misérables. Maybe Lincoln. Will you now write a criticism of Zero Dark Thirty that starts with the cli-
ché phrase, “Zero Dark Thirty certainly isn’t perfect ... ”? Sure. Zero Dark Thirty certainly isn’t perfect — most noticeably when a CIA agent who is meeting with an al-Qaeda source is way too excited about just how well this meeting is going to go. I mean, to the point that she’s bragging that the president of the United States will have to be briefed after the meeting because of all of the wonderful information that’s going to be shared. Needless to say, the meeting goes about as poorly as a meeting with a suspected terrorist can go.
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How many The Lord of the Rings references are in Zero Dark Thirty? One. Does Zero Dark Thirty end with a scene of The Rock tweeting the news of bin Laden’s death to the world? Sadly, no.
Under cover of night, elite Navy SEALs raid Osama bin Laden’s compound in Zero Dark Thirty.
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GREATEST PERSON OF THE WEEK
Kevin Robinson
JEN ABORN
For the Kids Back Home
BY EMMA DIAB
PRO BMX BIKER Kevin Robinson may hold a world record and have five gold medals under his belt, but he hasn’t forgotten the early days of building ramps in his friend’s backyards and practicing tricks on the flat of a court. The sport has defined his life for the past 31 years, and now he’s taken it upon himself to ensure that the kids in his Rhode Island commu-
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GONYO MEDIA
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nity also have the opportunity to stick with the sport they love. Since 2010, Robinson, a native of East Providence, Rhode Island, has championed children’s participation in sports through the K-Rob Foundation, providing financial assistance and hosting motivational events for kids in his community who want to pursue a particular sport and are unable to meet the cost of equipment and training. “I wanted to give kids the opportunity to do things that I didn’t have,” says the 41-year-old Robinson. “I wanted to try to help make it a little easier for the kids in my hometown.”
GREATEST PERSON OF THE WEEK
DO WHAT YOU LOVE When Robinson and his friends started practicing tricks together and watching the pros in the early ’80s, the sport was mostly underground. There was no set career to be had and colleges weren’t doling out sports scholarships for BMX, but Robinson kept at it, frequently riding his bike 10-15 miles just to get to the nearest park. “We’d do whatever we had to do to get to where we needed to get — we’d pile in a car, driving two to three hours just to ride a ramp,” Robinson said. While his friends’ interest in BMX fizzled out, Robinson persisted, performing at fairs around the country, and finally going pro in 1991 at age 20. But it wasn’t
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Robinson instructs the kids at Camp Woodward.
Exit until the inception of the first XGames in 1995 that extreme sports took off, as did Robinson’s career. He won his first two gold medals in the 2006 X Games for Big Air and Vert Best Trick. However, one of Robinson’s fondest memories isn’t winning gold at a competition, but the first time he caught air on a ramp, going right over the top. “That’s what riding’s been about for me — it’s never been about medals or money, it’s about pushing a progression of myself and pushing a progression of my sport. I don’t sit around and think about what I just accomplished like ‘oh this is great’, I move on to the next thing pretty quickly.” And the next thing for Robinson was a community in East Providence, where working families were hit hard by the recession.
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THE K-ROB FOUNDATION After 30 concussions, 44 orthopedic surgeries, shattering his pelvis and undergoing extensive reconstructive surgeries on his shoulder and ankle, Robinson still rides regularly and will compete in this year’s X Games. But in 2010 he found another way to stay grounded in the world of BMX outside
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Robinson leads the bike ride during the Family Fun Festival last May, wearing a shirt in memory of his friend Junior Seau.
of competing, creating the K-Rob Foundation, prompted by the economic struggles of local families and children who couldn’t afford to continue with a sports program. Robinson’s interest in starting his own foundation grew from the time he spent on the board at the Junior Seau Foundation, founded by Robinson’s good friend Seau, the former New England Patriot’s Linebacker who committed suicide earlier this year. Families who can’t afford to sign up their children for a number of sports such as football, baseball, karate or bike riding are invited to sign up for financial assistance from the foundation, and after the applications are vetted, those
Exit candidates who meet the requirements are given monetary aid. This is especially beneficial in East Providence, where the state budget commission was forced to cut middle school sports programs to slash the deficit. But the foundation doesn’t just offer financial aid — for the past two years, Robinson has been trying to foster a sense of community involvement through events for children and their families. The largest event was the second annual Family Fun Festival last May, which was free for kids and drew in a crowd of about 6,000. “With the foundation we’ll just keep doing positive events, even if it’s just for that day,” says Robinson. “If we can get people smiling and treating each other kindly then you know that’s all you can keep doing. “ The day begins with a bike-ride in the morning followed by live entertainment and sports demos in the afternoon. It was during the Family Fun Festival that Robinson revealed the names of the 16 children, aged 10 to 17, who were selected to spend a week at the action sports intensive Camp Woodward, divided evenly between kids interested in BMX and skateboarding. Robinson was even their cabin
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counselor, taking the bus over to State College, Penn., and spending the week as their instructor.
THE FUTURE The married father of three has some serious plans for his foundation and the local community, including a 35,000-square-foot indoor facility for BMX and skateboards in Coventry, R.I., set to open in October of 2013. Robinson also hopes this facility will act as a community center of sorts, providing free afterschool programs for kids such as tutoring and mentoring, a “positive place for kids to go.” “My ultimate dream would be to open a huge center here in East Providence,” he says, adding that he hopes to one day open an outdoor public skate park in his hometown as well. “If you’re passionate and you’re going after something because you believe in it you’ll figure out a way to make it work,” Robinson says. “You know, my whole life I’ve had people telling me riding my bike was a waste of time. But I had my mind made up and I followed my heart with what I wanted to do, and I still do that to this day.”
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TWITTER/DIANNEG (GUN AD); RIGHTWINGWATCH.ORG (PUNDIT); EMMANUEL DUNAND/AFP/GETTY IMAGES (SCHOOL SHOOTING); AP PHOTO/ LEE JIN-MAN (SAMSUNG); MARK GAIL/THE WASHINGTON POST VIA GETTY IMAGES
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Newspaper Features Huge Gun Ad Next to Shooting Story REPORTERS INTERVIEW CHILDREN IN ELEMENTARY SCHOOL SHOOTING
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Homosexuality May Be a Birth Defect That Leads Expectant Parents to Abort Fetuses, Pundit Says
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Workers Making Chips for Samsung Are Getting Cancer
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Atheists Can Be Executed in 7 Countries, Report Says
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06 Just Another Anti-Islam Subway Ad
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MTA (SUBWAY AD); GETTY IMAGES (COCAINE); GETTY IMAGES (WHALE); GETTY IMAGES/ LONELY PLANET IMAGES (JESUS); GETTY IMAGES/FUSE (BRICKS)
SWIMMERS ATTEMPT TO RIDE DYING SPERM WHALE
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Cocaine Breast Implants
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Man Kicked Out of Darts Tournament for Looking Like Jesus
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Woman Comes Home to Find Driveway Stolen
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