Huffington (Issue #33)

Defending Taylor Swift... Obama 2.0...

Best of Sundance... Olympic Diet...

THE HUFFINGTON POST MAGAZINE

JANUARY 27, 2013

iri, What Will I Do S With You? You mean, “What will you do without me?”

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01.27.13 #33 CONTENTS

Enter POINTERS: Welcome Back, Condoleezza ...

Farewell, Blockbuster MOVING IMAGE Q&A: Tom Arnold on Roseanne HEADLINES

Voices PETER SCHEER: Google’s Nightmare Come True

FROM TOP: JEWEL SAMAD/AFP/GETTYIMAGES; KEVORK DJANSEZIAN/GETTY IMAGES

OBAMA 2.0 The road forward.

BY HOWARD FINEMAN, DAVE JAMIESON, ARTHUR DELANEY, MARK GONGLOFF, DAVID WOOD and TOM ZELLER JR.

ELIZABETH PERLE: In Defense of Taylor Swift NINA BAHADUR: My Problem With Girls QUOTED

Exit FILM: 7 Indies Take a Shot at the Pros LIFESTYLE: Forget Wheaties. How a Real Olympian Eats.

TASTE TEST: Frozen Pizza (From Bad to Less Bad) TFU

SIRI RISING Why she could overshadow the iPhone.

BY BIANCA BOSKER

FROM THE EDITOR: Future Forward ON THE COVER: Photo illustration

for Huffington by Troy Dunham

LETTER FROM THE EDITOR

HUFFINGTON 01.27.13

Future Forward N THIS WEEK’S issue, Bianca Bosker looks at Siri — not only what Apple’s “humble personal assistant” can do for us, but also how it was initially envisioned, and what it might become.

As Bosker writes, the story of Siri is part of the largest artificial intelligence project in U.S. history, funded by the Defense Department to equip a virtual assistant with human-like reasoning and learning abilities. It’s the story of a scrappy, innovative startup acquired by the world’s largest tech giant. And it’s a story rooted in the belief that cutting-edge technology can lift us into a higher

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state of living, “by freeing us of the irritants and drudgeries of life that keep us from pursuing our more serious interests.”

Tracing Siri’s development, Bosker places it in the larger but lesser-known context of artificially intelligent assistants, from early phone-based assistants like Wildfire to Microsoft Office›s much-mocked Clippy. And she lifts the veil on years of infighting over what Siri should aim to do, as well as on the charges

Join the conversation on Twitter and Facebook

LETTER FROM THE EDITOR

from some of its supporters that Apple’s version hasn’t yet lived up to its original potential — even as its slogan, “Your wish is its command,” promises to, as Bosker puts it, “fulfill any desire.”

Elsewhere in the issue, Howard Fineman kicks off our new series, “The Road Forward: Obama’s Second Term Challenges,” a nod to the president’s 2012 campaign slogan “Forward.” As Fineman writes, “He has yet to improve the lives and lot of average Americans; to erect the edifices of health care and banking reform; to enact immigration reform or implement strong new environmental rules; to set a consistent course for our role in the world; or to soothe the corrosive tone of public life in Washington.”

To take stock of Obama’s accomplishments and failures so far, and to document the ways he’s trying to make good on his pledge to move the country forward, we’ve put 18 Huffington Post reporters in Washington and New York, plus six in Canada and Europe, on the beat. We›ll be putting the spotlight on a range of issues that will define Obama’s second term: from poverty, educa-

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tion reform, and foreign affairs to bank regulation, the environment and immigration. We begin with Dave Jamieson and Arthur Delaney on Obama’s crucial but fragile relationship with America’s

[Siri] is a story rooted in the belief that cutting-edge technology can lift us into a higher state of living.” foundering middle class; Mark Gongloff on how Obama must reform the financial system; David Wood on the president’s drone war; and Tom Zeller Jr. on the high expectations and big challenges Obama will face on climate change in his second term. By measuring Obama’s performance on these and other defining issues, The Road Forward will, as Fineman puts it, keep the spotlight on whether Obama “will be shrewd, persistent and tough enough to turn great promise into true greatness.”

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OBAMA MAKES HISTORY IN INAUGURAL ADDRESS

President Obama made history this week when he became the first president to address gay rights during an inauguration speech. “Our journey is not complete until our gay brothers and sisters are treated like anyone else under the law — for if we are truly created equal, then surely the love we commit to one another must be equal as well,” he said to a crowd of hundreds of thousands gathered on the National Mall. Obama also addressed poverty, racial and gender equality, and — in a reference to the gun control debate — he said, “our journey is not complete until all our children, from the streets of Detroit to the hills of Appalachia to the quiet lanes of Newtown, know that they are cared for, and cherished, and always safe from harm.”

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CONDOLEEZZA RICE JOINS CBS

Bob Schieffer announced on CBS’ Face the Nation that former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice will join the network as a contributor. She will “use her insight and vast experience to explore issues facing America at home and abroad,” the network said in a statement. Rice, who was the first African-American woman to be secretary of state, served under President George W. Bush.

WORLD ECONOMIC FORUM: $700 BILLION A YEAR NEEDED TO CURB CLIMATE CHANGE

The day before the launch of the World Economic Forum annual meeting in Davos, Switzerland, a forum study showed that an extra $700 billion a year is needed to promote using cleaner forms of energy instead of fossil fuels, Reuters reports. But the question of who will pay for a reduction in greenhouse gas emissions, which are blamed for sparking natural disasters like Hurricane Sandy, is still up for debate. President Obama addressed climate change in his inauguration speech, saying, “We will respond to the threat of climate change, knowing that the failure to do so would betray our children and future generations.”

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JACK WELCH AT IT AGAIN

After accusing the Obama administration of fixing the unemployment numbers in a tweet last year (“these Chicago guys will do anything”) ex-General Electric CEO Jack Welch floated a new theory on Inauguration Day. “Inaugurals always magnificent...appears Pres.

Obama comfortable with high unemployment and huge deficits..no serious mention,” he tweeted. While Obama did not directly address unemployment, his speech did contain mentions of the deficit and the importance of middle-class jobs.

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HIGH SCHOOL GRAD RATE HITS RECORD HIGH

A new report from the research arm of the U.S. Education Department shows that the nationwide high school graduation rate hit a record high of 78.2 percent for the 20092010 school year. “This is the highest estimated rate of on-time graduation,” said Jack Buckley, who directs the Education Department’s National Center for Education Statistics. He added that the only other time the U.S. had a similar high school graduation rate was in 1968.

BYE BYE, BLOCKBUSTER

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About 3,000 Blockbuster employees will soon be forced to look for new jobs. Blockbuster owner Dish Network Corp. announced that it will shut down about 300 locations of the video store chain, leaving only about 500 Blockbusters in the U.S., the AP reports. The announcement comes after a year that saw the closure of 500 Blockbuster locations.

THAT’S VIRAL WHEN EBAY GOES AWRY (NSFW)

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

HEADLINES TO VIEW FULL STORIES

MICHELLE OBAMA IS NOT AMUSED

‘GUN APPRECIATION’ GONE WRONG

THE DUTCH TAKE ‘FEELING YOUR PAIN’ TO A NEW LEVEL

LUPE’S FIASCO

FROM TOP: KEVIN WINTER/GETTY IMAGES; CHRISTOPHER POLK/GETTY IMAGES FOR CMT

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Q&A

Tom Arnold on Roasting His Ex-Wife Roseanne on Comedy Central “It was an intimate moment and, whatever. I’m glad it’s over.”

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Above: Actor Tom Arnold (L) and roastee Roseanne Barr onstage during the Roast of Roseanne in August of 2012. Below: Arnold poses at the 2012 CMT Music Awards.

FOR THE FULL INTERVIEW, VISIT HUFFPOST LIVE

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The Best HuffPost Splashes of the Week

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The Week in Photos From Kinderdijk to Nottingham, ahead find our selections of this week’s most compelling images.

Tap here for a more extensive look at the week on The Huffington Post.

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Kento Sakuyama is seen mid-air during day two of the FIS Men’s Ski Jumping World Cup at Okurayama Jump Stadium.

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London, England 01.16.2013 Office workers for IPC Media work into the night in the Blue Fin Building in Southwark.

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Kinderdijk, The Netherlands 01.15.2013 Snow covers Kinderdijk’s historic windmills, a tourist attraction in this South Holland village.

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Rawtenstall, England 01.15.2013 Two boxers train under the glow of the Haslingden Halo Panopticon, an art installation on the site of a former landfill.

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Yaroslavl, Russia 01.19.2013 A Russian Orthodox boy bathes in the icy cold water of a lake in a baptism ceremony during the Orthodox Epiphany celebrations, one of the biggest events in the Christian Orthodox calendar.

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Jakarta, Indonesia 01.20.2013 As major floods hit North Jakarta, local resident Syamsuri is evacuated by Indonesian Army. The floods have compelled the U.S. to offer $150,000 in aid.

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Louis Deacon of the Leicester Tigers rugby club jumps for a line out with Yoann Maestri of Toulouse during the Heineken Cup match.

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London, England 01.18.2013 An enthusiast inspects a locomotive at The London Model Engineering Exhibition at the Alexandra Palace, featuring more than a thousand models from more than 50 national and regional societies.

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Paraparaumu Beach, New Zealand 01.16.2013 The dead body of a sperm whale lies on Paraparaumu Beach on the Kapiti Coast, where it washed up overnight.

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Piornal, Spain 01.20.2013 People throw turnips at a man dressed as a horned demon, called the Jarramplas, as he makes his way through the streets during the Jarramplas Festival, which takes place every Jan. 19 to 20 on Saint Sebastian Day. The origins of the festival are not known, but the event symbolizes the expulsion of all things bad.

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Nottingham, United Kingdom 01.21.2013 Freddy the Boston Terrier plays in the snow after the UK’s weekend of heavy snowfall.

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Washington, D.C., U.S. 01.21.2013 President Obama signs a proclamation to commemorate his inauguration.

Standing around the president from left to right are: Sen. Harry Reid, Sen. Lamar Alexander, Sen. Chuck Schumer, Vice President Joe Biden, Rep. John Boehner, Rep. Eric Cantor and Rep. Nancy Pelosi.

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Voices

PETER SCHEER

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Facebook’s New Search Graph Is Google’s Nightmare Come True ALTHOUGH THE STOCK MARKET yawned at Facebook’s announcement of “Graph Search,” its new search service, with investors wagering it would only hurt smaller, vertical search services like Yelp and Linkedin, the truth is that it is potentially much more significant than that.

For the last several years Google’s management has had two nightmares. The first focused on the mass migration in internet usage from computers to smartphones, a development that threatened Google’s core business — search engine advertising — because phone makers (read: Apple) had no incentive to integrate Google’s ads (as opposed to its search results) into their handset displays.

Google’s second nightmare is

about Facebook. Increasingly, the digital universe consists of two internets: The vast universe that Google is able to index and search; and the walled-off portion, accounting for some 20-30 percent of total internet usage, represented by Facebook — which Google most definitely is not able to index and search.

In this nightmare, Mark Zuck-

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg in September of 2011.

Voices erberg calls a press conference one day to announce that he has launched his own search engine that does everything that Google does — plus, its searches include all relevant content on Facebook (which is not only off-limits to Google, but, given the nature of social media, could generate the most useful and user-specific search results of all).

Facebook’s launch of its Graph Search tool, in combination with its announced alliance with Microsoft’s Bing search service, is Google’s nightmare come true.

Facebook + Bing = a much enhanced version of Google. While Google has been able to neutralize the smartphone threat with the development of its Android operating system for phones, it will have a hard time matching that feat against Facebook’s invasion of Google’s search business.

Anticipating Facebook’s latest move, Google has invested heavily in its own social media business, Google+. But Google+, despite its early growth, impressive technology and considerable promise, is still dwarfed by Facebook and its one billion active users.

For Google, Facebook (together with Bing) is an even more for-

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midable rival than Apple. Apple’s revenue is concentrated in hardware sales, not advertising. But both Google and Facebook derive most of their revenue, and nearly all of their profit, from advertising. Each succeeds at the expense of the other.

And even if Facebook fails to trigger a mass shift in ads from Google’s platform to Facebook’s, its presence almost certainly will

The digital universe consists of two internets: The [one] Google is able to index and search, and the walled-off portion ... Facebook.” bid down the price of internet search advertising, which will hit Google’s profits even if Google manages to hold on to its dominant market position.

Google is going to have a hard time finding relief from its Facebook nightmare. Win or lose, it now confronts a much bigger Facebook challenge than is generally realized.

Peter Scheer is the executive director of the First Amendment Coalition.

Voices

ELIZABETH PERLE

HUFFINGTON 01.27.13

ROYCE DEGRIE/GETTY IMAGES

In Defense of Taylor Swift

I

HAVE FINALLY REACHED my breaking point. LEAVE BRITNEY TAYLOR ALONE. ¶ To give you some background, it seems that people are especially mad at T Swizzle this month. They are upset with her for many reasons, like ostensibly being asexual, having an out-of-control interest in antique shopping, dating too many men, and not being sufficiently feminist. Let me repeat. Asexual.

Antique shopping. Too many men. Anti-feminist. ¶ First of all, judging a young person’s perceived sexual orientation? Just stop.

And I’m not going to touch the antiquing thing with a 10 foot pole. ¶ In terms of slut-shaming her for having multiple boyfriends, I think it’s pretty obvious why we shouldn’t be doing it to a 23-yearold girl, whether she’s a mega-star or just out of college from small town Pennsylvania. No one deserves that. Not Swift and not her young fans, who are probably internalizing these critiques as we

Taylor Swift at the Nashville Symphony Ball in 2011.

Voices speak. Now, I have a lot to say about this “Taylor Swift is sexist” argument. There was one jarring article on Buzzfeed recently that got to the heart of the issue for me. The piece analyzed lyrics from her songs and asked: “Does Taylor Swift Hate Other Women?”

But what I’d like to know from Buzzfeed is: “Why do you?”

I’m not arguing that her songs are perfect feminist anthems that romanticize healthy romantic relationships. Few, if any, mainstream musicians today (male or female) write songs that are not problematic in that sense, and this probably says more about our preferences as an audience than their talent as artists.

Why, suddenly, do we all feel it’s her responsibility to carry our political banner for us?

It’s one thing to have a feminist analysis of Swift’s songs and to find them wanting. It’s another to dismiss her because her music doesn’t achieve feminism perfection in a vacuum where no one does. The more we focus on and disapprove of the few female singers who dare do their own writing, the more we are creating a hostile environment for empowered female artists to exist, period. More-

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over, Swift has actually negotiated interesting — and arguably, unprecedented — ways to retain her agency in an industry that would rather she didn’t. That’s what makes her a feminist role model.

Even though there’s little she can do to change the system that puts her private life as a young, female celebrity on display, Swift appears to have created a model

Why, suddenly, do we all feel it’s her responsibility to carry our political banner for us?” where she can manipulate it. She has preemptively created a narrative for herself that she has power over and, for the most part, has benefitted her career.

In an industry known for targeting young, successful women and attempting to strip them of their agency, Swift serves as a powerful example of someone who has fought back in ways that are smart, complicated and unapologetic. It’s also probably worth mentioning that Swift clearly doesn’t need my defense. She’s got this.

Elizabeth Perle is editor of The Huffington Post Youth Network.

JESSICA MIGLIO/COURTESY OF HBO

Voices

NINA BAHADUR

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My Problem With Girls I HAVE A confession to make: I don’t like Girls.

It took me a long time to admit this — especially to my co-workers, who are pretty

avid Girls fans. (The show’s Golden Globes wins don’t make it any easier.) When I voiced my thoughts about Girls to basically anyone, I was usually met with considerable surprise, if not outright dismissal, and for a while I couldn’t blame them. I ex-

Lena Dunham and Alex Karpovsky in the season two premiere of the HBO show.

Voices pected to love the show, too, but I didn’t, and I wasn’t sure why.

Sometime during Season 1, my mild dislike turned into a strange kind of loathing for Girls and the discourse around it. I couldn’t figure out quite what it was that bothered me, so I kept watching.

It didn’t grow on me.

Popular reasons not to love Girls include the lack of racial diversity, the privileged, firstworld problems of the characters and the nepotism apparent in the casting. While I understand these points, none of them are my main issue. I find the episodes pretty boring — like many other TV series that just aren’t my thing. So, why did I feel so strongly about Girls in a way that I didn’t about New Girl or How I Met Your Mother? Why did my mild dislike turn into something much stronger?

Finally, I figured out the problem.

I hated that so many people — in particular, older friends and co-workers — expected me to like it, because of who and where I am. Since I’m a female recent liberal arts grad living and working in New York, I should love Girls. Some people I’ve talked to about the show pro-

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test that I couldn’t possibly “get it” and still not love it. They assume that I must be, somewhere deep down, a woman-child-intraining, a girl like those Girls, whose experiences should deeply resonate with me in some way. I should totally know what it feels like to tell my boss I would sleep

I don’t wish the characters in Girls were more perfect, I just wish they were less terrible.” with him or her, or be willing to do mysterious drugs in a bathroom line.

Full disclosure: I am 22, and definitely still prone to total idiocy. But Girls is a whole new level of absurd — which wouldn’t really be a problem save for the seemingly widely held belief that Girls is less lighthearted entertainment and more new gospel.

Major critics have anointed Lena Dunham the new voice of a generation. My generation.

There is nothing aspirational about the characters, but I’m supposed to see myself in them.

I’m apparently supposed to look

Voices at each often-humiliated, clueless, insulting, entitled female character as an approximation of me. Haven’t I heard? Girls is a show written “for us by us.” To which I can only respond: Are you kidding me?

I’m not saying that we’re all “supposed” to spend our 20s doing one thing or another, and that the show is unrealistic because it misrepresents what that might be. Of course it’s unrealistic — it’s television. Nor am I under any illusion that your average 20-something spends his or her time making solely rational decisions and never saying anything stupid. But I can’t agree that the characters’ behavior is normal.

And honestly, I can’t empathize with it — at all.

Dunham objects to the idea that characters have to be likable, which I’m on board with. I don’t wish the characters in Girls were more perfect, I just wish they were less terrible. And I bother wishing that because, apparently, they represent me.

Evidently I’m in the minority, but I see a lot of things in them that I don’t want at all. I don’t wish my parents funded my life, I don’t think it’s realistic to throw

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yourself into your artistic endeavors without any sort of financial independence, and I have never once wished my life were a version of Sex and the City — or wanted to do crack in Bushwick.

I don’t wish my parents funded my life, and I don’t think it’s realistic to throw yourself into your artistic endeavors without any sort of financial independence. Does this mean I am boring?”

Does this mean I am boring? Am I not making the best use of my early 20s?

Maybe what Dunham’s saying — about messy relationships, about friendships, and about bodies — is important, and I certainly don’t begrudge her the chance to be heard. Maybe hers is a voice of a generation — but she doesn’t speak for me.

So, please don’t put her words in my mouth. Truly, I never want to be that kind of Girl.

Nina Bahadur is the assistant editor of HuffPost Women.

CLOCKWISE FROM TOP LEFT: JOHN STILLWELL/AFP/GETTY IMAGES; DANIEL ACKER/BLOOMBERG VIA GETTY IMAGES; JOE RAEDLE/GETTY IMAGES; GETTY IMAGES

Voices

QUOTED

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“ I regret using that word now because it’s got so much baggage attached to it.

Of course, I was just using the standard dictionary definition.”

“If there’s people trying to do bad stuff to our guys, then we’ll take them out of the game, I suppose.”

—Whole Foods CEO John Mackey

told HuffPost Live about his comparison of Obamacare to fascism in a recent interview with NPR

—Prince Harry,

in one of several interviews released to the media about killing Taliban fighters on his Afghanistan tour

“ Take a picture of yourself.

Take a picture of the rhinos.

Then learn how to use photoshop.”

— HuffPost commenter Adam_Woehler, on a South African woman being attacked by a rhino while posing for a photo with her husband

“I actually think the president … is not a believer in the Second Amendment. If he wants to reform it, then have the guts to admit that.”

—Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.), in an interview with Fox News

FROM LEFT: AP PHOTO/PBS, CARNIVAL FILM & TELEVISION LIMITED 2011 FOR MASTERPIECE, NICK BRIGGS; STEFANIA D’ALESSANDRO/GETTY IMAGES

Voices

QUOTED

Along comes this show Downton Abbey — rich people prominently featured and they’re generous; they’re nice people; they create jobs, for heaven’s sake; they’re classy; they’ve got style and we love ’em.

—British economic journalist Stuart Varney explains on Fox and Friends why the show poses a threat to liberals

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“ Anyone seeking an understanding of historical events and relevance should visit the library.

Then, when you want to be entertained, go to the movies.”

— HuffPost commenter Bennie_ Hickson, on Spike Lee’s Django Unchained criticism

“ Once again, if we are going to dictate the off campus behavior of our educators, we need to be paying them a heck of a lot more.”

— HuffPost commenter Parthenokinesis,

on a California teacher being fired for her porn star past

“ Note to everyone who thinks he/ she is supposed to receive special recognition for takng [sp] care of their children: You’re not, get over yourself.”

— HuffPost commenter Absolute, on the show All My Babies Mamas being cancelled by the Oxygen Network

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01.27.13 #33 FEATURES SIRI RISING

OBAMA 2.0 MIDDLE CLASS CHALLENGE FINANCIAL REFORM DRONE WARFARE ENVIRONMENT

ILLUSTRATION BY MARTIN GEE; PC PLUS MAGAZINE/FUTURE PUBLISHING/GETTY IMAGES (IPHONE)

SIRI RISING

Is She the Voice of Our Digital Future?

By BIANCA BOSKER

>> The world got its first inkling

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of the quick wit that would make Apple’s Siri an icon during a packed press conference held before an auditorium of tech elite. ¶ “Who are you?” an Apple executive asked the assistant. ¶ “I am a humble personal assistant,” Siri answered to appreciative laughter. ¶ More like humbled personal assistant. That press conference was actually Siri’s second coming-out party. When the virtual assistant first launched in early 2010, it was a standalone iPhone app called Siri created by a 24-person startup with the same name, a company Apple would later acquire.

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IAN WALDIE/BLOOMBERG VIA GETTY IMAGES

Back then, Siri boasted an even more irreverent tone — and a more robust set of skills. Like fiction writers dreaming up a character, Dag Kittlaus, Siri’s co-founder and chief executive, and Harry Saddler, a design expert, had carefully crafted the assistant’s attitude and backstory. It was to be “otherworldly,” “vaguely aware of popular culture” and armed with a “dry wit,” Kittlaus says.

Ask it about gyms, and Siri sent back a mocking, “Yeah, your grip feels weak.” Ask, “What happened to HAL?” — the brainy (and murderous) talking computer that starred in Stanley Kubrick’s 1968 thriller 2001: A Space Odyssey — and it delivered a sullen, “I don’t want to talk about it.” In those days, Siri still had “fuck” in its lexicon.

That was before Apple washed Siri’s mouth out with soap and curbed many of its talents, even as it endowed the assistant with new gifts. The Siri that Apple introduced in October 2011, 16 months

after acquiring the technology for a reported $150 to $250 million, had expanded its linguistic range from one to multiple languages. It was scaled to serve millions of people and programmed to operate internationally. It had acquired a voice with which to speak its answers, where before it had offered only written responses. And it was deeply integrated into the iPhone, so that it could

A customer tries the Siri voice assistant function on an Apple iPhone 5 in Australia during its debut on Sept. 21, 2012.

“ A KINDER, GENTLER HAL IS ON WAY ITS WAY TO THE MAINSTREAM FOR SURE.” tap into about a dozen of Apple’s own tools to handle simple tasks like scheduling a meeting, replying to emails or checking the weather.

As impressive as those talents were, most failed to realize that Apple’s version of Siri lacked many of the features once built into the program. This, after all, was no ordinary iPhone app, but the progeny of the largest artificial intelligence project in U.S. histo-

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ry: a Defense Department-funded undertaking that sought to build a virtual assistant that could reason and learn.

At its original debut, in 2010, Siri had been able to connect with 42 different web services — from Yelp and StubHub to Rotten Tomatoes and Wolfram Alpha — then return a single answer that integrated the best details culled from those diverse sources. It had been able to buy tickets, reserve a table and summon a taxi, all without a user having to open another app, register for a separate service or place a call. It was already on the verge of “intuiting” a user’s pet peeves and preferences to the point that it would have been able to seamlessly match its suggestions to his or her personality.

At a 2010 tech conference, Siri co-founder Tom Gruber demonstrated the app’s reach: Telling the assistant, “I’d like a romantic place for Italian food near my office,” yielded an answer that seamlessly combined facts from Citysearch, Gayot, Yelp, Yahoo!

Local, AllMenus.com, Google Maps, BooRah and OpenTable.

As conceived by its creators, Siri was supposed to be a “do engine,” something that would al-

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A demo version of the early Siri from 2010.

low people to hold conversations with the Internet. While a search engine used stilted keywords to create lists of links, a do engine could carry a conversation, then decide and act. Had one too many drinks? The ability to coordinate a Google search for a ride home might elude you, but a do engine could translate a muttered, “I’m drunk take me home,” into a command to send a car service to your location. The startup’s goal was not to build a better search engine, but to pioneer an entirely new paradigm for accessing the , one that would let artificially intelligent agents summon the answers people needed, rather than

COURTESY OF DAG KITTLAUS

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pull relevant resources for humans to consult on their own. If the search engine defined the second generation of the web, Siri’s co-founders were confident the do engine would define the third.

The do engine was designed to be a participant in the life at hand — one that could anticipate what you wanted before you wanted it, and make it yours before you could ask. Siri’s creators planned, though never implemented, a way for Siri to assist waylaid travelers: The assistant could preempt the frustration caused by a delayed plane by suggesting alternate flights, trains departing shortly, or car rental companies with vehicles available.

This Siri — the Siri of the past — offers a glimpse at what the Siri of the future may provide, and a blueprint for how a growing wave of artificially intelligent assistants will slot into our lives. The goal is a human-enhancing and potentially indispensable assistant that could supplement the limitations of our minds and free us from mundane and tedious tasks.

Siri’s backers know Apple’s version of the assistant has not yet lived up to its potential. “The Siri team saw the future, defined the

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future and built the first working version of the future,” says Gary Morgenthaler, a partner at Morgenthaler Ventures, one of the two first venture capital firms to invest in Siri. “So it’s disappointing to those of us that were part of the original team to see how slowly that’s progressed out of the acquired company into the marketplace.”

But as a new wave of virtual assistants compete to take on our to-do lists, Apple is under growing pressure to use the technology it already has and turn Siri into the multitasking, proactive helper it once was. Siri’s history suggests a fantastical future of virtual assistants is coming; where we now see Siri as a footnote to the iPhone’s legacy, some day soon the iPhone may be remembered as a footnote to Siri.

“A kinder, gentler HAL is on way its way to the mainstream for

Siri’s cofounders from left to right: Adam Cheyer, Dag Kittlaus and Tom Gruber.

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sure,” says Kittlaus. “Siri is just a poster child, but it goes way, way beyond that.”

ASA MATHAT/COURTESY OF MORGENTHALER VENTURES

REPORTING FOR DUTY AT ‘NERD CITY’

Thirty-five years after HAL’s big screen debut, turning the stuff of science fiction into fact fell to perhaps the only organization with a more outlandish imagination than a Lucas or Spielberg: the Defense Department.

In 2003, the agency’s investment arm, DARPA, tapped the non-profit research institute SRI International to lead a five-year, 500-person effort to build a virtual assistant, one the government hoped might yield software to help military commanders with both information overload and office chores. Although it wasn’t the project’s mission, this helper, the Cognitive Assistant that Learns and Organizes, or CALO, would ultimately provide the inspiration and model for Siri.

The Defense Department’s financial backing, $150 million in all, united hundreds of top-tier artificial intelligence experts for an ambitious and uncertain endeavor that most corporate R&D labs could only dream of tackling:

teaching computers to learn in the wild. The army of engineers at “nerd city” — one SRI researcher’s nickname for the lab — were tasked with creating a PC-based helper smart enough to learn by observing a user’s behavior, and all the people, projects and topics relevant to her work. The undertaking was “by any measure, the largest AI program in history,” says David Israel, one of the lead researchers on CALO. The CALO project was part of the PAL (Personal Assistant that

Gary Morgenthaler, a partner at Morgenthaler Ventures, one of the two first venture capital firms to invest in Siri.

AP PHOTO/MICHAEL SCHMELLING

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Learns) program, funded by the Defense Department’s investment arm, DARPA. At least to some people, it seemed as if the serious-minded federal government was taking a flier on the stuff of 9-year-old boys’ sci-fi fantasies.

“CALO was put together at a time when many people said AI was a waste of time,” explains Paul Saffo, a technology forecaster and associate professor at Stanford University. “It had failed multiple times, skepticism was high and a lot of people thought it was a dumb idea.”

Despite its naysayers, CALO proved a scientific triumph. The project reunited, for the first time in decades, independent disciplines of artificial intelligence that had been deemed too complex to cooperate.

It also demonstrated that a machine could learn in real time through its lived experience, as a human being does. Previously, artificial intelligence software had been coached “in vitro,” meaning a machine-learning algorithm would be applied to a fixed set of data, then judged on how it handled that information. Every part of CALO instead had to

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learn “in vivo,” training itself as it performed tasks using an uncontrolled diet of information.

The SRI lab had a history of bringing the future to the present.

Founded in 1946 by Stanford University trustees seeking research for “the good of society,” SRI formally split from the university in 1970 and has operated independently ever since. The institute leads research projects funded by government agencies and corporations, then spins out its most promising technologies into standalone startups. The inkjet printer, LCD screen and Disney-

Doug Engelbart, inventor of the computer mouse and winner of the LemelsonMIT prize, in 1997, with the mouse he designed.

ARAYA DIAZ/GETTY IMAGES FOR TECHCRUNCH

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land are all among the institute’s brainchildren.

The Menlo Park lab also gained renown for counting, among its researchers, Silicon Valley legend Doug Engelbart, who in the 1960s pioneered the computer mouse and foresaw many of the basic computing tools we now take for granted.

Adam Cheyer, an engineer at the institute, was already drawing comparisons to Engelbart, well before he launched what would eventually become Siri. The dark-haired, soft-spoken engineer — a one-time Rubik’s Cube champion who could solve the puzzle in just 26 seconds — shared not only Engelbart’s ingenuity, but also his “people first” approach to technology.

Engelbart maintained that machines should be used to augment human intellect and capabilities.

The objective was “not trying to replace humans in any respect, but trying to have devices, hardware and software that make humans more effective at what they already do,” explains Israel, who remembers Cheyer and Engelbart having lengthy discussions in the research institute’s cafeteria.

Where other people saw chores on a to-do list, Cheyer saw learning opportunities for virtual as-

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sistants. During an earlier stint at SRI in the 1990s, Cheyer, then straight out of a master’s program in computer science, built a small army of prototype assistants.

Cheyer’s kitchen helper, for example, could track the contents of his fridge and place grocery orders online when milk ran low.

At SRI, Cheyer worked on assembling all the pieces produced by the CALO project’s 27 teams into a single assistant, which was required to take an annual exam testing what it had learned over the course of the year. The “research-grade” virtual assistant Cheyer helped build — also called CALO — was still too rough

Siri cofounder Adam Cheyer arrives at the 5th Annual Crunchies Awards in 2012.

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around the edges to be installed in white-collar workers’ office PCs. But CALO was capable of performing an impressive variety of tasks that once seemed exclusive to human assistants.

Say your colleague canceled shortly before a meeting. CALO, knowledgeable about each person’s role on a project, could discern whether to cancel the meeting, and if needed, reschedule, issue new invitations and pin down a conference room. If the meeting went ahead as planned, CALO could assemble (and rank) all the documents and emails you’d need to be up to speed on the topic at hand. The assistant would listen in on the meeting, and, afterward, deliver a typed transcript of who said what and outline any specific tasks laid out during the conversation. CALO was also able to help put together presentations, organize files into folders, sort incoming messages and automate expense reports, among a host of other tasks.

Cheyer split his time between training CALO and assisting SRI’s Vanguard program, a parallel effort launched in 2003 to help companies such as Deustche Telekom and Motorola probe the fu-

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ture of a promising new gadget called the smartphone. The Vanguard program developed its own prototype assistant, more limited than CALO, but more feasible.

The prototype dazzled a general manager at Motorola by the name of Dag Kittlaus.

A native mid-Westerner once likened to a “baby-faced Nordic Brad Pitt,” Kittlaus supplemented his office routine with a daredevil’s diet of activities — chasing tornadoes, jumping from planes

“ SOME DAY SOON THE IPHONE MAY BE REMEMBERED AS A FOOTNOTE TO SIRI.” and earning a black belt in Hapkido. He was a sci-fi buff partial to authors like Arthur C. Clarke (who helped pen the screenplay for 2001: A Space Odyssey) and would later set out to write his own novel set in the distant future.

When Kittlaus failed to persuade Motorola to adopt Vanguard’s technology, he quit the company in 2007 for a position as entrepreneur-in-residence at SRI. Soon after, he found himself on a plane to California for a retreat with Cheyer and several SRI colleagues. Their mission for the

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weekend: figure out how to harness the best ideas from CALO and Vanguard to seed a startup.

It was at the Cypress Inn at Half Moon Bay, a quiet, coastal town just south of San Francisco, that the vision for Siri was born. This mobile virtual assistant — like CALO, and in tune with Engelbart’s thesis — would be put to work relieving humanity of lowgrade mental busywork.

The working nickname for this assistant was HAL. The proposed tagline: “HAL’s back — but this time he’s good.”

THE UNFINISHED REVOLUTION

Virtual assistants had long proved a kind of siren song to an entire crew of Silicon Valley dreamers that wound up shipwrecked in pursuit of a more human, intelligent and helpful HAL. Over a decade earlier, in 1994, Wildfire Communications debuted a new telephone-based assistant, “Wildfire,” that could handle messages, place calls and retrieve voicemail in response to a prompt.

Wildfire earned good reviews, but saw little pickup, despite the fact that “she” charmed users with sassy responses. A few years later, Microsoft Office’s assistant

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Clippy, an over-eager bouncing paperclip volunteering tips and shortcuts, launched to the chagrin of office workers everywhere.

Eventually, Clippy made TIME’s list of 50 worst inventions. In

“ OUR WHOLE TREND IS TOWARD EVER MORE INTIMATE INTERACTIONS WITH MACHINES.” 1998, General Magic’s Portico promised to connect the and cell phones with a voice-controlled aide that could read emails and take messages, among other tasks.

Within four years, the company shut down the assistant and filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy.

Yet if ever there were a right place and a right time for virtual assistants, the fall of 2007 appeared to be it. Faster wireless speeds, better speech recognition, the rise of cloud computing, the debut of Apple’s iPhone and a flood of new web services made virtual helpers seem attainable at last.

The SRI crew could see that the iPhone, which had launched just before their excursion to Half Moon Bay, would yield a population of networked, always-on-the-

FLICKR/TOM GRUBER

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go consumers who would increasingly rely on tiny touch-screens to tell them what to do. An assistant, in the form of a voice-controlled iPhone app, seemed the ideal way to help mobile users complete all kinds of tasks, without having to poke at small screens with fat fingers or wait for web pages to load.

The aspiring entrepreneurs also had the advantage of being able to tap CALO’s technology. Under a law passed by Congress in 1980,

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nonprofits, like SRI, were given the right to keep the profits flowing from software developed via government-funded research. The law would allow a startup to license key software from the CALO project in exchange for giving SRI a stake in the company.

Though Cheyer had doubts CALO research could be used to create a profitable business and was reluctant to leave his post at the lab, Kittlaus prevailed on his “innovation soulmate.” The result was a new company named Siri, with Kittlaus, as CEO, taking on

Siri cofounder Tom Gruber.

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co-founders Gruber, as chief technology officer, and Cheyer, as vicepresident of engineering.

Siri’s founding trio required prospective hires to read MIT professor Michael Dertouzos’s The Unfinished Revolution, a treatise arguing for “human-centric computing” and devices that “truly serve us, instead of the other way around.” If an applicant didn’t agree with Dertouzos’ thesis, he or she wasn’t a match for Siri.

Once hired, new Siri employees were handed an empty frame and instructed to keep a photo on their desks of the person whose vision most inspired their work. Cheyer framed a picture of another tech visionary who preached the “people first” mentality: Doug Engelbart.

Siri secured $8.5 million from investors in early 2008 and its progress over the following months was “absolutely breathtaking,” says Morgenthaler, the early Siri investor. Shawn Carolan, a partner at Menlo Ventures and another Siri backer, recalls, “Every board meeting was a breakthrough.”

The founders enlisted their Siri prototype in a rigorous artificialintelligence boot camp of their own design, one meant to train the assistant to understand, in-

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terpret and answer queries. When asked a question, Siri, which processed information in a remote data center, would send the audio of the speaker’s question to a server, where speech recognition software would “transcribe” the spoken words.

Siri then had to figure out the words’ meaning — what computer scientists call natural language

“ THEIR SHARED OBJECTIVE: IMPROVE TECHNOLOGY IN ORDER TO MAKE PEOPLE BETTER AT WHAT THEY DO, NOT TO REPLACE HUMANS WITH MACHINES.” processing. People have dozens of ways of asking the same thing, and while humans can deduce that the phrases, “I’m in the mood for a croissant,” “Is there a bakery nearby?” and “Some French pastries would be nice,” all arrive at the same point, it takes a highly sophisticated algorithm to reach that same conclusion.

The more traditional, errorprone approach to natural language processing interpreted meaning by identifying the parts

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of speech in a sentence. But Siri abandoned that method in favor of a breakthrough approach devised by Cheyer and his colleagues. Instead of modeling linguistic concepts, their system could model real-world objects.

Told, “I want to see a thriller,” Siri would immediately identify “thriller” as a film genre — and summon up movies — rather than analyze how the subject connected to an object and a verb.

Siri was able to map the contents of a question onto a domain of potential actions, then pick the action that seemed most probable, based on its understanding of the relationships between real-world concepts. (For example, Siri knew a given restaurant should have a rating, an address, a type of cuisine and a price range associated with it.) Siri could also apply details about the time of day and a user’s preferences and location to inform its response, or to ask for more information.

Picture Siri as a concierge in a noisy lobby. A request for the “closest coffee shop” might sound like “closest call Felicia” over the din. But knowing that “closest” is more likely to characterize a place than a person, and that a guest is

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more likely ask a concierge for dining tips, a human hotelier would infer the asker was probably hankering for a cappuccino. Same with Siri, which was tuned to listen for the kinds of phrases an employer might use with a personal assistant and could get the gist of a question without understanding every word. To avoid miscommunication, Siri also allowed users

“ SIRI COULD DO FOR ‘THOUSANDS OF ACTIVITIES WHAT AMAZON HAS DONE FOR SHOPPING.’” to type, rather than speak, their questions into its interface.

To pull a list of cafés, Siri would tap into data it had organized from over 40 web services that operated like remote, diffuse lobes of its brain. While previous virtual assistants functioned through deep training in a single specialty, Siri had been built as a crossindustry savant with expertise in anything from books to bagels; it just needed access to the application programming interfaces, or APIs, many web companies offer to third parties.

Early on, the Siri developers

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saw virtually no limit to the routine transactions the assistant could automate. They envisioned Siri’s architecture allowing for any web service with an API — potentially hundreds of thousands of them — to add its database to the do engine.

But Siri’s creators also knew their virtual assistant would only succeed if it was both smart and a smartass, both artificially intelligent and artificially amusing.

Kittlaus and Saddler brainstormed snappy comebacks for all the offbeat questions people were likely to ask the assistant. The co-founders also dreamed of offering users a choice of different personality “packs” that could be installed to make Siri’s answers sweeter or sassier. And because Siri could recognize nuances in users’ speech mannerisms, its creators hoped one day they might even build a Siri that could mimic people’s personalities. “Yo, yo what kind of flicks are playing, dude?” might get Siri to answer, “Hey man, check out the new Eastwood flick.

Word,” according to Kittlaus.

In February 2010, three weeks after Siri debuted as an independently developed iPhone app, Kittlaus received a call from a

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mystery number — one he nearly missed thanks to a glitchy, unresponsive iPhone screen.

It was Steve Jobs and he wanted to meet. The next day.

Siri’s co-founders spent three hours with Jobs at his Palo Alto home discussing the future of do engines and how people could converse with machines (Jobs loved Siri’s snark). Apple quickly followed up with an interest in acquiring the young company.

“The way that Steve described it, speech recognition — and how to use it to create a speech interface for something like the iPhone — was an area of interest to him and Scott Forstall [then head of Apple’s mobile software] for some time,” recalls Kittlaus. “The story that I’m told is that he thought we’d cracked that paradigm with our simple, conversational interface.”

Verizon thought so, too. In the fall of 2009, several months before Apple approached Siri, Verizon had signed a deal with the startup to make Siri a default app on all Android phones set to launch in the new year. When Apple swooped in to buy Siri, it insisted on making the assistant exclusive to Apple devices, and nixed the Verizon deal. In the process, it narrowly avoided seeing Siri become a selling point for smartphones powered by its biggest

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rival, Google. (Somewhere in the vaults of the wireless giant, there are unreleased commercials touting Siri as an Android add-on.)

Its first and only app had barely been available for two full months. And now Siri — and its future — belonged to Apple.

“It was a storybook ending — or beginning, you can call it,” Kittlaus says.

RONALDO SCHEMIDT/AFP/GETTY IMAGES

‘AN ARTIFICIALLYINTELLIGENT ORPHAN’

With Siri and its entire 24-person team installed at Apple’s Cupertino headquarters, the tech giant at once got down to tinkering with its new acquisition.

Even as Apple amped up some features, it removed many of Siri’s powers by disconnecting the assistant from most of the outside services that had powered its digital brain. The restaurant reservation function, one of the key features of the original Siri app in 2010, would be denied to iPhone users until 2012.

Industry insiders say Apple’s size has hindered its ability to forge deals with the dozens of services that once synced with Siri.

Whereas partnering with a startup in its embryonic stages was a sim-

pler affair, brokering a deal with the world’s most influential tech company, a high-stakes undertaking by any measure, required many lawyers, meetings and spreadsheets of cost-benefit analyses.

Though Apple has the technology to pair Siri with a multitude of sites and services — and could use it soon — it may not yet have persuaded those potential partners to embrace a bigger Siri.

Apple also seems keen to ensure Siri will be decent for many users, rather than genius for a few. Progress has been slowed by Apple’s

Paul Saffo, a technology forecaster and associate professor at Stanford University.

“We moving more and more towards an interface like the interface we have with each other,” Saffo said.

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need to localize the assistant in the nearly 100 countries that offer the iPhone. Sending Siri abroad requires training the assistant in dozens of different languages, a timeintensive affair given the technical challenges of teaching the algorithm to understand human speech.

People familiar with the early version of Siri gripe that Apple, usually so meticulous about its products’ look and feel, has hidden Siri’s capabilities with a design that over-promises on what Siri can deliver. To avoid disappointing its users, the original Siri app tried to teach people what they could ask by showing a screen of sample questions each time they queried the assistant.

Siri’s current layout largely leaves the assistant’s abilities to the user’s imagination, even though it excels at only a very specific subset of tasks. Apple’s slogan for Siri — “Your wish is its command” — creates even more frustration by suggesting people should let their dreams run wild and expect Siri, the genie in the iPhone, will fulfill any desire.

Apple also must wrestle with the fact that Siri isn’t always a great listener, especially in the places it’s likely to be used most.

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Speech recognition software, is still iffy in noisy settings, and especially has trouble decoding the low-quality audio that Bluetooth headsets send to Siri — so good luck chatting with Siri while you’re driving a car. That problem is likely temporary, however, as better data and more sophisticated models help machines become ever-more in tune with human speech.

Already, Apple’s assistant does seem to be getting sharper: Invest-

“ SIRI HAS BECOME ‘AN ARTIFICIALLY INTELLIGENT ORPHAN’ WITHIN APPLE.” ment bank Piper Jaffray raised Siri’s grade from a “D” to a “C” after a test of its skills last December found Siri could understand 91 percent of queries and correctly answer 77 percent of them.

But corporate politics have been unkind to Siri, and the endeavor’s prospects may be jeopardized by its loss of many powerful advocates within Apple. Though Saffo, the Stanford professor and futurist, cautions deciphering Apple’s inner workings is like “trying to understand North Korea,” he ventures that Siri has become “an artificially-intelligent orphan”

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within the company.

Only one of Siri’s three cofounders, Tom Gruber, remains at the company. Kittlaus left three weeks after Apple re-launched Siri in 2011, and Cheyer quit a year later. Apple’s Forstall, who introduced Siri at its first keynote and oversaw the company’s iOS software, was fired last year.

Steve Jobs died the day after Siri debuted. And Luc Julia, who replaced Kittlaus as head of Siri, lasted just 10 months at Apple before leaving in 2012.

A HIGHER STATE OF BEING

Siri offered the first mass-market assistant capable of understanding humans’ natural speech patterns and assembling information from disparate parts of the into a single, correct response. That model, one Siri pioneered, has been embraced by a growing wave of artificial intelligence engineers and entrepreneurs keen to pioneer their own version of HAL. The virtual assistants now coming to market are trying to provide many of the same capabilities offered in the early version of Siri, and CALO before it. Even Apple has been slowly reinstating some of the capabilities Siri once of-

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fered, such as movie reviews and restaurant bookings.

Having seen Siri’s success, Silicon Valley startups are now mining the CALO project to build a race of assistants tailored to work in specialized fields. Desti is an artificially intelligent assistant specializing in travel; Lola is a “Siri for banking;” and Kuato is leveraging CALO research to build a learning assistant.

More than half a dozen Sirilike services launched in 2012 alone. Samsung debuted S-Voice, a voice-controlled assistant. Nuance, a provider of speech recognition software, released a “Siri for apps” called Nina. Startups Evi and Maluuba each released virtual assistant apps. IBM is working on adapting its supercomputer Watson into a turbo-charged Siri that can help physicians, farmers, Wall Street traders and high-schoolers.

And Google has followed Siri with its own conversational assistant, Google Now. “The idea is not to ask one question and get an answer, but to have the assistant proceed with me in a conversation and go and do things for me,” says Scott Huffman, an engineering director who oversees Google’s mobile search efforts. It’s a vision that sounds remarkably like the one Siri’s founders first embraced.

AP PHOTO/PAUL SAKUMA

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Futurists and researchers predict such voice-controlled software, like Siri and Google Now, will take us from understanding how to use technology to technology that understands us.

“We’re moving more and more towards an interface like the interface we have with each other,” says Saffo. “Our whole trend is toward ever more intimate interactions

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with machines [...] and with each phase, machines are doing something ever more central to our lives.”

These ever more central tasks include everything from taking care of life’s little hassles to actually shaping what we do. Siri’s founders had planned to make the assistant a source of personalized advice and wisdom by implanting Siri with CALO’s cutting-edge learning skills.

Siri would have taken it upon itself to summon information that hadn’t specifically been requested.

Phil Schiller, Apple’s senior vice president of worldwide marketing, talks about Siri on the iPhone 4S at the Apple Headquarters in Cupertino, Calif.

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Google’s assistant is going a step further, volunteering information before it’s even been asked. Google Now masters its users’ routines so it can proactively fetch game updates for sports fans or advise users to leave early for a meeting due to traffic. (As Google chairman Eric Schmidt, “[People] want Google to tell them what they should be doing next.”)

A few years from now, as you walk through the mall, your virtual assistant will tell you where to shop for shoes by factoring in your wardrobe, time frame and cash flow. When you step into a store, you consult the options the assistant has lined up for you.

The calfskin loafers are a must, it whispers, at the same time cautioning that the purchase would put you over your monthly budget. If you do splurge, it suggests you request a cash advance, and the assistant offers to contact your bank. While you’re paying, the assistant, knowing that you’ve been going to a lot of museums lately, offers updates on current exhibits. Or, thanks to emotionrecognition technology that infers your mood from your facial expressions, it senses you’re feeling down and cracks some jokes. At

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the office, another assistant might take over. Before your date, yet another could counsel you on your love life.

Where does that leave humans?

Siri investor Shawn Carolan, like many others, imagines we’ll be more productive. “Take everything you do in a day and just condense it down from 15 minutes down to 30 seconds. You can just express your intent, and it gets done,” explains Carolan. “You just became a

“ IT WAS A STORYBOOK ENDING — OR BEGINNING, YOU CAN CALL IT.” 30 times more powerful human.”

With its own reach and Siri’s software, Apple could still fulfill the do engine dream. If it took advantage of Siri’s early architecture that used web services’ APIs to feed the assistant’s ever-expandable brain, Siri would have the potential to automate a multitude of tasks.

Morgenthaler argues that with this technology, Siri could do for “thousands of activities what Amazon has done for shopping.”

Under Apple, Siri could one day book flights, order flowers and offer fashion advice, becoming what

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former CALO program director James Arnold calls an “iTunes for everything else in the world.” Siri, the startup, took a commission anytime someone made a purchase via the app. Were Apple ever to do the same, it could tap into an entirely new source of cash.

Arnold also sees virtual assistants as intellectual equalizers. A superb memory might cease to be an advantage as intelligent assistants are tasked with remembering names, dates and other details.

Everyone will have the ability to see unusual but important connections between legal cases or patients’ symptoms, thanks to assistants that can identify relevant precedents or files.

“The future of virtual personal assistants is to make it so we don’t have to think so much and work so hard to do things that are possible,” says Kittlaus. “It’s less about survival and more about exploring the world.”

Yet for all the efficiencies these do engines may provide, they may also carry a significant risk. Evan Selinger, a fellow at the Institute for Ethics and Emerging Technologies, argues that less friction in our lives may “render us more vulnerable to being automatic,” and elimi-

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nate crucial opportunities for moral deliberation. “The digital servant becomes the digital overlord, and we don’t even recognize it.”

They might also make us an easy target for an algorithm that knows more about our bad habits and indulgences than we do, and isn’t above exploiting them. The stream of suggestions from virtual assistants, especially if advertisers have a say, could make us more susceptible to overeating and over-spending. A spouse knows not to encourage you to stop by the steakhouse given your heart condition. But would Siri?

Or Google Now if Google got a big ad buy from the steakhouse?

Would Siri nag you into becoming your best self or would it coddle and humor you into a state of blissful complacency?

By freeing us of the irritants and drudgeries of life that keep us from pursuing our more serious interests, the promise of virtual assistants offers a release into an inconceivably higher state of being. As the mathematician and philosopher Alfred North Whitehead observed, “Progress is measured by what you no longer have to think about.”

But progress toward what? That may be one of the few questions our assistants won’t be able to answer.

PHOTO OR ILLUSTRATION CREDIT TK

OBAMA 2.0 The Road Forward: Obama’s Second-Term PHOTO OR ILLUSTRATION CREDIT TK

PREVIOUS PAGE: POLIVIER DOULIERY-POOL/GETTY IMAGES

By HOWARD FINEMAN

JUST BECAUSE you beat Mitt Romney — and John McCain before him — doesn’t mean you’re a great president or even a particularly good one.

President Barack Obama has proved to be brilliant at digital organizing and winning elections.

But his presidency so far has been less than meets the eye.

He has yet to improve the lives and lot of average Americans; to erect the edifices of health care and banking reform; to enact immigration reform or implement strong new environmental rules; to set a consistent course for our role in the world; or to soothe the corrosive tone of public life in Washington.

Still, the public hasn’t abandoned him; he won a convincing victory last November, after all.

A new Huffington Post/YouGov

poll shows voters modestly hopeful about his chances of being more successful this time around; a combined 64 percent of those polled say they think he will accomplish as much or more in the

“ Obama is in an unusually strong position to deliver on the potential of his second term — but only if he has the will and wherewithal to turn ballotbox victory into real-life results.”

second term than he did in the first term.

And, given the haplessness of his Republican foes, Obama is in an unusually strong position to deliver on the potential of his second term — but only if he has the will and wherewithal to turn ballotbox victory into real-life results.

That’s the bottom line of an in-

OBAMA 2.O depth survey by The Huffington Post of the problems and prospects facing the president from the moment he placed his hand on two Bibles: the one Abraham Lincoln used in 1861, and the “traveling” one Martin Luther King, Jr., kept at his side.

A series of stories on The Huffington Post, entitled “The Road Forward,” offers the results of that survey: 20 reported pieces, expert blog posts, HuffPost Live video interviews with reporters, and poll data from HuffPost/YouGov. Ahead, we’ve spotlighted four of these pieces, focusing on the middle class, environment, financial reform and drones.

The most crucial part of any HuffPost project comes after we publish it, in the form of comments from our vast and voluble social community. We pioneered a mix of news reporting, social media and community input, and no story we publish is supposed to be the final word. Just the opposite — we encourage you to add your take.

Say this about Obama: he likes to be seen as aiming high. His 2012 campaign slogan was one mighty word with a period at the end of it: “FORWARD.” So, taking the president at his word — liter-

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ally — we are calling the series “THE ROAD FORWARD: Obama’s Second Term Challenges.”

Eighteen Huffington Post reporters in Washington and New York, plus six in Canada and Europe, examine how far we have come — and how far Obama still needs to go to move “FORWARD” into the Promised Land.

Drudges on the right see the president as a malignant and unstoppable force out to utterly transform America. But our reporters found something less apocalyptic. Obama actually has been less daring than he could have been, less systematic than he should have been, and more focused on short-term politics than his lofty, man-of-big-ideas image would suggest.

We start with the middle class, in whose name the president has, fitfully, dedicated his presidency.

There is no question that the president helped save the global system of trade and credit from collapse — a collapse that would have ruined us all, middle class included. Also, as his aides regularly point out, the promise of more widely available health care, subsidized by taxpayers, can make up for some of the downdraft in job and wages.

But reporters Dave Jamieson and Arthur Delaney found that

OBAMA 2.O the American middle class — the cultural and economic mainstay of the country — is under more pressure than ever, and in some ways farther behind than it was when Obama took office in 2009. Our reporters look at the administration’s claims of progress, and its modest targeted plans for a second term, and ask whether he is eager or able to do more.

It’s a central question — if not the central question — of the Obama presidency.

We find that Obama has miles to travel on this and other issues addressed here. His electoral victories (winning two terms by more than 50 percent of the popular vote each time) place him in the company of presidents like Andrew Jackson, Franklin Roosevelt and Ronald Reagan. Obama is in the winner’s circle, but not yet the “transformational figure” circle.

For most reelected presidents, power fades quickly. That may not be true in Obama’s case. Laws he passed in his first term can be implemented without going back to a nettlesome Congress. The world economy could be poised for a new round of growth. His Republican foes are in retreat and disarray. He can back them into a

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corner or woo them one-by one, as he did recently on the “fiscal cliff.” He was a novice at Washington and at the give-and-take of politics four years ago. Now he has a feel for the game.

The deeper question is whether he will be shrewd, persistent and tough enough to turn great prom-

“ Obama actually has been less daring than he could have been, less systematic than he should have been, and more focused on short-term politics than his lofty, man-of-bigideas image would suggest.”

ise into true greatness. His critics are of course skeptical. The American people are skeptical, too. A HuffPost/YouGov poll shows that only 37 percent of the American people predict that Obama will be a “great or above average” president. Other polls show that voters still think by a wide margin that the country is on the “wrong track.”

But Obama has defied expectations before. And if he can meet the challenges we explore here, he will do so again — and honor the memory of Lincoln and King in a fashion far more profound than a hand on a Bible.

MIDDLE CLASS CHALLENGE The Hard Math Facing Obama

By DAVE JAMIESON and ARTHUR DELANEY

ON ELECTION NIGHT in Chicago two months ago, President Barack Obama triumphantly pledged to fight for a middle class he’d appealed to relentlessly — and successfully — on the 2012 campaign trail.

“I believe we can build on the progress we’ve made and continue to fight for new jobs and new opportunity and new security for the middle class,” Obama said. “I believe we can keep the promise of our founders, the idea that if you’re willing to work hard ... you can make it here in America.”

The central challenge of

Obama’s second term is whether he can keep that founder’s “promise” to working Americans. It won’t be easy, and in an era of divided government and amid cries for austerity and budget cuts, it does not seem likely that the president will offer sweeping new proposals to do so. The administration has said that its top two priorities at the outset of its second term are immigration reform and gun control.

Despite an ongoing jobs crisis, creating quality jobs seems to have fallen a few slots on the president’s to-do list.

As Obama implicitly acknowledged, the American middle class has fallen on hard times, saddled

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with historic levels of debt, skyrocketing health care costs and flat wages. By most accounts, middle-class Americans are no better off than they were when the president took office in 2009, in the wake of an unprecedented financial crisis and in the midst of the Great Recession.

The arithmetic is stark. Median household income is lower than when Obama took office, according to Census Bureau data — lower even than when President Bill Clinton left office in 2001. The

middle 60 percent of households — those earning between $20,262 and $101,582 — captured a smaller share of aggregate income in 2011 than they did in 2009, while the top fifth, which already made more than the other groups combined, captured more. Surveys of public opinion reveal a middle class that is smaller, poorer and less optimistic than ever. And although the unemployment rate fitfully has fallen below 8 percent for the first time since Obama’s 2009 inauguration, most new jobs are too low-paying to sustain middle-class families.

There is more to the plight of

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Obama exits after making a statement following a meeting of the Middle Class Task Force at the White House on Jan. 25, 2010.

OBAMA 2.O / MIDDLE CLASS CHALLENGE the American middle class than numbers can express — and a greater threat to the country than economists can quantify.

Democracy, after all, can’t thrive without a broad, strong, educated core of citizens. But today they find themselves buffeted by the remorseless dictates of global capital, the need for evermore education and training and the burdens of higher taxes to pay for social programs they need, such as health care.

Battling these global and cultural trends is difficult. In fact, it is unfair to ask any one person — even a president, even Barack Obama — to overcome them all.

The president’s first responsibility in 2009 literally was to do his part to save the world’s frozen capital, banking and trade systems — without which the American middle class would have had no prospects at all.

Most fair-minded observers would say that Obama did his part, and acquitted himself well under crushing circumstances. A workable and affordable health care system, the central legislative success of his first term, can (if he sets it up properly) be of great benefit to middle-class workers.

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But now he must make good on his own promise — not always central to his discourse or decision making — to find more goodpaying middle class jobs.

How? On the stump this year, the president made manufacturing a centerpiece of his vision, arguing that a combination of tax reform, investment and education could help repatriate quality jobs to U.S. soil and stabilize the middle class.

Perhaps sensing the political popularity of such an idea in Rust Belt states like Ohio and Michigan, the

“ People are talking about it. That’s the difference between this election and the ones in the past. We actually had a debate about what’s hollowing out the country and what isn’t.”

Obama campaign set the lofty but achievable goal of creating a million new manufacturing jobs during the president’s second term.

In a recent interview on Meet the Press, the president renewed his commitment to investing in infrastructure, which he called “broken,” as another way to create good-paying jobs.

With the conversation in Washington focused not just on aus-

OBAMA 2.O / MIDDLE CLASS CHALLENGE terity but how much austerity to apply to a sputtering economy, it’s hard to imagine what kind of rebooted jobs plan the president could propose for his next term while staying within the bounds of political reality.

“In the short term, we are in a pretty difficult spot,” said John Schmitt, an economist with the left-leaning Center for Economic and Policy Research who studies economic inequality and unemployment. “Even if there was a serious commitment on the part of the administration towards a jobs program of some sort, it would run into a lot of trouble in the Congress.”

Without a clear and politically viable policy objective for jobs, the administration is likely to continue the piecemeal approach to economic recovery that it took for most of the president’s first term, observers say.

Obama’s landmark 2009 stimulus bill pumped billions of dollars into the ailing economy, stemming the loss of hundreds of thousands of jobs each month. The bill addressed the short-term fallout in the private sector by cutting taxes and pouring money into infrastructure projects and expanded

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unemployment insurance benefits.

But since then, additional spending has been all but off the table. Obama has repeatedly proposed more infrastructure spending, but the White House has routinely given up such demands in negotiations with congressional Republicans.

The lack of stimulus since the initial package — aside from the

“ The answer is very clear: We need substantial additional stimulus to support the economy. We are choosing as a country not to do it.” repeated extensions of long-term unemployment insurance — has exasperated left-leaning and centrist economists.

“The answer is very clear: We need substantial additional stimulus to support the economy,” said Heidi Shierholz, an economist at the Economic Policy Institute (EPI), a left-of-center think tank. “We are choosing, as a country and as a town [Washington], not to do it, with millions of jobless workers.”

To address the decline in manufacturing jobs, the Obama administration has undertaken a number of modest initiatives, such as launching a manufacturing insti-

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tute in Youngstown, Ohio, with $30 million in federal funding, a joint effort between industry and schools to train workers for tomorrow’s manufacturing jobs. The Youngstown facility focuses on training workers for 3-D printing technology, the kind of modern manufacturing industry where observers see a lot of potential.

The facility is an acknowledgment that tomorrow’s manufacturing jobs will be different from the ones of the past. Gone are the days when a new high school graduate could show up at the factory door, get trained on the shop

floor and earn a good wage and a pension. Jobs like those in 3-D printing require more advanced training and a certain degree of computer literacy. The same goes for other areas where experts, as well as the White House, see promise, like industrial robotics or nanomanufacturing. Obama’s own tech advisers have warned that the country’s “historic leadership” in manufacturing technology is “at risk” if it can’t cultivate the right talent for these fields.

In his 2013 budget proposal, Obama called for devoting $1 billion to create a national network of institutes like the one in Youngstown — a recommendation that hasn’t exactly become a prior-

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Job seekers wait in line at KennedyKing College to attend a job fair on Nov. 9, 2012.

OBAMA 2.O / MIDDLE CLASS CHALLENGE ity for Congress. Neither have the loftier goals of his earlier manufacturing package, such as extending tax breaks to companies that return jobs to U.S. shores. They appear unlikely to move forward in a second term, even if the president chooses to champion them.

“The administration has done some things but could do a lot more to help manufacturing,” said Scott Paul, director of the nonprofit Alliance for American Manufacturing. What the White House has done so far is “not well-publicized or well-known. They will ultimately be helpful, but so much of the debate has become politicized, it’s hard to make progress on some of the meaningful issues.”

And in the end, the manufacturing plan still faces some cold mathematics. The U.S. lost more than 5 million manufacturing jobs in the first decade of this century, falling from 17 million to 12 million. Fewer than 9 percent of American workers have manufacturing jobs, compared with more than 20 percent in 1979. Creating a million new such jobs puts only a dent in that sector’s — and the middle class’s — long-term woes.

“It doesn’t come close to restoring manufacturing employ-

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ment to what it had been,” Paul noted, adding that he still found the goal admirable.

Even setting aside the immediate joblessness crisis, Obama still faces the long-term problems of deteriorating wages and growing income inequality for the poor and middle class. Since 1979, the top 1 percent of American households captured more than 38 percent of income growth, while the bottom 90 percent received just shy of 37 percent, according to EPI. The Great Recession technically ended halfway through 2009, but

“ So much of the debate has become politicized, it’s hard to make progress on some of the meaningful issues.” the economic recovery of the past few years is replacing office workers, real estate brokers and insurance claims adjusters with retail salespeople, restaurant workers and warehouse hands.

Mid-wage jobs — ones with median hourly wages ranging from $13.84 to $21.13 — accounted for 60 percent of the jobs lost during the recession, according to an analysis by the National Employment Law Project, a worker advocacy group. During the recovery since then, mid-wage jobs

OBAMA 2.O / MIDDLE CLASS CHALLENGE have represented just 22 percent of growth. Jobs earning less than $13.84 per hour made up 58 percent of recovery growth, according to the NELP. The president pledged during his 2008 campaign that by 2011 he would have the minimum wage raised to $9.50 and pegged to inflation, a move that worker advocates have clamored for for years, claiming it would help raise the wage floor for the working poor and the middle class. But the federal minimum wage remains $7.25 per hour, well below a living wage in most areas.

Many of those same worker advocates tie the stagnation of real wages to the decline of collective bargaining in the workplace. The rate of unionization in the U.S. has fallen to a historic low, with just 7 percent of private-sector workers now belonging to a union. Labor leaders believe that labor law needs to be amended to make it easier for workers to join unions. Their best shot came and went under the president’s watch, when Democrats failed to pass the Employee Free Choice Act when they controlled both chambers of Congress.

“I do feel disappointment,” said Schmitt, the Center for Economic

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and Policy Research economist.

“That said, we’re also in a [political] context where it’s extremely difficult to make any progress on the concerns of low- and middlewage workers.”

Despite those shortcomings, and despite the acrimony on Capitol Hill, liberals like Richard Trumka, president of the AFL-CIO federation of unions, are bullish on Obama’s second term, given the focus on the middle class and jobs during the election.

“It all starts with the political will, or the national appetite, to

“ It all starts with the political will, or the national appetite, to again create jobs … and I think that’s underway right now.” again create jobs that are going to be family-supportive and middleclass producing, and I think that’s underway right now,” Trumka said. “People are talking about it.

That’s the difference between this election and the ones in the past.

We actually had a debate about what’s hollowing out the country and what isn’t. And our side won, big time.”

Now the president’s challenge is to turn that political victory into an economic one for the people who supported him.

FINANCIAL REFORM A Wishlist for the President

By MARK GONGLOFF

WHEN PRESIDENT Barack Obama first swore the oath of office, the backdrop was a financial system in flames. Four years on, the fires are out, but those who hoped Obama would make capitalism fundamentally safer are disappointed.

Barring another crisis in the next four years, the president may have missed his best chance for a more significant overhaul of finance. But there are still things he can do in a second term to at least ensure that the accomplishments of his first term, embodied in the Dodd–Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act,

don’t go to waste.

Obama can’t rewrite laws or bend independent agencies such as the Federal Reserve to his whim. Any reform efforts are countered by a multitude of tireless financial lobbyists who have resisted every step of the way — often successfully — bankrolled by a deep-pocketed industry with influence over regulators, lawmakers and the media.

But Obama can set the agenda, with his words and with the people he puts in key jobs, to let Wall Street know that Main Street will always come first.

Because Main Street may be starting to wonder.

“We are losing public support,”

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said Sheila Bair, former chairman of the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation, expressing disappointment with the sluggish pace of reform.

“The longer this drags on, the more people get cynical.”

The sprawling Dodd-Frank reform act, passed in 2010, is chock full of rules that could help avert another crisis. It forces banks to pay penalties for being too large and gives officials tools to possibly wind down a failing big bank safely.

It orders the regulation of complex derivatives and tries to make it harder for banks to gamble with their own money. It establishes new bodies to oversee risks in the financial system and protect consumers.

But about two-thirds of DoddFrank’s rules have not yet been finalized, and more than 100 rulemaking deadlines have been missed. Meanwhile, no banker has yet gone to jail for any of the actions leading up to the crisis, and efforts to hold the banks accountable have been few and far between, consisting mainly of modest fines, with the banks neither ad-

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Obama meets with members of his economic team, including Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner (left).

OBAMA 2.O / FINANCIAL REFORM mitting nor denying wrongdoing.

That raises questions about where financial reform will rank among Obama’s many second-term priorities, from seemingly endless battles with Congress over the federal budget deficit to gun control, immigration and national security.

“In fairness, the president has very big issues he has to deal with,” said University of Maryland law professor Michael Greenberger, a former director of the Division of Trading and Markets at the Commodity Futures Trading Commission. “But I don’t see the inner workings of the White House worrying about the market reform issue.”

The White House did not respond to a request for comment.

Reform advocates warn that retreating from even the modest advances of Obama’s first term mean his presidency could ultimately be known, like those of Ronald Reagan and Bill Clinton, as having planted the seeds of future financial disasters.

There are reasons to doubt the system is significantly safer than it was before the crisis. The biggest banks are bigger than ever, and their risks are still mainly hidden from public view. At the

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same time, financial markets are more complex, and financial regulators are still outgunned, outstaffed and outsmarted by the powerful banks they regulate.

“I think the failure to set our economy straight with regard to the financial sector could well be the blight that the president had a chance to but did not correct,”

“ Any reform efforts are countered by a multitude of tireless financial lobbyists who have resisted every step of the way.” said Bart Naylor, financial policy advocate for the nonprofit group Public Citizen.

Many reformers were particularly discouraged by Obama’s recent nomination of White House Chief of Staff Jacob “Jack” Lew for the post of Treasury secretary in his second term. As secretary, Lew would be one of the nation’s top financial regulators and chair the Financial Stability Oversight Council established by DoddFrank to watch out for risks in the financial markets.

Though all agree that Lew is smart and a peerless expert on the federal budget, he has professed limited understanding of financial markets. He also made millions working for Citigroup just before

OBAMA 2.O / FINANCIAL REFORM it was bailed out in the crisis, in a unit that made bets against mortgage-backed securities. He got that job on the recommendation of a colleague in the Clinton administration, former Treasury Secretary Robert Rubin, one of the chief architects of market deregulation in the 1990s. Lew has said that he didn’t think deregulation led to the financial crisis, a view in line with Rubin’s laissezfaire approach. Lew’s pick signals that financial reform will take a back seat in Obama’s second term to matters of the budget. That may prove shortsighted.

“If you care about the fiscal crisis, the first place to start is to make sure we prevent another financial crisis,” said Neil Barofsky, former inspector general for the Troubled Asset Relief Program, the crisis-era bailout fund. “We’re having this fiscal crisis now because of the financial crisis. If we have a $4 trillion or $5 trillion hit from another crisis, negotiations over the sequester will be nothing.”

In interviews with The Huffington Post, Barofsky and other reform advocates identified at least five things that must happen in Obama’s second term to maintain the momentum for reform and

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make another devastating crisis less likely.

They agree that there is almost certainly no chance that Obama will embrace more dramatic reform ideas being advocated in some circles, including breaking up large banks or reinstating the

“ I think the failure to set our economy straight with regard to the financial sector could well be the blight that the president had a chance to but did not correct.”

Depression-era Glass-Steagall Act separating commercial and investment banking. Even the five modest goals presented here might be too much of a stretch, they fear.

But they are possible.

One: First, Do No Harm Dodd-Frank is far from perfect.

It does not clear up the murk of bank balance sheets, bring sanity to executive compensation or much reduce the influence of flawed credit-rating agencies. Its provisions for winding down big banks might not work. But doing away with Dodd-Frank could be much worse; even the administration’s harshest critics on the left admit it is better than nothing.

Critics on the right, meanwhile,

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wish it would just disappear, and they have been working with bank lobbyists to kill it, or at least water it down as much as they can.

If he accomplishes nothing else on financial reform in his second term, Obama at least needs to keep fighting to preserve DoddFrank, these advocates said.

“Protecting what we have is first and foremost,” said Bair.

Bair is hopeful that Obama and

the Democratic senators who created Dodd-Frank have a strong incentive to preserve it. Others see Obama’s attention wandering and worry the banks have an even stronger incentive to neuter the law.

Two: Finish the Rules Already Congress passed the buck on putting Dodd-Frank’s rules into effect to various regulatory agencies, where they have often gotten bogged down for one reason or another. According to a recent

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House Financial Services Committee Chairman Spencer Bachus lifts copies of what he calls the “rules” section of Dodd-Frank during a news conference to discuss the bill’s impact.

OBAMA 2.O / FINANCIAL REFORM tally by the law firm Davis Polk, just a third of Dodd-Frank’s rules are done. Only about half of the law’s rules for derivatives have been finalized. Only about a quarter of the rules for winding down troubled banks are in place. Less than 10 percent of the bank regulations are done.

The Securities and Exchange Commission is still on the hook for finishing dozens of rules. But the process has ground to a halt with the departure of former chairman Mary Schapiro, leaving only four commissioners on the SEC: two Democrats who will vote to put rules in place and two Republicans who often won’t.

“We need three votes to get rules through, or Dodd-Frank will be crippled,” said Greenberger.

Three: Solve Too Big to Fail One reform concept with bipartisan support is the idea that the biggest banks are still too big to fail — in fact, they are bigger than before the crisis. The five biggest U.S. banks held about $8.7 trillion in assets at the end of the third quarter, the latest data available, or about 55 percent of the entire U.S. annual gross domestic product. That’s up from about 43 per-

cent before the crisis, Bloomberg noted recently.

Dodd-Frank offers at least two possible solutions to this problem, according to Marcus Stanley, policy director at the nonprofit Americans For Financial Reform: higher capital requirements for big banks, and the so-called Volcker Rule, which prohibits banks from gambling with their own money.

Both provisions could force big banks to get smaller, hiving off trading operations or other parts that make them too bulky. So far, neither provision has been finalized, and the Volcker Rule has been riddled with exemptions before it even takes effect.

Four: Get the Right People in Place Though Lew may not eventually run the Treasury as a natural-born regulator, he should at least have a top deputy who will play the role of riding herd on regulation in a second term, many reformers said — someone to speak up for DoddFrank, rebut bank lobbyists and understand the risks lurking in the system. The reported top pick to be Lew’s No. 2, Morgan Stanley chief financial officer Ruth Porat, has the necessary expertise, but has lobbied regulators frequently on behalf of Wall Street since Dodd-Frank’s passage.

Other key personnel decisions

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OBAMA 2.O / FINANCIAL REFORM include getting that fifth SEC commissioner in place and making sure Commodity Futures Trading Commission Chairman Gary Gensler, the reformers’ favorite Wall Street regulator, gets another term after his current stint ends in 2013.

The problem, though, is that even if you get good people in key positions, the agencies will be understaffed relative to the banks and lobbying firms they’re opposing.

“The CFTC is radically underfunded,” said Stanley. “Their personnel count is roughly pretty similar to the mid-1990s, and Dodd-Frank has increased their workload by eight-fold.”

Five: Loophole-Free Derivatives Regulation Perhaps even more important than fixing the problem of toobig-to-fail banks is making sure regulators can keep tabs on the exotic derivatives that contributed to the last crisis, from credit default swaps (CDS) to collateralized debt obligations (CDO) to CDOs stuffed with CDSs. Again, Dodd-Frank has rules for that, but banks are pushing hard for a way out. Republicans last year introduced HR 3283, the

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Swap Jurisdiction Certainty Act, which would exempt overseas derivatives trades from Dodd-Frank rules as long as they were routed through a foreign subsidiary.

The bill is in limbo, but it’s just one of many examples of banks tirelessly working to carve loop-

“ Part of the lobbying strategy is to wear you down, drag it out, until people get frustrated and lose confidence in regulators to do anything.”

holes into obscure corners of the law dealing with obscure matters, where they can quietly make tons of money, while leaving the financial system at risk.

If anything is certain in Obama’s second term, it is that this will continue.

“Part of the lobbying strategy is to wear you down, drag it out, until people get frustrated and lose confidence in regulators to do anything and the pressure subsides,” said Bair. “That’s why it’s important that this stuff get done soon, not later, and as cleanly and effectively as possible.

“You will never make this industry happy,” Bair warned of banks. “They will always want more.”

DRONE WARFARE Obama’s Messy Hunt for a Clean Kill

By DAVID WOOD

WITHOUT WARNING in the dead of night of Jan. 3, on a dirt road in a remote region of Pakistan, two missiles slammed into a doublecab pickup truck and blew it to smithereens along with the six men inside. It’s safe to say the victims never heard the U.S. drone circling far overhead.

One of the dead was a known bad guy, Mullah Nazir, a Taliban warlord who boasted of his ties with al Qaeda and recently banned polio vaccinations for local children. The other men killed were said to be lower-ranking Taliban commanders.

A clean kill, demonstrating the increasing ability of the United States to identify, track, target and eliminate dangerous threats to American security? Perhaps. A majority of Americans think so — by 59 to 18, Americans approve of using drones to kill high-level terrorist suspects overseas, according to a new HuffPost/YouGov poll.

But a growing number of military and civilian experts in war and law say that President Barack Obama’s drone war is counterproductive and unsustainable, perhaps violating the Constitution as well.

That puts the expanding American fleet of 375 armed drones — which gives the White House a seductively simple, inexpen-

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Northrop Grumman program director Scott Winship shows off a mockup of the company’s unmanned combat air vehicle. the X-47B.

OBAMA 2.O / DRONE WARFARE sive, safe (for Americans) and easily hidden way to wage war — squarely on top of Obama’s agenda as he takes up his second term. Complicating a potential reform of the drone program: Its chief architect and apologist, White House terrorism adviser John Brennan, is Obama’s pick to run the CIA — which operates in secret many of the drone strikes.

“Our criteria for using [drones] is very tight and very strict,” Obama insisted in August. In an interview with CNN, Obama explained that any proposed strike has to comply with U.S. and international law, and the target must be a real threat who cannot be captured.

“And we have got to make sure that in whatever operations we conduct we are very careful about avoiding civilian casualties. And, in fact,” the president said, “there are a whole bunch of situations where we will not engage in operations if we think there’s gonna be civilian casualties involved.”

On the morning of March 17, 2011, more than three dozen village elders and local government leaders gathered in an open-air bus depot in the town of Datta Khel, in North Waziristan, Paki-

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stan. Under discussion: how to avoid being drawn into the insurgency raging there and across the border in Afghanistan. At about 10:45 a.m., a drone hovering overhead fired a supersonic missile into the gathering. One man remembers hearing a slight hissing noise before the blast threw him, unconscious, several yards away.

An immediate second strike killed many of the wounded.

What happened in Datta Khel has been exhaustively documented, at some risk, in on-site investigations by The New York Times, the

“ The anger, fear and resentment the strikes leave behind among civilians seems to outweigh any potential military benefit.”

Associated Press, The Guardian, and the independent Bureau of Investigative Reporting, among other organizations. The results were verified and compiled in a report by law-school researchers from Stanford and New York universities.

U.S. officials insisted that all those killed were insurgents. But interviews with survivors and families of the dead, along with other eyewitnesses and medical authorities indicated that most if

OBAMA 2.O / DRONE WARFARE not all of the roughly 40 people killed were civilians. The Associated Press investigation concluded that four of the dead may have been affiliated with the Taliban.

That June, three months after the Datta Khel attack, Brennan boasted that in the drone attacks, “there hasn’t been a single collateral death because of the exceptional proficiency, precision of the capabilities we’ve been able to develop.”

But that one attack — among 350 or more drone strikes Obama has authorized — captures what critics contend is a lose-lose proposition for the United States as it confronts militant Islamist insurgencies and terrorist organizations across much of the world.

Almost all of the “targeted assassinations” of alleged terrorist leaders engaged in plots or operations against the United States are conducted by drone strikes.

Others have been accomplished with AC-130 aerial gunships or by commandos.

Among the known, if not acknowledged, targets of drone strikes so far have been people in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Yemen and Somalia. Administration officials are said to be eyeing drone strikes against al Qaeda-linked insur-

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gents in the mid-Sahara nation of Mali and in north Africa. Predator and Reaper drones can carry either Hellfire missiles with blastfragmentation warheads, or the satellite-guided GBU-39 bomb, which can glide 60 miles and bears a carbon fiber composite warhead to reduce lethal shrapnel.

The Air Force has bought 12,379 of these bombs from Boeing.

The accumulating problems caused by these killings concern even those who acknowledge them as a legitimate weapon of war. As U.S. troops are reduced in Afghani-

“ When you kill a terrorist, even if you kill no women and children, no combatants, you’re still gonna enrage the population, depending on how it’s done.”

stan over the next two years, for instance, the United States may find drone strikes increasingly useful against insurgent sanctuaries across the border in Pakistan.

“The fact is, the U.S. might need to maintain and sustain this capability,” Micah Zenko, a fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations told The Huffington Post.

“But there needs to be significant restraints and much more transparency” both in the legal justifi-

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cation for the killings and in how the strikes are conducted.

Secrecy is a key concern. The administration has never explained why drone strikes — and not, say, infantry attacks in Afghanistan — must be secret. Yet with such a highly classified program, there is no effective independent confirmation of the administration’s assertions that the strikes comply with domestic and

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international law. Strike packages are assembled by the CIA and the military’s Joint Special Operations Command, whose role has grown from its initial involvement managing drone strikes in Afghanistan and Iraq.

The material, including identification of the targets, justification for the strikes, estimates of potential civilian casualties and assessments of the impact on the local community, are vetted by lawyers and officials at the Pentagon and White House — in secret.

Pakistani demonstrators shout anti-U.S. slogans during a protest against drone attacks in the country’s tribal areas.

OBAMA 2.O / DRONE WARFARE Obama has ducked questions about whether or not he personally reviews each strike package.

The legal basis for drone strikes is said to reside in a June 2010 memo from the White House Office of Legal Counsel used to justify killing Anwar al-Awlaki, a U.S. citizen and extremist firebrand, in Yemen in September 2011. That memo remains secret after New York District Court Judge Colleen McMahon ruled in frustration on Jan. 2 that the law shields those White House decisions. That effectively allows “the executive branch of our government to proclaim as perfectly lawful certain actions that seem on their face incompatible with our Constitution and laws, while keeping the reasons for its conclusions a secret,” she wrote.

Nor is there much congressional oversight of the drone strikes.

After being blocked for years, the Senate Intelligence Committee finally won permission in 2009 to send a delegation to the CIA once a month to peek at strike videos and scan some of the intelligence justifying the strikes, a committee official confirmed. But congressional committees charged with oversight of the armed services and foreign

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relations have never managed to hold even closed-door classified briefings on the drone strikes.

“Assertions by Obama administration officials as well as by scholars, that these operations comply with international standards are undermined by the total absence of any forms of credible transparency or verifiable accountability,” concludes Philip Alston, NYU professor of law and the former United Nations adviser on extrajudicial, summary or arbitrary executions.

A second deep concern is the

“ The recent use of ‘signature strikes’ or ‘crowd killings,’ which are said to target a group of unidentified suspects, appears to violate international law egregiously.”

civilian death toll from drone strikes. In the enormous violence unleashed in war, civilians always suffer. After more than a decade of war, military targeters have gotten pretty good at designing attacks to minimize or eliminate civilian casualties. But not perfect. Drone operators can watch a proposed target for days or weeks to establish patterns of life, augmented by spies and cultural experts. Targeting software like Bugsplat, which

OBAMA 2.O / DRONE WARFARE models the effective kill zone and collateral injury and damage of a proposed strike, can help. “You use the full range of intelligence,” said Army Brig Gen. Rich Gross, who as legal counsel to the Joint Chiefs of Staff reviews strike execution orders.

Counting the number of civilians killed in these strikes is notoriously difficult, given that strikes usually take place in remote areas that are often hostile to Westerners. The most careful accounting is generally considered to be that by the Bureau of Investigative Journalism, which said between 558 and 1,119 civilians have been killed in strikes in Pakistan, Yemen and Somalia.

In any attack, Gross told The Huffington Post, “there’s a real science involved with what type of weapon system will be dropped and the numbers of people you would expect in that culture at that time of day.” The art, he said, is judging whether the military benefit of a strike outweighs the projected loss of civilian life, as required by international law.

The recent use of “signature strikes” or “crowd killings,” which are said to target a group of unnamed and unidentified suspects,

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appears to violate international law even more egregiously.

There is also the issue of blowback. It doesn’t take a detailed military analysis to recognize that having drones constantly overhead promising instant death isn’t popular in non-battlefield strike zones like Pakistan, Yemen and Somalia. Evidence gathered by reporters and investigators in North Waziristan and other sites of drone strikes is that the anger, fear and resentment the strikes leave behind among civilians seems to outweigh any potential military benefit. Such devastating strikes, which kill with no warning, “are hated on a visceral level,” retired general and Afghan war commander Stanley McChrystal said recently. “The resentment created by American use of unmanned strikes,” he added, “is much greater than the average American appreciates.”

“The argument that several folks have raised is that when you kill a terrorist, even if you kill no women and children, no combatants, you’re still gonna enrage the population, depending on how it’s done,” said Gross. “That’s a consideration that policymakers always have to struggle with.”

Two other problems arise with the drone program. One is copycats. Inevitably, weapons technol-

JEWEL SAMAD/AFP/GETTY IMAGES

OBAMA 2.O / DRONE WARFARE

ogy spreads, and already other countries are racing to expand their drone fleets and arm them with weapons. It’s also likely that some will not be as fussy as the U.S. government said it is in following international law. Iran has already used surveillance drones.

Imagine the havoc if it threatened to launch clouds of armed drones toward the Persian Gulf oilfields.

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For that reason, experts have urged the administration to work closely to control the export of drone technology, as the United States and others have done with nuclear weapons technology.

The other issue is whether or not drone killings really advance the so-called war on terror. The use of secretive drone strikes is justified as a way to “surgically” (to use Brennan’s description) remove senior terrorist leaders intent on attacking the United

Obama is seen speaking at a campaign event in Baltimore last June, after a week of being accused of deliberately leaking information about drone strikes and Iran for political gain in the upcoming election.

OBAMA 2.O / DRONE WARFARE States. The Jan. 3 strike which killed Mullah Nazir, for instance, ostensibly removed a senior battlefield commander.

But, according to the Long War Journal, Nazir was replaced within a day by Bahwal Khan, his top aide for the past 16 years, an Afghan fighter closely allied with al Qaeda and other terrorist groups in the region. As a result, “little will change,” a U.S. intelligence official told the Journal. “It will be business as usual, we’ll continue to have to take shots at al Qaeda leaders and others” in the area, the official said.

Given all these difficulties, said Zenko, “the trajectory of U.S. drone strike policies is unsustainable.” On the military side, a global arms race to acquire and deploy armed drones could erode the U.S. freedom of action and threaten American friends and allies.

On the domestic side, the rising clamor of public opinion could either force the program deeper into the shadows, or impose unwieldy or counterproductive reforms from the outside — for example a ban on all armed drone strikes.

Many security experts acknowledge that armed drones provide the United States a needed na-

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tional security capability which should be retained — and can be done so safely with a little more transparency and safeguards.

For example, Zenko suggests in a new policy paper that the president should move quickly to disclose more of the legal justification for the strikes, end the practice of crowd killings, authorize classified briefings to Congress, and, to increase accountability, assign the drone program to either the Defense Department’s Joint Special Operations Command or the CIA, but not both.

“ Obama has ducked questions about whether or not he personally reviews each strike package.”

Beyond that, he said, the United States might usefully set up an international protocol to limit the spread of drone technology, much as it has done with nuclear weapons technology.

“Reforming U.S. drone strike policies will be difficult and will require sustained high-level attention to balance transparency with the need to protect sensitive intelligence sources and methods,” Zenko writes.

Over to you, Mr. President.

ENVIRONMENT Obama and Climate Change

By TOM ZELLER JR.

ON THE NIGHT of his re-election, President Barack Obama described grand ambitions for his second term, including a desire to bequeath to future generations a nation not only free of debt and unencumbered by inequality, but also one “that isn’t threatened by the destructive power of a warming planet.”

The laws of both physics and politics suggest he’ll have his work cut out for him, and his second-term success will surely be measured on far more concrete terms. The president, after all, faces several lingering and highly divisive decisions, including whether and how to clean up the nation’s aging fleet of coalfired power plants, which pump vast amounts of carbon dioxide

and other greenhouse gases into the atmosphere. He also must decide whether or not to approve the controversial Keystone XL pipeline project, which would transport heavy, carbon-intensive oil from the scarred landscape of

“ If past is prologue, Obama is unlikely to make anyone fully satisfied.”

Alberta, Canada, to ports on the American Gulf Coast.

If past is prologue, Obama is unlikely to make anyone fully satisfied.

While many conservatives spent much of the last four years condemning the president as an environmental zealot bent on sacrificing jobs and economic growth to the altar of green, Obama also took substantial heat from his environmental base. A broad col-

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OBAMA 2.O / ENVIRONMENT

lection of conservation groups and climate activists have argued that the president was walking an equivocal line at best, championing emissions reductions, for example, while also embracing expanded oil and gas drilling, including in the delicate Arctic, and continuing his support for so-called clean coal technology,

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which many environmentalists consider an oxymoron.

To be sure, the Obama administration introduced several inarguably historic emissions-reduction measures over the course of its first term, including tough new fuelefficiency standards for vehicles and emissions limits on new power plants — both promulgated through the regulatory authority of the Environmental Protection Agency, rather than by act of Congress.

New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg (center) views a map with Pres.

Obama during an aerial tour to view damage from Hurricane Sandy.

OBAMA 2.O / ENVIRONMENT But even after a year of recordbreaking heat, Obama embarks on his second term against the backdrop of a Congress that remains stubbornly divided on questions of climate and conservation, leaving little hope these issues will be addressed through broad-based legislation, which the administration has long said was the preferred route for such measures.

That will leave the president with a long list of demands and expectations from his environmental base and only the comparatively narrow corridors of his own regulatory authority through which to pursue any of it — should he choose to do so.

Earlier this month, leaders of more than three dozen prominent environmental and conservation organizations issued a letter to Obama, calling on him to use the bully pulpit of his presidency to, among other things, place global warming front and center in the national discourse.

Clark Stevens, a White House spokesman, said the administration has climate change squarely in its sights. “The president has made clear that he believes that climate change is real, that it is impacted by human activity and

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that we must continue to take steps to confront this threat,” Stevens said, ticking off the accomplishments of Obama’s first term.

The administration, he added, “will continue to build on this progress and climate change will be a priority in his second term.”

That assertion — and a number of other environmentally contentious issues — will be closely watched over the next four years.

Among the hot spots:

POWER PLANT EMISSIONS Back in 2007, the Supreme Court ruled that if the EPA determined that greenhouse gases were a threat to human health, those

“ A host of additional environmental issues will confront the president over the next four years. “ emissions must be regulated by the agency under the Clean Air Act. Two years later, the EPA under administrator Lisa Jackson determined just that: carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases are a public health threat. In the months and years that followed, the agency issued new curbs on emissions from cars and light trucks, as well as from any new power plant.

OBAMA 2.O / ENVIRONMENT Those rules outraged the coalburning industry, which currently has no realistic way to meet the emissions limits. Large-scale carbon capture and control technology is decades from commercialization, despite the roughly $5 billion the Obama administration has invested in developing “clean coal” technology. The upshot: The rule effectively prevents the building of new coal plants.

In the second Obama term, environmental groups want more.

They want to see those rules finalized, and more importantly, they want new rules for existing power plants, which account for roughly 40 percent of the country’s emissions. Just how aggressive the administration will be is an open question, given that it would almost certainly force existing coal plants to shutter. The uncertainty — along with rock-bottom prices for natural gas — is driving many utilities to switch power plants to natural gas, which can fuel the plants within the EPA’s rules.

Acknowledging that any emissions rules on existing plants won’t go down without a pitched legal fight, David Goldman, the director of government affairs with the Natural Resources Defense

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Council, called it “low-hanging, but toxic fruit.”

“The administration needs to take this first step,” Goldman said.

“The president has repeatedly said he’s interested in attacking the climate problem, and this falls into authority he already has.”

KEYSTONE XL PIPELINE A decision on the contentious pipeline, which would deliver heavy crude oil from Alberta to refineries on the Texas Gulf Coast — and then to the global oil market — was abruptly delayed by the Obama administration just as the 2012 presidential campaign was about to kick into full gear. “More study needed” was the reason offered by the State Department, which must make the call because the pipeline crosses an international border, though politics certainly played a key role in the decision to delay.

Republicans in Congress respond angrily to the deferral, going so far as to tie agreement on last year’s payroll tax cut deal to approval of the pipeline, ultimately to no avail.

But a year has now passed, the president has won a second term, and the decision remains a skunk at his re-election garden party.

Opinions differ on the real-world impact of the pipeline, both com-

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OBAMA 2.O / ENVIRONMENT

mercially and in terms of global warming, though it’s safe to assume that the project would not deliver a bumper crop of jobs nor lower prices at the pump, as supporters argue. At the same time, not everyone agrees that a completed Keystone XL pipeline would necessarily mean “game over” for the climate, as some op-

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ponents of the project have declared — though a recent study by a Canadian environmental group suggests the climate impacts of Keystone may be worse than previously thought.

But whatever its actual effects, the pipeline remains an extremely powerful totem for stakeholders on both sides. It represents to some, rightly or wrongly, Obama’s commitment to American jobs and liberation from the tyranny of

Actress Daryl Hannah sits in front of the White House during a protest against the construction of the Keystone XL pipeline.

OBAMA 2.O / ENVIRONMENT Middle East oil, and to others, the president’s willingness to mark a clear end to the era of fossil fuels.

“Reject dirty fuels,” the coalition of environmental groups declared in its letter to Obama earlier this month. “We should not pursue dirty fuels like tar sands when climate science tells us that 80 percent of existing fossil fuel reserves need to be kept in the ground.”

Other climate action advocates see the pipeline as a distraction.

“It has emerged as a very symbolic flashpoint,” Elliot Diringer, the executive vice president of the Center for Climate and Energy Solutions in Washington and a former policy adviser at the White House Council on Environmental Quality under President Bill Clinton. “But I don’t know that we should expend our political capital on symbolic victories rather than real progress.”

As the State Department continues a new environmental review of the project, eyes will inevitably shift to retiring Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s presumed successor, the Democratic senator from Massachusetts, John Kerry.

He will nominally inherit Keystone’s federal permit application — though the ultimate decision will be Obama’s.

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The administration has already given a nod to TransCanada, the company behind the pipeline, to begin building the lower leg of the project, which runs from Cushing, Okla., to the Gulf Coast, prompt-

“ We should not pursue dirty fuels like tar sands when climate science tells us that 80 percent of existing fossil fuel reserves need to be kept in the ground.”

ing pitched battles between protesters and local police. But the connection to Alberta’s oil sands — an inarguably dirty deposit of thick bitumen that requires copious, emissions-intensive refining and chemical treatment to turn it into useable product — remains the real test for Obama, a president who has, after all, spent a good deal of effort touting an “all of the above” energy strategy.

Any decision is still likely a good ways off, but it’s certain that large swaths of the electorate will be unhappy with whatever decision the president makes.

THE CLIMATE CONVERSATION The third and final presidential debate last October marked the first time since the 1980s that an entire season of presidential and vice

OBAMA 2.O / ENVIRONMENT presidential debates went by with nary a mention of climate change.

For environmentalists, and many ordinary Americans, it was a troubling milestone, particularly as a gargantuan super-storm — and one of the sort that virtually all climate scientists have been warning for years would increase in frequency as the planet warmed — bore down on the East Coast and, in the end, caused unprecedented destruction.

“Hurricane Sandy,” wrote Daniel Honan at BigThink.com, “Mother Nature’s revenge on the 2012 election?”

Obama was specifically targeted for his silence, which seemed to take hold during his first term around the time that support for broad climate change legislation — a top-tier campaign goal of candidate Obama in 2008 — was foundering. Green groups were angered by the president’s decision to recede into the background on the climate fight, and to focus on other goals, principally health care and immigration reform.

“I just think it’s irresponsible for our leaders to not address one of the biggest challenges facing our generation,” Phil Radford, the executive director of Greenpeace USA, said at the conclusion of the

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debates. “It’s one of the biggest security threats we have — it’s a threat to agriculture, it threatens our economy. And to simply not talk about it is one of the biggest failures of our leadership.”

The White House characterized those and similar complaints as unfair. But given recent news that 2012 was hotter on average in the United States than any year on record, and the release on Friday of a congressionally mandated assessment of climate change suggesting that the impacts of global warming are already being felt, Obama can expect demands for his voice on the matter to increase.

“Leadership matters,” wrote Dan Lashof, director of the Natural Resources Defense Council’s climate and clean air program, in a blog post on Monday. “Because the president has to rally public support for the bold steps he must take to address climate change and to make sure those steps aren’t undone by Congress.”

Writing in their letter to the president, environmental leaders emphasized this point: “Raise your voice,” they wrote. “Elevate the issue of climate disruption and climate solutions in the public discourse. Connect the dots between carbon pollution and extreme weather, and lead the public discussion of what we need to do

OBAMA 2.O / ENVIRONMENT as a nation to both prepare for the changes in climate that are no longer avoidable and avoid changes in climate that are unacceptable.”

A host of additional environmental issues will confront the president over the next four years — even as many of his key energy and environmental lieutenants have either announced their departures or are expected to do so soon. These include Lisa Jackson at EPA, Steven Chu at the Energy Department, and Jane Lubchenco at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

Last week, Interior Secretary Ken Salazar announced that he, too, would be stepping down.

Strengthening of the Clean Water Act to protect headwaters and wetlands, meanwhile, is high on many groups’ agendas. Activists will also be watching the EPA as it completes a review of hydraulic fracturing — used by oil and gas companies to exploit deep deposits of hydrocarbons — and its impacts on water sources. Conservation groups have complained that Obama has so far set aside for protection fewer acres of land than any recent president. They want more. Calls for reforming

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oversight of toxic chemical production and handling — a woefully under-regulated industry, according to activists, are also gathering momentum, as are demands that Obama suspend oil and gas exploration in the Arctic.

That last push comes after a string of embarrassing missteps

by Shell Oil, which was granted federal permits to plumb exploratory wells off the coast of Alaska this year, only to founder amid rough seas and an apparent inability to maintain control of its drill ships.

“ Hurricane Sandy: Mother Nature’s revenge on the 2012 election?”

An investigation by the Department of Interior is underway, but the tea leaves suggest that the Obama administration will continue to chart its own course on these issues.

“Developing America’s domestic energy sources is essential for reducing our dependence on foreign oil and creating jobs here at home,” Salazar said earlier this month, “and the administration is fully committed to exploring for potential energy resources in frontier areas such as the Arctic.”

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FILM

The Contenders: 7 Indies Take a Shot at the Pros

BY MIKE RYAN

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Exit HE SUNDANCE Film Festival is interesting because it’s such a crapshoot. By the time the Toronto International Film Festival comes around, there’s a pretty solid consensus about what’s going to be good (Argo and Silver Linings Playbook were “must sees” before I even boarded my flight last September). Sure, there’s pre-festival buzz at Sundance, but it’s not terribly reliable. It’s kind of like watching a large group of minor league baseball players vie for a shot at the major leagues. We might know a bit about how they performed in high school

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or college, and we can be pretty sure they know how to hit and field, but chances are only a few of them have what it takes to make it in the pros.

Last year, the star prospect to come out of Sundance was Oscar-nominated Beasts of the Southern Wild, a movie that wasn’t even on our radar at this time last year.

We picked up on the buzz following its first Sundance screening and immediately knew it was something special. Ahead are seven films that piqued our interest at Sundance — perhaps, like Beasts of the Southern Wild, there’s a future Oscar nominee on this list.

PREVIOUS PAGE: ARI PERILSTEIN/GETTY IMAGES; THIS PAGE; RACHEL MORRISON

FRUITVALE Fruitvale is the name of a station along the Bay Area Rapid Transit system.

It's also the place where a police officer shot and killed an unarmed man named Oscar Grant (played by Michael B. Jordan) early on New Year's Day in 2009. Fruitvale, which The Weinstein Company picked up, shows how Grant, a troubled man of just 22, was finally getting his life together on the day it ended. The final act, which we know is coming (the reallife footage opens the film), is simply devastating.

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DON JON’S ADDICTION Well, this was a surprise. Not that there wasn't at least some inkling that Joseph Gordon-Levitt could successfully direct a movie; he has worked with some pretty talented directors in the last couple of years.

I just didn't expect this to be so funny — to tell the truth, for some reason I thought that this was going to be a Shame-style exploration of a man's plunge into an Internet pornography-related abyss — and so raunchy. Also, most important, Don Jon's Addiction brings Tony Danza back into our lives. And, yes, Danza is great in this movie.

FROM TOP: THOMAS KLOSS; DESPINA SPYROU; QUANTRELL COLBERT

BEFORE MIDNIGHT Before Midnight, starring Ethan Hawke and Julie Delpy and directed by Richard Linklater, takes place nine years after Before Sunset (2004), itself a sequel to Before Sunrise (1995). Revealing the extent of the relationship these two do or don't have in Before Midnight is treading on spoiler territory, but I will say that this film is the most relatable of the three because they seem like real people, not just caricatures of some sort of "true love" fantasy.

A.C.O.D. It’s about time we finally see Adam Scott and Amy Poehler in a project together. OK, yes, sarcasm — but shouldn’t every project involve Scott and Poehler? Scott plays Carter, the go-between between his divorced parents — played by Richard Jenkins and Catherine O’Hara — in this offering from first-time feature director Stu Zicherman, who also co-wrote the film with Modern Family writer Ben Karlin.

I will say Before Midnight is the most relatable of the three because they seem like real people, not just some caricatures of some sort of 'true love' fantasy.”

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FILM

AIN’T THEM BODIES SAINTS

Casey Affleck plays a husband who takes the blame for the shooting of a police officer to cover up for his wife (Rooney Mara). Four years into his sentence, he escapes and attempts to find his wife and daughter he’s never met. This movie takes its sweet old time, but there's something haunting about it that sticks.

CLOCKWISE FROM TOP LEFT: DAVID LOWERY; MYLES ARONOWITZ; JESS HALL.

THE SPECTACULAR NOW

Sundance is kind of like watching a large group of minor league baseball players vie for a shot at the major leagues.”

The Spectacular Now is the follow-up movie for screenwriters Michael Weber and Scott Neustadter, who once wrote a movie you most likely saw called (500) Days of Summer. The Spectacular Now is about a high school senior (Miles Teller) who seems to be the king of the world, but who has no real plans for the future and may be turning into an alcoholic — until he meets a sci-fi nerd played, improbably enough, by Shailene Woodley.

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THE EAST

The late Tony Scott (that is still strange to type) produced this film about a group of anarchists who target bigbusiness leaders, forcing them to ingest whatever dangerous products they happen to be in charge of manufacturing. Zal Batmanglij (The Sound of My Voice) directs this story of a former FBI agent (Brit Marling) who infiltrates this group (called “The East”), only to wind up questioning her own motivations.

CARLY DANIEL PHOTOGRAPHY

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Forget Wheaties.

How a Real Olympian Eats.

BY MADELEINE CRUM

LIFESTYLE

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Exit STHER LOFGREN is a 27-year-old professional rower whose career began in high school, blossomed at Harvard University, and reached an alltime high last year, when she and seven other women won gold at the London Olympics in the women’s eight. To reach this level, she works out twice a day: once at the crack of dawn, and again after a full day at her job, where she works as a brand and marketing consultant. She views the food she eats as fuel for her body rather than as a form of pleasure.

“I love delicious things as much as the next person, but eating to boost my performance as a rower has made me very attuned to what my body responds well to and what slows it down, and that helps me continue to make good choices,” says Lofgren, whose favorite foods are ripe fruits, fresh vegetables, Greek yogurt and highflavor grains.

She avoids gluten and limits her red meat intake to once or twice a week. The former, she says, causes “gluten hangovers,” which she swears she experiences after pizza dinners or late-night beers. The latter, she says, is “just not good

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for you.” Lofgren doesn’t forbid indulgences, though — wine and Starbucks pastries are semi-regular staples.

Lofgren laments the polarized levels of healthiness at restaurants, stating that most places either tend towards gourmet or junk.

“You are supposed to want to be a foodie who slaves away for hours to make a meal that requires salt imported from Austra-

I love delicious things, but eating to boost my performance has made me very attuned to what my body responds well to, and that helps me make good choices.” lia made from dried baby tears, or else you must be someone who is speeding through a Burger King drive-through,” she says. “My solution is somewhere in the middle — I’ve found a few things that I can pre-make or quickly make and eat, happily, with little variation, every day. And then some nights I go all in on a foodie-type dinner, which I’ve found is best inspired when you’re cooking for a friend.”

ESTHER’S 24-HOUR MEAL DIARY: BREAKFAST 1

Medium bowl of gluten-free oatmeal with chia seeds, ground flaxseed, frozen berries, raw almonds, raisins, stevia and salt ■

Large cup of coffee with stevia and 1 percent milk ■

Oatmeal is my go-to before practice, since it tends to stay down no matter how intense the work we do. It’s warm during

cold weather, too, which helps warm me up when we’re heading out for a freezing row. Everything I put into the oatmeal is anti-inflammatory, with omega-3s and antioxidants giving me a boost right from waking up. Salt helps me stay hydrated during practice. And coffee — no explanation necessary, most rowers’ blood in the morning is 30 percent coffee!

“MOST ROWERS’ BLOOD IN THE MORNING IS 30 % COFFEE.”

POST-PRACTICE SNACK Scoop of Superfood powder mixed with water ■

Scoop of vanilla unsweetened whey protein powder mixed with water ■

■

Right after a hard workout, your body is at its most vulnerable and is also most receptive to nutrients. Superfood powder has a really high ORAC value, and protein helps your muscles feel less fatigued later.

BREAKFAST 2 Starbucks grande latte

■

Starbucks blueberry scone

This helps me wake up and gets me started at work. A typical morning practice burns between 1,000 and 2,000 calories, so many rowers eat two breakfasts to help get calories in early.

PHOTOGRAPHS BY WENDY GEORGE

LUNCH

Medium baby spinach salad with grilled chicken, raw walnuts, strawberries, goat cheese, olive oil, and balsamic vinegar ■

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Apple

■

Bottle of water

This lunch is a good balance of nutrition, with lots of veggie and animal protein, good fats, and antioxidants from the berries. This is also a chance to get in some fiber, which can be hard to eat right before practice.

SECTION

POST-WORKOUT SNACK ■ Medium

bottle of carrot juice ■ Scoop

of vanilla unsweetened whey protein powder

PHOTO OR ILLUSTRATION CREDIT TK

I have an after-work workout, too, so sometimes I’ll split this snack between before and after, depending on hunger level. It’s important not to start a workout hungry, because you won’t accomplish what you set out to do! This has sugar and a ton of vitamins from the carrots, as well as high-quality protein, so it is a good snack whether I’m rowing, running, biking or lifting (or all four!).

PHOTO OR ILLUSTRATION CREDIT TK

DINNER

■ Crab-stuffed

salmon

■ Medium

baby spinach salad with raw almonds, strawberries, goat cheese, olive oil and balsamic vinegar ■ Glass

of Sauvignon Blanc

Tons of delicious omega-3s, but no butter, in this Paleo-friendly recipe. This is a good meal to replenish the stores depleted from the day’s workout, but also to enjoy! It’s definitely not an every night thing — the typical includes making leftovers into a stir-fry or a simple big salad with chicken and toppings — but I’m always looking for recipes that are a reminder that eating healthfully doesn’t mean eating bland food. And the wine — everybody likes to unwind after a long day!

Daily Diets is a series chronicling what professionals eat during a 24-hour period. We focus on those whose diets stray from the norm due to time constraints or dietary restrictions.

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TASTE TEST

The Best Frozen Microwave Pizzas HILE we understand that microwaves are the worst appliance for cooking pizza (hello, soggy crusts), certain brands have attempted to do the impossible.

They have created microwaveable frozen pizzas.

Out of sheer curiosity, we rounded up five of such pizzas (making sure they’re nationally available and sold in major grocery stores, of course) and put them to a taste

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test. Before you dare try any of these pizzas, we must warn you.

With one exception (Trader Joe’s), these pizzas have a lot of ingredients that are difficult to pronounce and nearly impossible to define. We do not recommend eating these as a part of your normal daily diet.

They’re strictly for hangover emergencies and hunger attacks.

So, do any of these pizzas taste good enough to make up for the ensuing guilt? Find out ahead.

As always, this taste test is in no way influenced by the brands included.

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TASTE TEST

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#1

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MILDLY RECOMMENDED

DIGIORNO DEEP DISH, FOUR-CHEESE PIZZA

Comments: “The tomato sauce and cheese were plentiful. And the dough is SO sugary, almost like sugar cookies in a weirdly addictive way (probably because I’m American).” “Good, salty cheese. The sauce is kind of sweet, and the dough is not pizza crust but pleasantly crispy in parts. Wait, I’ve turned on this. The dough is cookies.” “It’s a soft doughy masterpiece. Strong oregano flavor, sweet pizza sauce and so much soft dough.” “The dough could be crispier — it’s very sweet.”

#2: CALIFORNIA PIZZA KITCHEN CRISPY THIN CRUST, MARGHERITA

Comments: “This is ‘fancy’ microwave pizza. Lots of flavor, but it sort of tastes like my spice cabinet exploded on this.” “Oh, hi herbs! I like that there are whole pieces of tomato on this.” “This pizza does not taste like it was microwaved. But it does taste like they used a cracker for a crust.”

“It’s the most flavorful of the bunch, and I like the crispy crust.”

NOT RECOMMENDED

#3: TRADER JOE’S PIZZA MARGHERITA Comments: “The tomato sauce is fresh and there’s so much going for this pizza, but the cheese ruined it. It’s like someone melted American cheese, let it harden into a rubbery disk, and threw it on top of this.” “This is the only one that actually looks like pizza. I like the sauce, but the cheese is too weird to forgive.” “You have to be really brave to take a bite out of the cheese.

It looks like glue.” “This has the best crust of the bunch, but the cheese tastes like plastic.”

#4: DIGIORNO TRADITIONAL CRUST, FOUR-CHEESE PIZZA

Comments: “It’s too sweet and the bread tastes stale.” “Aside from the cardboard flavor, I like the slight crunch in the crust. How did a microwave do that?” “There is LOTS of dried oregano. The dough is dry and I want more cheese.” “It’s got a nice firm crust but it’s too shortbread-y.”

PHOTOGRAPHS BY DAMON DAHLEN

#5: CELESTE PIZZA FOR ONE, ORIGINAL

Comments: “Where’s the cheese?” “Whatever you do, don’t smile while eating this pizza. The sauce/paste glues to your teeth.”

“Whoa. REALLY salty. The sauce sticks to your teeth, weirdly.

Where is the cheese? This pizza should die.” If you blindfolded me, I wouldn’t know this is pizza.”

TFU

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ALEX WONG/GETTY IMAGES (MCCONNELL); NIKKI KAHN/THE WASHINGTON POST VIA GETTY IMAGES (FACEBOOK); GETTY IMAGES/FLICKR RF (PHONE BILLS); GETTY IMAGES (CHEMO)

Mitch McConnell Emails Supporters: They’re ‘Coming for Your Guns’

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Pat Roberts Blames Awful-Looking Women for Marriage Problems

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STUDY SHOWS THAT FACEBOOK IS MORE MEMORABLE THAN REAL BOOKS

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Family Added $70 Million in Bogus Charges to Customers’ Phone Bills

05 Two Years of Chemo … but She Didn’t Have Cancer

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HUFFINGTON 01.27.13

TFU

GETTY IMAGES/IMAGE SOURCE (WOMAN SMOTHERS BOYFRIEND); FACEBOOK/ PETTER KVERNENG (FACEBOOK); BREVARD COUNTY SHERIFF (THUMB); AP PHOTO/SETH WENIG (SUBWAY); TWITTER/ REBECCA JOLL

Woman Smothers Boyfriend to Death With Her Breasts

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This Kid’s Crush Promised to Sleep With Him If He Gets 1 Million Likes on Facebook

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MAN BITES OFF GIRLFRIEND’S THUMB WHILE DRIVING TO TACO BELL

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Subway: ‘Footlong’ Not Meant to Be a Measurement of Length

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Creepy Smiley Faces Branded on Hundreds of Sheep

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