Huffington (Issue #52)

HUNGER GAMES | VERGARA, UNCENSORED | ONE NATION UNDER STRESS

THE HUFFINGTON POST MAGAZINE

JUNE 9, 2013

Click Pray To Pray

How Megapastor JOEL OSTEEN Is Saving Souls With Facebook by Bianca Bosker

06.09.13 #52 CONTENTS

Enter POINTERS: Turmoil in Turkey ... Judging Judges JASON LINKINS: Looking Forward in Angst Q&A: Sofia Vergara HEADLINES MOVING IMAGE

Voices ON THE COVER: COURTESY JOEL OSTEEN MINISTRIES; THIS PAGE FROM TOP: AP PHOTO/PAT SULLIVAN; RYAN J. REILLY

LEAH GOODMAN: Tumblr As We Know It Is Ending

‘LIKE’ A PRAYER Megapastor Joel Osteen spreads the holy word online.

BY BIANCA BOSKER

DAVID GALLO: What You Don’t Know About Life in the Ocean QUOTED

Exit MUSIC: 50 Cent, Where Are You Now? STRESS LESS: One Nation Under Stress EAT THIS: Don’t Be Scared, It’s Just a Bag of Dried Beans TFU

GITMO’S HUNGER STRIKERS ‘I can’t find the words to describe the suffering I am going through.’

BY RYAN J. REILLY

FROM THE EDITOR: Answered Prayers, Broken Promises

LETTER FROM THE EDITOR

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Answered Prayers, Broken Promises HIS WEEK, Bianca Bosker puts the spotlight on Joel Osteen’s efforts to spread God’s word through social media.

Osteen is the pastor of the largest church in America. His “Night of Hope” gatherings draw tens of thousands of evangelical Christians to stadiums around the country. But it’s Osteen’s use of technology, and particularly social media, that underscores

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his reach: He has a presence on Twitter, Facebook, YouTube and Instagram, in addition to podcasts, an iPad magazine and two forthcoming iPhone apps. His dedicated site, “Pray Together,” lets people post prayers and respond to the prayers of others. As Bianca puts it, “In life, prayers may or may not be realized. But in the social media realm of the Night of Hope,

Join the conversation on Twitter and Facebook

LETTER FROM THE EDITOR

all prayers must be answered.”

As she explains, the tools of “digi-vangelism” may be new, but the notion of using the latest technology to build religious communities has been the hallmark not only of televangelists like Jimmy Swaggart and Jerry Falwell, but earlier missionaries going all the way back to the beginning of organized religion itself. As Contagious author Jonah Berger puts it, “Religion is the original social media. Even that phrase, ‘spreading the gospel.’

Religion is one of the original things that people shared to a good degree.”

Elsewhere in the issue, Ryan J. Reilly looks at the hunger strikes that have brought attention — if only briefly — back to Guantanamo, and the fact that President Obama still hasn’t honored his pledge to close the prison camp down. Eleven years after prisoners first arrived, 166 remain at Guantanamo, and despite widespread calls for its closure, the facility continues to expand, from a recently built courthouse and refurbished sports center to a chapel under

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construction. Meanwhile, Guantanamo’s prisoners and lawyers have been clamoring to make their voices heard. As one prisoner wrote, “I just hope that because of the pain we are suffering, the eyes of the world will

In life, prayers may or may not be realized.

But in the social media realm of the Night of Hope, all prayers must be answered.” once again look to Guantánamo before it is too late.”

Finally, as part of our ongoing coverage of stress and its destructive effects on our lives, we’re looking at our country’s most-stressed cities and states, along with a stress-less recipe for a delicious summer dish.

ARIANNA

Enter

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‘THESE ARE 1 NO SLOUCHES’

POINTERS

President Obama announced his three picks for the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit on Tuesday, pressuring Republicans to swiftly consider them for confirmation. His nominees have had to wait an average of three times longer than former President George W. Bush’s nominees, and Obama said the delays have to stop “for the good of the American people.” The nominees are Patricia Ann Millet, Cornelia Pillard and Robert Leon Wilkins. “These are no slouches. These are no hacks,” Obama said. “These are incredibly accomplished lawyers by all accounts.”

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POINTERS

‘NEWS GATHERING IS BEING CRIMINALIZED’

New York Times executive editor Jill Abramson said Sunday that amid the Department of Justice’s investigations of journalists, she’s worried “the process of news gathering is being criminalized.” The Times was one of several news organizations to boycott a meeting with Attorney General Eric Holder about leak investigations because it was off the record. “To have this private meeting ... and not be able to share anything about it with our readers didn’t seem to have a point to me,” she told CBS’ Face the Nation. Holder vowed not to indict any journalists for their reporting.

3 ‘WRONG AND UNFAIR’

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Turkey’s deputy prime minister Bulent Arinc apologized on Monday for the severe police crackdown that occurred in response to a peaceful protest against government plans to destroy a park. “The excessive violence that was used in the first instance against those who were behaving with respect for the environment is wrong and unfair. I apologize to those citizens,” Arinc said at a news conference.

Demonstrations continued this week across the country in response to the brutal crackdown, and two have reportedly been killed in the ensuing chaos.

‘THE ADMINISTRATION OWES THE PUBLIC AN EXPLANATION’

A Guardian report that the National Security Agency is collecting the phone logs of millions of U.S. Verizon customers sparked outrage this week. The paper reported that a “top secret order” mandates that Verizon provide phone call data to the NSA on an “ongoing, daily basis.”

Senate Intelligence Committee Chair Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) defended the program. “It’s called protecting America,” she said. Others disagreed. “The administration owes the American public an explanation of what authorities it thinks it has,” Sen. Mark Udall (D-Colo.) said.

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POINTERS

‘CRISIS OF CONSCIENCE TO COME FORWARD’

This week marked the two-year anniversary of the disappearance of Indiana University student Lauren Spierer — and yet the police seem to be no closer to solving the case. Spierer mysteriously disappeared on June 3, 2011, after she was last seen at 4:30 a.m. “There’s a sense that some day, some week things will change for us,” her dad, Robert, told the Herald-Times. “That someone will have the strength, the crisis of conscience to come forward.”

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6 ‘MAKING MY SOUL COMPLETE AND HAPPY’ THAT’S VIRAL WARNING: THIS WILL INDUCE TEARS

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Kristen Beck, who served as a Navy SEAL for 13 deployments, revealed in a new memoir that she is transgender.

Beck remained closeted while fighting in Afghanistan because of the “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy, but she is now telling her story. “I do not believe a soul has a gender, but my new path is making my soul complete and happy,” Beck writes.

“I hope my journey sheds some light on the human experience and most importantly helps heal the ‘socio-religious dogma’ of a purely binary gender.”

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

HEADLINES TO VIEW FULL STORIES

ORAL SEX, THROAT CANCER AND MICHAEL DOUGLAS

STUCK IN THE MIDDLE ...

FOREVER

GAY COUPLE NAMED HIGH SCHOOL’S CUTEST PAIR

POLICE DOG PAYS RESPECTS TO A FALLEN PARTNER

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LOOKING FORWARD IN ANGST

JASON LINKINS

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IS RUNNING FOR PRESIDENT A BAD CAREER MOVE? D

ID MICHELE BACHMANN make the right decision to run for president in 2012? I’m

not sure that “running for president in 2012” was a smart decision for anyone to make, frankly, what with all the bridges falling down and whatnot. But NBC’s First Read sees Bachmann’s decision as a cautionary tale:

Michele Bachmann addresses supporters and the media after winning the Ames Straw Poll.

Enter A word of warning to anyone thinking about 2016: Running for president doesn’t always help your political career. After unsuccessful presidential bids in ’04 and ’08, Rep. Dennis Kucinich (D-OH) later found himself without a congressional seat. After he finished sixth in the ‘08 Iowa caucuses — after moving his family to the state — Sen. Chris Dodd (D-CT) saw his popularity in his state plummet and decided not to run for re-election. And after briefly running for president in 2008, former Wisconsin Gov. Tommy Thompson (R) lost a Senate race four years later. And now you can add Rep. Michele Bachmann (R-MN), who like Dodd finished sixth in Iowa in 2012, to this list.

I’m pretty sure that’s all wrong.

Let’s begin with the spare examples cited, a tiny list of politicians who found themselves falling on hard times sometime after they made presidential bids. As near as I can tell, none of them experienced a fallow period in their political careers as a consequence of having run for president.

Kucinich “found himself without a congressional seat” because

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his district was abolished in redistricting after the 2010 Census, and he was forced to run against another incumbent, Rep. Marcy Kaptur, in a Democratic primary in a district mainly composed of Kaptur’s historical constituency.

Chris Dodd’s rough electoral sledding had much more to do with a

The larger lesson here isn’t so much ‘think twice before running for president’ as much as it is ‘don’t improperly use campaign funds or launder money or steal email lists.’” plethora of post-financial crash controversies — most notably his flip-flop on legislation that eventually “helped pave the way for AIG to pay controversial bonuses to its employees.” Tommy Thompson was a presidential candidate for a hot minute in 2008, and he withdrew before the primaries.

Four years later, he ran for the Senate and lost to Tammy Baldwin. I’m at a complete loss as to why his brief involvement in presidential politics doomed him.

Was Bachmann harmed by her

Enter presidential run? You can make the argument, because Bachmann is being driven into retirement by a “range of allegations related to Bachmann’s failed presidential campaign, including charges that she improperly used campaign funds to promote her book, that her campaign ‘launder[ed]’ money, and that one of her staffers stole an email list from a home-school organization,” as Salon’s Alex Seitz-Wald reported.

So, sure, she’d be in better shape if she’d not run for president, potentially, but I sort of think the larger lesson here isn’t so much “think twice before running for president” as much as it is “don’t improperly use campaign funds or launder money or steal email lists.”

In reality, however, Bachmann will be dining out on her brief presidential bid for a long time, because running for president is often enough to catapult a person into the political celebritysphere.

The speaking fees that Bachmann will be able to command alone make the candidacy worth it.

Here’s a bit of perspective, courtesy of the St. Paul Pioneer Press: It would’ve cost big bucks to get Republican Tim Pawlenty to return to Ames, where his presi-

LOOKING FORWARD IN ANGST

dential campaign ended in 2011 after a poor finish at the Iowa Straw Poll.

Emails released by Iowa State University show its Harkin Institute of Public Policy wanted Pawlenty to come speak last month about Iowa’s leadoff role in the presidential nominating process.

Pawlenty’s agent told school officials his speaking fee was $25,000 plus expenses. Institute director Dave Peterson wrote that fee was “well beyond” what the institute could afford, but started asking others whether they could “cobble together enough” university funds from elsewhere.

If Tim Pawlenty, the guy Bachmann personally drove from the 2012 race, has been priced out of the cheap seats because of his terrible presidential bid, then Bachmann is going to be fine. If the campaign scandals from her 2012 bid are driving her out of the House of Representatives, then the rest of us will be fine, too.

Basically, Bachmann’s decision to run for president was a win-win for everyone.

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Q&A

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Sofia Vergara: I’m Grateful for My Breasts “To be a voluptuous girl, has opened many doors for me. I would be ungrateful to say it’s all because of my brains and my talent.”

Modern Family star Sofia Vergara in the season four finale, “Goodnight Gracie” (below). The actress stars in Robert Rodriguez’s Machete Kills, out July 31.

FOR THE FULL INTERVIEW, VISIT HUFFPOST LIVE

SPENCER PLATT/GETTY IMAGES (RICE REDEMPTION, CHRISTIE); ADEM ALTAN/AFP/GETTY IMAGES (TENS OF THOUSANDS VS. ERDOGAN); MICHAL CIZEK/AFP/GETTY IMAGES (EUROPEAN RUIN)

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HEADLINES

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The Week That Was TAP IMAGE TO ENLARGE, TAP EACH DATE FOR FULL ARTICLE ON THE HUFFINGTON POST

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Istanbul, Turkey 06.01.2013

AP PHOTO

Turkish protesters clash with police at Taksim Square.

Many protesters have become increasingly frustrated with Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan, whom they believe is becoming more totalitarian.

Police forces removed barricades throughout the square in an effort to alleviate tensions among the protesters and restore order to the area.

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London, England 06.01.2013 British police arrest a protester during a demonstration march staged by the British National Party. Police forces intervened when members believed to be affiliated with opposing political group Unite Against Fascism staged a counter protest.

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Frankfurt Am Main, Germany 06.01.2013 Riot police begin detaining protesters during a “Blockupy” demonstration in Frankfurt’s financial district. Protesters rallied against the European Central Bank’s debt policy and the exploitation of textile workers in Third World countries, among other issues.

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Prague, Czech Rep. 06.01.2013 A young girl braves spring rain showers to take part in the sixth annual Zombie Walk in Prague. Hundreds of zombie impersonators in elaborate and oft-gruesome costumes trudged through the city streets throughout the event.

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Kiev, Ukraine 06.02.2013

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A man and his homemade flying machine plummet into the Rusanovsky Channel during the Red Bull Flugtag event.

Participants attempted to launch 35 different size- and weight-limited planes over the water in front of more than 70,000 spectators.

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Lake Hughes, Calif.

06.01.2013 The landscape glows in Lake Hughes after a 19,500-acre wildfire swept through the area. Thousands of firefighters continue to work through the smoldering heat in an effort to contain the area.

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Blackpool, England 06.03.2013 A British woman lays out and sunbathes as warm weather arrives on the North Pier of the Blackpool Promenade. After one of the coldest springs on record, England is expected to see higher temperatures and lots of sunlight.

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Beijing, China 06.03.2013 A young boy explores Tiananmen Square as a paramilitary police officer stands guard during a ceremonial lowering of the flag.

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Fukushima, Japan 06.01.2013

THE ASAHI SHIMBUN VIA GETTY IMAGES

Members of the Japan Air Self-Defense Force’s acrobatic team, “Blue Impulse,” soar above the crowd at the Tohoku Rokkon Festival. Members from six different prefectures in Japan’s Tohoku region began gathering at the festival to pray for recovery after a tsunami devastated the area two years ago.

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La Villa, Panama 05.30.2013 A boy playfully teases a man sporting a traditional devil’s costume during Corpus Christi celebrations in La Villa de los Santos. Roman Catholics took to the streets for the traditional celebration, in which people dress as devils and dance through the streets in a gesture of penance.

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Islamabad, Pakistan 05.31.2013 A handler bathes a monkey in a stream in Islamabad, where a heat wave has brought temperatures as high as 42 degrees Celsius (106 degrees Fahrenheit). Forecasts suggest temperatures may continue to climb as the heat wave continues.

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Pamplona, Spain 06.02.2013 Spanish Catholics gather on grass-covered streets during a procession on Corpus Christi, a religious holiday that originated in Spain during the fifth century.

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

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Voices

LEAH GOODMAN

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KAREN BLEIER/AFP/GETTY IMAGES

My Fear That Tumblr As We Know It Is Ending MORE THAN ONCE when I have felt down about something — a fight with a friend or a bad grade on a test in school — I have resorted to Tumblr. Rather than call up a friend and rely upon a direct, personal connection with someone I already know well, I have instead shared my problems anonymously with other people on Tumblr. My real-life friend might at that moment be occupied by something other than my life’s challenges, or they might use my struggles to gossip in a way that will make me un-

comfortable. Whereas on Tumblr the people who focus on the problems I share do so by choice.

I sometimes visit blogs written by people I know and respect and ask for their advice. Or I write my own post on my own blog — giving up the anonymity, while allowing people who follow me to answer. I use the network as a kind of collective wisdom.

Though I split my time between Berlin, Germany, and Brooklyn, New York, the people I interact with on Tumblr are scattered from London to Los Angeles. What brings us together is a sense of community built of shared inter-

Voices ests, and a real desire to help each other and understand one another.

I am far from the only teenager who has come to use Tumblr in this fashion. The site has exploded in popularity among a certain slice of the teenage world in part because of how its users have transformed it into a safe place where you need not fear being judged by anyone.

Tumblr has become a place for outcasts to express themselves on subjects ranging from what clothes they like to their favorite TV shows to their sexual orientation.

Some of what we do here may seem unimportant — debating our worship of one or another fictional character or which member of One Direction we’d like to meet.

But Tumblr also occupies a much more serious place for some users. People use it to seek help with their math homework. They use it as a plea for help when they find themselves confronting suicidal thoughts. People with serious mental disorders find friends through Tumblr, since they feel out of place in real life.

On Tumblr, people say what they really feel, without concern for bad consequences, feeling confident that this is the nature of the community. That encourages other

LEAH GOODMAN

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people to do the same, all of which makes Tumblr more and more real for those of us who embrace it.

We Tumblr users do commonly worry that people from school may find our blogs and make fun of them or gossip about our problems.

We Tumblr users do commonly worry that people from school might find our blogs and make fun of them …

Now, with Yahoo agreeing to purchase Tumblr, it’s as if that fear has become a bitter reality.”

Now, with Yahoo agreeing to purchase Tumblr, it’s as if that fear has become a bitter reality. My Tumblr dashboard — the place where I see everyone who I follow — now looks like a terrible accident has hit the site. It is full of fears that Tumblr as we know it is ending.

Surely, Yahoo, having paid $1.1 billion for Tumblr, is going to start advertising the site like crazy, causing new people to sign up without understanding the community. It’s as if our beloved island is about to fill up with high-rise hotels that will be jammed with tourists who have no respect for the culture.

Voices We all just know that if Yahoo advertises as much as expected, soon enough our great aunts are going to be asking for our Tumblr URLs, along with our brothers and our parents. Once we know that everyone in our real lives is tracking what’s happening in our Tumblr lives, the former will overtake the latter: Tumblr users will become self-conscious and fake, performing for their audiences, robbing the site of the element that makes it such a powerful experience now.

It may seem strange that a site bringing together strangers from points around the globe can create a space for interactions that feel more real than those with people at school and at home, but that’s how it actually is.

Tumblr is so much more than a website at this point. It has grown into such a huge community, one that could be easily destroyed by the sort of reckless marketing that Yahoo must be about to unleash.

Tumblr users seem to function together differently than any other social networking site. In fact, I wouldn’t even categorize Tumblr as a social network. Originally, Tumblr was a blogging platform but it has grown into something much different: Most of the Tumblr com-

LEAH GOODMAN

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munity, myself included, has categorized themselves into so-called “fandoms,” a term that simply refers to a group of people who share a passion for a certain book, show, movie, band or person.

Now, we worry that our deepest

Tumblr users will become self-conscious and fake, performing for their audiences, robbing the site of the element that makes it such a powerful experience now.” thoughts and our shared interests are about to be used by a company we do not trust to try to sell us things we don’t need. For people my age, Yahoo is just about advertising. It’s a sell-out that stands for nothing other than making its logo pop up all over the Web. For us, Tumblr feels real, and Yahoo is the thing that will make it feel like a fraud, or at least inclusive of people who have arrived for no other reason than that some giant search engine suggested they click here.

Leah Goodman is an eighth grader at John F. Kennedy International School in Berlin.

Voices

DAVID GALLO

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SCIENCE

COURTESY OF TED

What You Don’t Know About Life in the Ocean I HAD THE privilege of spending a few days with Jim Cameron recently. Most people know Jim as the person who created the two highest grossing films (Avatar and Titanic) in Hollywood history. Few know him as a recognized leader in ocean exploration and a true ocean champion. Among other things, he’s earned that reputation by his

development of new technologies, by his unparalleled exploration of RMS Titanic, and most recently by his seven-mile solo dive to the very deepest spot on planet Earth. Cameron respects the ocean as much as any environmentalist and he knows it as well as any scientist. I’d say his love of the sea runs as deep as his dive. Jim is quick to point out that he has surrounded himself with a very talented team that has become used to setting an incredibly high

David Gallo was a coexpedition leader during an exploration of the RMS Titanic and the German battleship Bismarck.

Voices bar for the rest of the world. During my visit with Jim he said something to me about the sea that stopped me in my tracks. We were discussing the inability to effectively convey the importance of the ocean to humanity and vice versa. Jim said, “The oceans are changing faster than we can understand them.”

Think about that.

To understand the ocean we need to first explore it. The issue with the oceans is that they’re vast (they cover more than 70 percent of the earth’s surface), they’re deep (average depth is about 2½ miles), they’re dark (sunlight and its warmth only reach skin deep), the pressure is intense (1,500 atmospheres at greatest ocean depth), and for good measure they are incredibly dynamic (waves, swell, currents, etc). Indeed each of these things represents a challenge to exploration, but they are not insurmountable problems. We have used everything from snorkels and scuba to submarines and sophisticated robots to slowly but steadily reveal the deepest darkest secrets of Neptune’s realm. New imaging systems, sensors and powerful data processing and display techniques promise to deliver a view of the world beneath the sea with unprecedented

DAVID GALLO

accuracy and clarity. In my opinion, Jim’s solo dive to the bottom of the Mariana Trench in Deep Sea Challenger wasn’t a success just because of that one triumphant instance in time. It continues to be a success because it proves that no part of the global ocean is beyond our reach. We are truly at the threshold of an entirely new era of ocean exploration.

To date, we’ve explored less than 5 percent of the world beneath the waves. There are precious few research vessels and funding for ocean exploration and science is becoming increasingly difficult to procure. It’s unfortunate because in that 5 percent of the ocean we have explored we find the world’s greatest mountain range (the 50,000 mile long Mid-Ocean Ridge), thousands of mountain peaks higher than those of the Alps, thousands of valleys many times deeper,

TED and The Huffington Post are excited to bring you TEDWeekends, a curated weekend program that introduces a powerful “idea worth spreading” every Friday, anchored in an exceptional TEDTalk. This week’s TEDTalk is accompanied by an original blog post from the featured speaker, along with new op-eds, thoughts and responses from the HuffPost community. Watch the talk above, read the blog post and tell us your thoughts below. Become part of the conversation!

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wider, and longer than the Grand Canyon, undersea rivers, and even undersea waterfalls (the greatest waterfall on earth is at the bottom of the Atlantic between Iceland and Greenland). In some of the sea’s most hostile parts, where we were sure we would find no life at all, we find robust communities of life that in some cases rival the tropical rainforests in diversity and density.

So what’s in the other unexplored 95 percent of the ocean? Is it possible that by some chance we’ve already found all of the exciting stuff, or is the ocean full of surprises?

No matter where you live on planet earth, the oceans have an impact on your everyday life and no matter where you live; your activities have an impact on the oceans.

Floods, drought, weather patterns, tsunamis, hurricanes, typhoons, rogue waves, all get their energy from the sea waters or from the sea floor beneath. Conversely whatever you put on the ground or in the air stands a very good chance of mak-

MORE ON TED WEEKENDS PROTECTING EARTH’S FINAL FRONTIER

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DAVID GALLO

Voices

A GRAND COSMIC EVOLUTION

ing its way out to the sea.

If you look at Earth from space, it’s tough to see the 7 billion people who call this planet home.

We are almost like a virus on this planet and just like a virus we have managed to make the planet “sick.” It may be difficult to believe but our activities over time have changed the temperature and the chemistry of the global ocean. Anyone with an aquarium knows that if you change the temperature and chemistry of the water, you’re asking for trouble... big trouble. We can thank the ocean for the air we breathe, the food we eat, and the water we drink. It’s always been that way in the past, but the future might be quite different if we don’t change our habits.

Yes, the oceans are changing rapidly, but they are not beyond understanding. The keys to our past, and the clues to our future are in Neptune’s hands.

David Gallo is an oceanographer.

A selection of the week’s related blogs HEADLINES TO VIEW BLOGS ABOUT THIS WEEK’S THEME

RESTORING THE BLUE

ONE OCEAN WORLD AMONG MANY

THE LAST CORAL WILDERNESS ON EARTH

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QUOTED

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“ No news executive should go in there on an off-the-record session. It should be on the record. Let the sun shine in.”

— Tom Brokaw

CLOCKWISE FROM TOP LEFT: ALEX WONG/GETTY IMAGES ; WILLIAM B. PLOWMAN/NBC/NBC NEWSWIRE VIA GETTY IMAGES; AP PHOTO/BOGDAN MARAN; SAUL LOEB/AFP/GETTY IMAGES

“ The words were extremely hard.”

discussed his thoughts on Eric Holder’s upcoming meeting with news organizations to review the DOJ’s guidelines for investigating journalists on HuffPost Live

— 13-year-old Arvind Mahankali,

winner of the 86th Scripps National Spelling Bee

“ Hope, compassion — I was afraid these traits were extinct.”

“ It’s a master-servant relationship.”

— Conservative talk radio host Rush Limbaugh said about President Barack Obama and New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie’s relationship

— HuffPost commenter Sayers 3474 on Amanda Donnelly comforting drummer Lee Rigby as he died

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QUOTED

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“ Since when do atheists need to ‘come out’? I’ve never met anyone who would describe themselves as a closet atheist.”

— HuffPost commenter Autora

on “Rebecca Vitsmun, Atheist Oklahoma Tornado Survivor, Sees Thousands In Indiegogo Campaign Donations”

“ I’m a fat kid on the inside.”

— Sexiest Man Alive Channing Tatum

CLOCKWISE FROM TOP LEFT: JOHN SHEARER/INVISION/AP; SCOTT OLSON/GETTY IMAGES; SHUTTERSTOCK / MARY416

told Cosmo

Try explaining to a 5 year old why ‘unihorn’ is wrong and ‘unicorn’ is right.

I couldn’t.

— HuffPost commenter Krayonc

on “Cute Kid Note Of The Day: Ascha’s Assignment”

“ Who cares. Call me when someone finds his tax returns hidden in a book.”

— HuffPost Commenter Zeutern

on Mitt Romney’s yearbook message to a prep school pal being uncovered in a bookstore

AP PHOTO/RICHARD VOGEL

06.09.13 #52

FEATURES CLICK ‘PRAY’ TO PRAY THE HUNGER GAMES

How JOEL OSTEEN Is Saving Souls With Facebook

CLICK ‘PRAY’ TO PRAY

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BY BIANCA BOSKER

PREVIOUS PAGE: COURTESY JOEL OSTEEN MINISTRIES

HALFWAY THROUGH MEGAPASTOR Joel Osteen’s sermon at Marlins Park stadium, seven frazzled people sitting in a press box overlooking the field realize they have a problem: The prayers aren’t going through. ¶ “I can forward ‘prayer’ to ‘prayer request,’” volunteers a member of Osteen’s technical staff as a possible fix. He fiddles with the trackball of his BlackBerry as he tries his best to reassure Osteen’s marketing director, Jason Madding, that they can redirect people’s emailed prayers to the proper place and prevent them from disappearing into the digital ether.

Hunched over a MacBook, Madding flips back and forth between a Skype chat and a page tracking traffic to Osteen’s sites. He coordinates with a remote team of developers as he monitors the popularity of Osteen’s page to gauge whether the surge of visitors will overwhelm the servers and bring down the site.

On the field below, a musician blows two long blasts from a ram’s horn while drums thump in

the background. “Every day has your name on it,” Osteen shouts to the crowd.

Osteen, a 50-year-old Texas native with an impeccable complexion, thick head of dark hair and a gleaming white smile, is the pastor of the largest church in America.

On this April night in Miami, nearly 36,000 cheering people have gathered in the stands of the stadium to hear him speak. But for Madding, the crucial action is playing out on an iPad propped on a desk in front of him: He is watching the live stream of the pastor’s sermon as it

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appears to audiences who are tuning in from home — a group numbering more than 138,000. They are absorbing Osteen’s “Night of Hope,” a gathering of evangelical Christians aimed at strengthening people’s commitment to Christ, swaying non-believers and spreading Osteen’s message of self-improvement through Christianity.

Madding’s iPad displays a ceaseless stream of comments from those taking part from their homes around the world — people grappling with illness, joblessness, loneliness, despair and suicidal thoughts; people seeking comfort, prayer and fellowship. These participants are not inside the stadium,

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but in an expanded gathering that connects the experience of those here in the flesh with those online.

Over the course of this night, Osteen’s team of social media consultants confronts the formidable task of making that synergy happen. They struggle to keep up with the relentless flood of digital interaction. In life, prayers may or may not be realized. But in the social media realm of the Night of Hope, all prayers must be answered.

Osteen’s staff has instructed online congregants to post prayers to his website or phone prayers to a 1-800 number. They’ve also provided an email address, prayer@joelosteen.com, assuring digital participants that the church has prayer partners on hand who will field their missives and pray for them.

Osteen (left) leads his congregation in prayer for the victims of last month’s Indian Ocean tsunami on Jan. 9, 2005, in Houston.

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But at this moment, those emailed entreaties have no prayer of reaching anyone. The email address Osteen’s helpers have supplied is the wrong one. It’s one that doesn’t exist — the staff was meant to offer up “prayerrequest@joelosteen.com.” Thanks to the error, an auto-generated email reply informs the faithful that delivery of their prayers has “failed permanently.”

“It bounced back,” types one of the people in the chat room, who has tried to email from her home in Canada. “I need your prayers.”

She tersely summarizes her feelings about the situation: “=(.”

THE ORIGINAL SOCIAL MEDIA Social networking sites, long celebrated as avenues for up-to-theminute information from friends, pundits, celebrities and corporations, are now being deployed in the spirit of higher powers. They have emerged as vehicles for spiritual salvation. Increasingly, the road to Damascus is a hyperlink and the Epistle is a tweet.

In some sense, this seems inevitable. The Internet is effectively doing for present-day pastors what television once did for Jerry Falwell, Jimmy Swaggart and the rest of the so-called televangelists: helping

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Increasingly, the road to Damascus is a hyperlink and the Epistle is a tweet.” them spread Christianity on a mass scale while liberating their congregations from the confines of the physical church.

Beyond the tens of millions of viewers who can be reached via television broadcasts, the Web has amplified the potential audience to the hundreds of millions, while transcending geographic boundaries. Pastors need not concern themselves with buying TV time in the appropriate markets. They can instead use tweets, streaming video, podcasts and Facebook status updates — free, accessible anytime and widely shared — to turn hearts and shepherd their flock. And while TV is a one-way form of communication, the Internet enables interaction, letting ministries converse with the people tuning in.

“Thirty years ago, televangelists used technology that did not exist

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before then to spread their message, and that is essentially what technology is allowing pastors and churches to do now,” said Todd Rhoades, the director of new media and technologies at the Leadership Network, which seeks to help churches master technical innovation. “But it’s on a much larger scale and in many ways it’s on a more individual scale — it seems a lot more personal.”

Social media brand managers would pay dearly for fans as active as the followers that religious groups have attracted online. On social networking sites, megapastors’ fan bases are considerably smaller than those of pop stars or big brands, but church followers tend to be far more engaged and apt to spread the word of their preachers.

Religious groups regularly rank among the top five most-discussed fan pages on Facebook, according to PageData, a social media analytics firm. Rihanna, the most popular public figure on Facebook with over 70 million “likes,” averaged 41,000 interactions per Facebook post during the month of March, reported Quintly, an analytics firm that registers shares, comments and “likes” as individual interactions. Joel

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Osteen Ministries, with a relatively paltry 3.6 million “likes,” averaged 160,000 interactions per post, Quintly found — nearly four times Rihanna’s average, three times Justin Bieber’s and almost sixteen times the White House’s.

Evangelical Christians and social media creators ultimately share something fundamental in common: Both are consumed with the nature of how information spreads, and both are intent on fashioning a sense of community out of individuals separated by time, space, language and culture. Both also passionately apply themselves to filling what they view as a void in the human experience.

“Religion is the original social media,” says Jonah Berger, author of Contagious: Why Things Catch On. “Even that phrase, ‘spreading the gospel.’ Religion is one of the original things that people shared to a good degree.”

‘THE DIGIVANGELIST’ Osteen has long harbored aspirations of reaching enormous numbers of people. Early in his career, when he published his first book, Osteen’s public relations team pitched him as “Billy Graham meets Tony Robbins.” His message of pos-

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itive thinking and attaining personal prosperity through Christianity has attracted both devout followers and strident critics, who argue he preaches a watered-down version of the Bible that overemphasizes material wealth. But his breed of selfempowerment evangelicalism — “Be a victor, not a victim,” “[God] wants us to enjoy every single day of our lives” — has proved so popular, Osteen delivers his song-filled sermons to traveling Night of Hope events held monthly in different

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cities around the world. He’s also authored several bestsellers and reaches 10 million homes a month via his weekly TV broadcast. He has a passion for television and doesn’t seem to have ever met a camera he didn’t like. “TV is Joel’s heart,” notes Madding. But seeing new opportunities to expand his following and spread his brand of inspiration, Osteen has lately sought to master a new field: digi-vangelism.

In his telling, social media enables him to “impact more people in a positive way” — an impact he no doubt hopes will ultimately tether believers and non-believers

D.C. resident Danielle Logan prays during Osteen’s sermon at Nationals Park on April 29, 2012, in Washington, D.C.

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Joel is there. He’s touchable, he’s interactive. You don’t feel like he’s just a TV.”

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closer to his congregation (and maybe even sell some of his books or DVDs along the way).

Other churches, like Oklahoma’s evangelical LifeChurch, have been more ambitious and creative with their approaches to technology, though none can yet rival Osteen’s reach.

And Osteen, born in an era where the dominant screen was a television, not a computer, is facing some of the same challenges other churches are confronting as he attempts to update his message for the Facebook era. Larger churches have traditionally been technology’s early adopters, and smaller congregations are likely to crib from Osteen’s social media strategy.

Here’s where devotees can currently find Osteen online: YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, on podcasts, delivered to their email inboxes, as a blog on JoelOsteen. com, livestreamed via his website, in an iPad magazine and, coming soon, on two standalone iPhone apps. To handle the deluge of prayer requests posted to Osteen’s Facebook wall and phoned into his church, Joel Osteen Ministries has even launched a dedicated site, Pray Together, where people can post prayer requests for the ministry’s

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entire congregation to respond to.

Just click “pray” to pray.

“It’s kind of like — are you familiar with Reddit or Digg?” asks Brian Boyd, the chief executive of Media Connect Partners (or MCP), a social media consultancy that assists Joel Osteen Ministries with their with day-to-day online outreach efforts, as well as their Night of Hope events. “You can vote a prayer request up or down, and actually pray.”

Some evangelical Christians view these developments with alarm, decrying what they portray as an insincere reach for souls with social media and a trend that could undermine the draw of in-person gatherings of people in one place.

Evangelical Christian pastor John MacArthur railed against “flat screen preachers” in a 2011 interview with Christianity.com, declaring their form of ministry an “aberration” that moved “away from the core of sound doctrine.” But Osteen’s social media consultants maintain they have witnessed the faithful finding real fellowship and solace in a virtual setting.

“You don’t have to sign up for an email, you don’t have to go to church, and you don’t have to go out and find it: you can literally log

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BIANCA BOSKER

onto your computer or your phone, and you can get the encouragement or inspiration that you need,” says Kelly Vo, a twenty-something social media analyst manager with MCP who helps Osteen, along with other Christian figures, on his web strategy. “People share things on social media, with Joel, that I don’t think people would even share with their pastor in person.”

‘I SPEAK JOEL’ It’s just after noon on Saturday, more than six hours before the Night of Hope is set to begin, and already a gaggle of web gurus have arranged themselves at a long desk in the empty press box at Marlins Park. They are seated elbow-toelbow, MacBook-to-MacBook, as they prepare for the intense activity ahead. The room is silent, save for the growl of planes flying overhead and the occasional twang from an electric guitarist rehearsing on the black stage below.

For the Night of Hope, Boyd’s MCP has rallied a team of 10 to run social media, with most of the moderators here in Miami and others working from their homes scattered from Las Vegas to Charlotte. Joel Osteen Ministries has tapped another 11 people, includ-

ing Madding’s marketing staff and a group of developers, to be sure Osteen’s site doesn’t collapse under the weight of its online congregation. In Texas, Osteen has seven prayer partners, made up of Lakewood Church staff and volunteers, on hand to pray via email and on the phone.

The mission for this sizable social media operation is to transpose and transmit the real-life experience of Osteen’s Night of Hope sermon — a rock concert-like production where thousands pray, sing, shout, stand, stomp, hug, clap, cry and convert — to people sitting alone, in darkened rooms, before the glow of computer screen.

“I want it to be real, interactive,” says Boyd. “I want them to feel like they’re sitting in the stadium.”

Moderators from Media Connect Partners — Osteen’s social media consultancy — monitor his social media accounts in the Marlins Park press box, dubbed “Social Central JOM” (“Joel Osteen Ministries”).

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People share things on social media, with Joel, that I don’t think people would even share with their pastor in person.”

MCP will update Joel Osteen Ministries’ social accounts all night to drive people to the main attraction: the live, online video stream of the Night of Hope and the public chat room that sits alongside it on the screen. Osteen’s chat room will be open to all comers as a place where they can message with other followers or with the team of MCP moderators on hand to offer encouragement, share information on local churches and answer questions posed by virtual attendees.

A separate section of the screen allows participants to post prayer requests for all to see and answer.

Vo, a slim brunette dressed in purple pants, a lavender collared shirt, and black pumps, works on putting together a list of pastors to follow on Twitter. Peering into her laptop, she shifts between Twitter, Facebook, a custom-made scheduler listing outgoing posts and the Instagram app on her iPhone. Though

this is Vo’s first Night of Hope, she has worked smaller Osteen events and has a sense of what’s in store.

She has warned her colleague to steel himself for a virtual stampede.

“There are thousands of comments a second,” she tells another team member. “It’s just a massive undertaking. It’s exciting because his fans are excited, and so nice, and they’re so happy to be a part of it and they’re so enthusiastic.”

That deluge of comments is the most stressful part of the night for Boyd, who notes it’s simply impossible to interact personally with every virtual attendee — though that’s the aim.

“We really do want to try to reach everyone,” he explains. “If someone asks a question, we want to get an answer to them. If someone has a concern or wants to give a praise report, we want to be able to talk to them, and you just can’t do it. Even with 10 people, with that kind of volume, you’re unable to get to every single person.”

A former literary editor who

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studied creative writing at Arizona State University, Vo knows Osteen’s fans better than most. She’s helped manage Osteen’s social profiles for six months, and spends an hour or two every day responding to his followers’ comments or drafting status updates to send from the pastor’s accounts. The posts, based on lines from Osteen’s sermons and books, are each screened by Joel Osteen Ministries’ media relations chief, Andrea Davis, before they’re published. Osteen is against personal updates and insists on short, motivational phrases: “It’s hope, it’s inspiration, it’s stuff that they can use,” the pastor explains. “That has helped us be effective.” Though Osteen doesn’t tweet himself, he has a separate, private Twitter account from which he monitors his official feed. If Osteen sees a tweet go out that doesn’t sound true to him, Davis can expect a call.

“I eat, breathe and sleep Joel at times,” says Vo. “I speak Joel now … You pick up the voice and it’s like, ‘Oh, God bless you’ and ‘Would love to pray for you.’”

And yet, much like the majority of the congregants who gather via social media, Vo knows Osteen primarily as a digital experience: She has met him in person only

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once — the day before.

Osteen’s Facebook and Twitter posts are relatively standard fare, but their reception is anything but typical. A tweet sent earlier that morning advised his 1.6 million followers, “Today, find something to be grateful for. Every day is a gift from God.” That message has been retweeted more than 6,000 times, about average for Osteen, who takes a personal interest in his retweets.

By contrast, Whole Foods, which boasts twice as many followers as Osteen and in 2012 was named the most influential brand on Twitter, is lucky to see one of its tweets retweeted a dozen times.

Retweeting and “liking” on Facebook amount to an effective way to convey the Word, as believers disseminate Osteen’s message through their genuine social networks.

“It opens up the doors for a lot of unbelievers,” says Alisha Brooks, one of the in-person attendees at the Night of Hope who follows Osteen closely online. “Through social media, I might have a whole bunch of people who follow me that may not be into the Word or anything like that. So if I see something [Osteen] tweets and I retweet it, now it has access to an extra 100, 200 or 300 people that didn’t have

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Religion is the original social media.”

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access to that or didn’t see it.

And it might help.”

Vo breaks from her Twitter work to scan through the 400-odd comments on Osteen’s most recent Facebook post, systematically “liking” some and answering questions about the Night of Hope. That personal attention, says Vo, helps endear Joel to people by assuring them he’s hearing their prayers and praise — even if it’s from the “JOM Team,” not Osteen himself.

“Joel is there. He’s touchable, he’s interactive. You don’t feel like he’s just a TV,” she says. “The followers know he’s there, he’s listening, he’s a pastor and he’s watching, so they get the interaction.”

‘I NEED A PRAYER’ About 20 minutes before the Night of Hope is scheduled to begin, Vo resettles herself in front of her computer. In addition to updating Facebook and Twitter, she’s been assigned the role of “greeter,” meaning she will welcome people to the Night of Hope chat room. Socalled “URL pushers” will answer queries with pre-written blocks of text that direct people to everything from Osteen’s Twitter account to local churches. Two others from the group will screen each incom-

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ing comment before publishing it to the public forum, and someone else will run giveaways (the prizes: free copies of Osteen’s books). In the Night of Hope chat room, people waiting for Osteen to take the stage banter about where they’re from and where they’re watching the stream: Israel, Canada, Hawaii, North Carolina. Shortly after 7 p.m., Osteen’s big, pearly grin flashes onto the screen.

Prayer requests begin to flow into the chat room. Elsewhere on the Internet, people tend to present themselves in the best light. Here, people bare all, sharing stories about depression, abuse, seizures, strokes, infertility and lost children.

“Hey everyone I need prayer,” writes a woman, who identifies herself in the chat as “Lisa Elliott.” “I am dealing with Brain Cancer and dealing with abuse in my life and asking for some prayers in this I feel like I can’t keep going with the way my life is going.”

Vo writes back to Elliott assuring her Osteen ministries “would love to stand with you in prayer.”

She advises her to share her prayer request online, or by phoning into a 1-800 line, where volunteer prayer partners will join callers in prayer and offer them scripture.

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Then, 30 minutes later: 8:05 p.m. Comment From Lisa Elliott: siting [sic] here in tears 8:14 p.m. Comment From Lisa Elliott: I hatmy [sic] life my abusive boyfriend is drunk sleeping if he wakes up I get beat “Lisa, We are standing with you during this time,” types one of the moderators, called “Matt-ADMIN.” He directs Elliott to a prayer site and to the erroneous email address, prayer@joelosteen.com.

“Our prayer team would love to pray with you.”

Another woman in the chat room, someone not part of the Osteen team, tells Elliott: “my prayers are with you, I was in your situation nine yrs ago, there is a way to get help, call your local womens’ help center as I did.”

“Can I have the number so I can call them now,” Elliott asks. Then, “crying over this I have never had something like this.”

“Enjoy the experience, Lisa!” a moderator answers cheerily.

Another half hour passes.

9:00 p.m. Comment From Lisa Elliott: please pray for me toight [sic] that nothig happens 9:00 p.m. Comment From Kelly-ADMIN: Lisa, we are standing with you in prayer and faith.

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9:03 p.m. Comment From Lisa Elliott: I know he will beat me tonight Another moderator is congratulating Elliott. Apparently, she has just won a free copy of Osteen’s newest book.

The MCP team is having trouble keeping up. The room grows quiet, save for the frantic tap of fingers clicking on keys. An unpublished queue of comments speaks to the agitation of people waiting for answers: “CAN YOU SEE ME???” one person has typed. A moderator sends a private message to a particularly frustrated user, assuring him they’re doing their best.

As tens of thousands of people absorb the live stream, the video is stalling, spurring even more gripes in the chat room and on Osteen’s Facebook wall.

“You’ve got 30 complaints on your Facebook page that the servers are down,” the wife of one of Osteen’s photographers informs Vo. Vo clenches her jaw. The audience is diminishing, with the number of concurrent online viewers down to 34,000 from over 41,000 earlier in the night. People have spent an average of 48 minutes watching the Night of Hope, but the video’s hiccups seem to be costing Osteen his viewers. Boyd tells Vo

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to post a link to the live stream on Facebook. Now. “It’s frozen, my thing is frozen,” Vo answers through gritted teeth.

“It’s literally frozen.”

In Rapid City, S.D., Janice Heigh, 53, logs on to the chat room to seek help. She and her husband have been overwhelmed by the work of caring for their three grandchildren. She feels distance and isolation seeping into her marriage.

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She also feels removed from a community of people grappling with similar troubles. Though she attends weekly services and teaches Sunday school at a local Rapid City church, Heigh has struggled to find a Bible studies group for people in her predicament. There are meetings for parents with young children — populated by people decades her junior — and meetings for people in her age group, who generally have other worries. She has had trouble arranging her schedule around that of her local church.

But on the Web, church services

Osteen and his wife, Victoria, take the stage at Marlins Park in April 2013.

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are always happening, and support groups are to be found at every hour of the day. Heigh has tapped into them via Facebook, Prayer.com, and at sites like the one for Osteen’s Night of Hope. In this way, she has found other grandparents tending to their own grandchildren. She has taken comfort in seeing that other people’s lives are imperfect, too.

Unlike in person, these online exchanges spare Heigh from feeling like she’s a burden: The people she chats with online are there because they want to be. She takes refuge in the anonymity of this interaction.

“At midnight, I can go to the computer, pull it up and there’s someone on there somewhere who can give you insights, a kind word,” she says. “They’re thinking about you, praying about it and it’s like, ‘I’m OK. I’m all right. It broadened my horizons spiritually because I was able to feel connected, even though I knew there was no way I could make it to this or that.”

On this night, in the chat room at the Night of Hope, she begins typing.

“I will be married 34 years tomorrow,” she writes. “My husband and I have had many years of trials and triumphs. We are now raising our daughters 2 girls. I feel that my

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husband and I have grown far apart since we took on the responsibility of these GOD given children.”

“Please pray that we can come together after all these years.”

Heigh continues. “We have had the girls for 7 years so it is not a new situation but seems I am a single parent.”

Vo answers a minute later.

“Janice, thank you for sharing your story and your heart with us,” she types back. “We are standing with you in prayer and faith. May God’s goodness and mercy shine upon you.”

From Miami to South Dakota, this message makes its way, arriving with the affirmation intended.

“It makes you feel validated,” Heigh explains later. “The Internet, to me, it has brought a whole situation to God.” Bianca Bosker is the executive tech editor at The Huffington Post, where she helped launch the site’s tech section.

Osteen addresses those who say his ministry doesn’t rely enough upon real faith. Tap here for the full interview on HuffPost Live.

T H E

HOW AMERICA’S

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THE HUNGER GAMES AT GUANTANAMO

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GUANTANAMO BAY NAVAL BASE, CUBA —

FOR WEEKS, SAID ARMY COL. JOHN V. BOGDAN, the man in charge of Guantanamo’s detention facilities, he had tried to bring the crisis to a peaceful resolution. Since early February, a little more than six months after he took over command here, detainees had been protesting their treatment. Those in the communal Camp Six had covered video cameras with empty cereal boxes and other items, preventing U.S. officials from monitoring their movements. ¶ More than 100 detainees were participating in a hunger strike, the detainees’ lawyers had been telling the press and military officials. The military, however, downplayed the severity of the protest, placing the number of hunger strikers, initially, at just a half-dozen. One spokesman told CBS News in mid-March that the idea of a mass hunger strike at the prison was an “utter fabrication,” and said prisoners were “in fact eating handfuls of trail mix, nuts, and other food.” Guards pointed to scraps of pita bread and peanut butter in trash bags as evidence that the hunger strike wasn’t real.

PHOTOGRAPHS BY RYAN J. REILLY

Razor wire lines the fences at Guantanamo Bay Naval Base, where more than 100 detainees are staging a hunger strike.

THE HUNGER GAMES AT GUANTANAMO

“We had no urgent need to get in there,” Bogdan told reporters in April. “We had no evidence of any threat or harm or risk to the detainees. It was a little bit of a waiting game.”

As the protest dragged on, however, U.S. officials feared they were losing control. The head of Camp Six acknowledged in late March that the pantries inside the communal blocks were getting low on food, which was “beginning to be a problem.” Medical personnel gradually raised the official number of recognized hunger strikers — up to 43 by mid-April.

Negotiations had gotten nowhere. The detainees wanted changes to the way the guards handled their copies of the Quran, but Bogdan would not consider their demands until the cameras were uncovered. “I don’t reinforce bad behavior,” he said. “The deal was uncover the cameras, comply with rules, follow the rules, and then we would address anything that might be legitimate.”

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Bogdan decided he had had enough.

At 5:10 a.m. on April 13, a contingent of guards in riot gear stormed Camp Six and forced the detainees into their individual cells.

The guards had trained for the mission for weeks. They fired rubber pellets at the detainees. Two guards wearing helmets were knocked in the head — one with a squeegee handle, the other with a heavy metal bar from exercise equipment — but resistance from the detainees, who were spread out in several of Camp Six’s cellblocks, wasn’t widespread. The raid was over in a matter of minutes, leaving five detainees injured.

“We were trying to be patient and work with them and give them the opportunity to comply,” Bogdan told reporters from The Huffington Post and three other news organizations shortly after the raid. “We hit the point where I thought we were accepting too much risk, and I felt it was time to take action.”

The raid gave U.S. officials con-

“ I CAN’T FIND THE WORDS TO DESCRIBE THE SUFFERING I AM GOING THROUGH.”

JOHN MOORE/GETTY IMAGES

THE HUNGER GAMES AT GUANTANAMO

trol of the facility again. But they soon discovered that, out of sight behind the disabled camera lenses, the detainees’ lawyers had been right — the situation was far worse than they had acknowledged. The military’s medical personnel later acknowledged that 100 detainees have been participating in the hunger strike since before the raid. In one cell, officials found a detainee near death from hunger and thirst.

Thirty-nine detainees are currently being force-fed. At least twice a day, guards in riot gear tie each detainee to a chair or bed, and medical personnel force a tube up his nose and down his throat, and

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pump a can of Ensure or other dietary supplement into his stomach.

There are so many detainees being force-fed that Guantanamo’s medical personnel were at one point working around the clock to keep up with the demand, and approximately 40 additional medical personnel were sent in Guantanamo to help deal with the growing crisis.

“There will be more than one death,” predicted the military’s Muslim adviser, who would identify himself only by his first name, Zak. The night after the raid, a detainee in Camp Six tried to commit suicide, choking himself with his own shirt. The night before, a Camp Five detainee tried to do the same.

“I can’t find the words to describe the suffering I am going

Guards forcefeed some detainees by pumping dietary supplements like Ensure into their stomachs through tubes inserted down their throats.

A “LINGERING PROBLEM THAT IS NOT GOING TO GET BETTER, IT’S GOING TO GET WORSE. IT’S GOING TO FESTER.” through,” Mohammed al-Zarnouqi, a citizen of Yemen who said he had been on hunger strike since Jan. 19, wrote in a March 25 letter to his legal team.

“You can only imagine how a hunger striker with his weak body is treated in a harsh way,” he wrote.

He said that when he was taken to the medical clinic in March, guards threw him to the concrete floor, causing him to hit his head. “Six to seven soldiers press my back, bend my legs in the knee area and tie my hands with shackles,” he wrote.

“Really, now it is just pain everywhere. I don’t want to die in Guantánamo,” Younous Chekkouri, a detainee from Morocco, told his lawyer in early April. He said he had lost 30 pounds.

According to the detainees, the hunger strike began as a protest against the way military personnel were handling prisoner Qurans. The military disputes the allegations.

Regardless of why the hunger strike started, however, there’s general consensus about why it continues.

“The problem is the indefinite detention,” said Carlos Warner, a federal public defender representing several Guantanamo detainees.

Eleven years after the first prisoners arrived at Guantanamo, 166 remain, with no end in sight.

More than half — 86 — have been cleared for transfer to other countries, but the process has been snarled by a mix of congressionally imposed restrictions and executive branch inaction.

Even if President Barack Obama did have the power to close Guantanamo unilaterally, doing so would not necessarily mean that the detainees would be set free in other countries. William Lietzau, the top detainee policy official at the Pentagon, told The New York Times recently that he doesn’t believe the number of detainees being held without charges would “change radically,” even if legislative restrictions were removed.

But the lack of progress, especially given Obama’s promise to close Guantanamo, has worn on the detainees. They were reportedly particularly upset after Obama failed to mention Guan-

THE HUNGER GAMES AT GUANTANAMO

tanamo during his State of the Union address in February. The mass hunger strike began a few weeks later — the last resort of desperate men seeking attention.

“I just hope that because of the pain we are suffering, the eyes of the world will once again look to Guantánamo before it is too late,” one prisoner, Samir Naji al Hasan Moqbel, wrote in The New York Times in April, detailing his

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experience of being force-fed.

After 11 years, he continues to be held at Guantanamo because the Obama administration refuses to send detainees home to Yemen while the country remains a hotbed of terrorism.

Accounts like his did turn public attention toward Guantanamo, at least briefly. A day after al Hasan Moqbel’s op-ed was published, the Boston Marathon bombings shocked the nation and pushed Guantanamo off the front pages — the same week the military granted

Col. John Bogdan speaks to reporters in April.

Weapons confiscated from detainees during a raid lay on the table.

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“ WE HAVE THE KEYS AT THE END OF THE DAY, THEY ARE ON THE OTHER SIDE OF THE CELL.”

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“ I’VE NEVER BEEN IN A CIVILIAN PRISON THAT LOOKED ANYTHING LIKE THE COMMUNAL HERE.” reporters access to the prison facilities for the first time in weeks.

Now, however, with the crisis in Boston eased, attention is slowly shifting back to the detainees.

Obama renewed his commitment to close Guantanamo during a press conference at the White House at the end of April.

“I don’t want these individuals to die,” Obama said of the hunger strikers. “Obviously the Pentagon

is trying to manage the situation as best as they can. But I think all of us should reflect on why exactly are we doing this?”

During a May 23 speech on national security, Obama once again called on Congress to lift restrictions on detainee transfers from Guantanamo and announced he was appointing an official whose sole responsibility would be to facilitate the transfer of detainees to

THE HUNGER GAMES AT GUANTANAMO

third countries. The administration will soon reopen transfers to Yemen, which it had previously blocked due to concerns about the security situation in the country.

But Guantanamo, Obama acknowledged earlier this year, is a “lingering problem that is not going to get better, it’s going to get worse.” Ahead of Obama’s national security speech, a senior administration official acknowledged that closing Guantanamo was the “most difficult piece of the puzzle.”

Such unease about its continued existence is at odds with the development of Guantanamo from a temporary detention facility into a more robust prison camp. The military has spent millions of dollars in recent years on a state-of-the-art courthouse, housing for lawyers, guards and other personnel, and improved facilities for the detainees. A new chapel is under construction, and the sports center is being refurbished. The Pentagon is requesting nearly $200 million for upgrades at Guantanamo, including replacing the secretive Camp Seven that houses high-value detainees.

As the military tells it, prisoners in Guantanamo’s Camp Six had it about as good as prisoners being held indefinitely without charges

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ONE DETAINEE AT GUANTANAMO HAS BEEN FORCEFED DAILY SINCE 2005. possibly could. Their communal pods had big-screen televisions, microwaves, refrigerators and 22-hour access to a large outdoor recreation yard. That soccer field, about half the size of a U.S. football field, was accessible to detainees via a secured walkway that minimized contact, and conflict, with guards.

Detainees could move freely within their communal blocks for most of the day and could eat, pray, and even play video games together.

FIFA soccer on PlayStation 3 was a hit, while Angry Birds “was kind of popular at the beginning, but it just stopped,” a library tech named Milton, who agreed to be identified only by his first name, told reporters. DVDs of Everybody Loves Raymond were also a hit, and Milton was making his way through Friends to decide whether it was

THE HUNGER GAMES AT GUANTÁNAMO

appropriate, but was concerned that Jennifer Aniston may be too scantily clad.

“We were ready to give them their own DVD player just before they started covering cameras,” said Zak, the Muslim adviser. “We bought that shipment six months ago, nine months ago. We worked on it to get the money.”

Bogdan, who took charge of Guantanamo’s detention facilities in June 2012, decided to crack down on some of the freedoms and

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comforts of the communal cellblock, however. Detainees have told their lawyers that Bogdan directed guards to confiscate personal items, crank up the air conditioning to make the cells uncomfortably cold, and search Qurans for contraband.

“I will bring this camp to how it was in the old times. I’ve got kids at home and I know how to deal with kids,” Bogdan reportedly said, according to a detainee.

Bogdan has defended his actions, saying that guards had allowed some of the rules to slip in previous years and that he was simply enforcing official procedures.

Guards use restraining chairs to hold detainees in place while they are forcefed dietary supplements.

AP PHOTO/BEN FOX

THE HUNGER GAMES AT GUANTANAMO

“We have a constantly rotating guard force. So when you have a guard force that’s been in for a while and then a new one comes on, the newer guard force is going to be a little more, for the lack of a better word, by the book,” Bogdan said. Prison officials found an iPod in Camp Six after the raid that they

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believe a guard snuck in, and other electronic contraband has been found in the past.

Capt. John, an Army reservist who had worked in Louisiana prisons and detention facilities when not on active duty and declined to provide his last name, said he was shocked by the conditions when he took charge of Camp Six in January.

“I’ve never been in a civilian prison that looked anything like the

In April, guards conducted a raid to confiscate weapons from prisoners, including broomsticks, shanks and water bottles filled with gravel.

THE HUNGER GAMES AT GUANTANAMO

communal here,” John said, standing inside a communal block he said had been packed with books, cases of bottled water, trash and “all sorts of items” the detainees had hoarded until the raid. “In a civilian facility, you’ll have some level of control.

And if they live in communal, it really is compliant, they lock down when you tell them to lock down.

They move when you tell them to move. But not necessarily here.”

Detainees would use sticks to poke at guards observing them from a “sally port,” the cage that links each block to the rest of the prison, he said. While detainees have been

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trying to protest being held indefinitely without charges, the military is trying to keep guards focused on the idea that the detainees are terrorists who need to be locked up.

Some of the military personnel now at Guantanamo are as young as 18, and were just children when the Sept. 11 attacks took place. To bring them up to speed, and to give those deployed to Guantanamo a better sense of why they’re there, FBI counterterrorism officials hold periodic unclassified briefings open to members of the military. A recent April briefing, which helped explain the role allegedly played by five detainees on trial in connection with the Sept. 11 attacks, featured recordings of 911 calls from

Military officials show journalists the room where some detainees were being force fed during the ongoing hunger strike at the facility.

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victims in the World Trade Center, which attendees said left many participants in tears.

Additionally, guards at Guantanamo — like all other members of the military — are barred from doing their own research on WikiLeaks, and in theory any news websites that present information from WikiLeaks. Such research may tell them more about the detainees.

The consequence of accepting the government’s side of the story and excluding everything else is a strict us vs. them mentality.

“Many of the guards are not informed about the details of the sit-

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uation at Guantanamo or the legal process of it, that there are some people who are cleared for release.

They’re kept away from all that,” said Omar Deghayes, a former detainee who was released in 2007 after a five-year incarceration. “They tell them these are the worst of the worst. All they know is ‘Oh, these people are connected to Sept. 11.’

That’s the mindframe.”

“We have the keys at the end of the day, they are on the other side of the cell,” states a sign hanging in the Camp Six observation room, where guards monitor detainees via cameras.

Zak, the Muslim adviser, said the hunger strike began when a small group of detainees he described as

A cell block sits empty in Guantanamo Bay’s Camp Five.

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troublemakers convinced the others to join the protest, because living relatively comfortably “is not going to remind the world” about Guantanamo Bay. “We never stopped improving the living conditions. We got to the point where detainees are living comfortably, nobody is shooting at us, we eat meat, we eat chicken, and they were telling their families that,” Zak said.

“The 10 percent of the detainees got up and said, ‘Come on, guys, you’ve been asleep since 2008.’

Everybody was bragging about how good life was and everything, people in the outside world say, ‘How can I talk about your case, how can I move your case if you’re just living comfortably?’” Zak said.

The hunger strike hasn’t halted the production of those meals the detainees were allegedly writing home about. In an aging kitchen without air conditioning overlooking the Caribbean Sea, four military contractors in hairnets continue to spoon meals — spiced beef, tomatoes and rice on the day reporters

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visited, one of six meals on the rotating menu — into white styrofoam containers. Each prisoner’s inmate number, along with any dietary restrictions, is written on each container in black marker. Before the raid, staffers prepared much of the food buffet-style. But now that detainees have been restricted to their cells, it’s served almost entirely as individual portions, which also helps medical personnel monitor the status of the hunger strikers.

Most of the meals are stacked into insulated containers and driven a quarter-mile east to Camp Five and Camp Six, where, hours later, they’ll be tossed into the garbage, uneaten.

“Nothing changed at our end,” said Sam Scott, who’s been working food prep since 2003, of the daily meal routine. “It bothers me,” she said of the hunger strike, “but we cannot do nothing about it.”

A different kind of meal is now prepared for the hunger-striking detainees who are in the worst shape. At least twice a day, military personnel pump a can of

“ THERE WILL BE MORE THAN ONE DEATH.”

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liquid nutritional supplement — Ensure, Pulmocare, Glucerna or TwoCal HN — into the stomachs of those being force-fed. Camp Six’s medical personnel used to give the detainees their choice of Ensure — butter pecan, vanilla, chocolate or strawberry. Now, those being force-fed are not allowed to select the flavor they’ll have hosed into their stomachs.

“Detainees have the right to peacefully protest,” said Guantanamo spokesman Lt. Col. Samuel House. But, he said, “We will not allow a detainee to starve them-

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selves to death, and we will continue to treat each person humanely.”

Fayiz al Kandari, one of the detainees being force-feed, complained through his lawyer, Carlos Warner, that medical officials were using a feeding tube that was too large, and that he was not able to breathe. He said his request for the doctors to use a smaller tube was denied.

Roughly two-thirds of those being force-fed “accept their nutritional supplement voluntarily,” according to House, meaning the emaciated men don’t actively fight the inevitable. Even those detainees who cooperate are strapped down into a chair with built-in restraints for the arms, legs and torso. Those

A guard monitors prison cell activity through surveillance cameras in Camp Six.

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who refuse to go to the medical facility are strapped to their beds and force-fed inside their cells.

“It’s not a violent resistance,” one medical staffer in Camp Six said the day reporters visited. Nevertheless, medical personnel are accompanied at all times by guards in riot gear.

Deghayes, the former Guantanamo detainee who was on a hunger strike for a few weeks during his time at the prison, described the effects of slow starvation. “It’s more difficult than if you were not a pris-

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oner, because you’re in an isolated cell and all you have is nothing but walls,” he told HuffPost. “You become very hungry, you become very sick... You lose your senses, you can’t think properly, you have pain in your head and everywhere of course, you think about food. It’s difficult. It comes to a point where you can’t stand anymore.”

While there are potential health risks to force-feeding ­— collapsed lungs, infections, pneumonia — the military in theory may continue

“ THE PROBLEM IS THE INDEFINITE DETENTION.”

The sun rises outside Guantanamo Bay Naval Base in Cuba.

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the practice for years. One detainee at Guantanamo has been force-fed daily since 2005.

But force-feeding — while in line with the practices of civilian penitentiaries controlled by the federal Bureau of Prisons — puts the U.S. government at odds with much of the medical and international community. Force-feeding, the American Medical Association wrote in a letter to Secretary of Defense Chuck Hagel in late April, “violates core ethical values of the medical profession” because every “competent patient has the right to refuse medical intervention, including life-sustaining interventions.” The International Committee of the Red Cross also disagrees with force-feedings.

Neither side seems to have an easy solution for ending the hunger strike. Military officials at Guantanamo nearly universally dismiss the complaints of detainees. “They’ll protest a variety of things, from what time the rec yard needs to be sanitized... to how many calories was in the yogurt they got that day,” said Capt. John, the officer in charge of Camp Six. “They were asking to be released from Gitmo,” said Bogdan.

“I can’t do that.”

Bogdan said he still wants to shift

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Camp Six back to communal living.

It will be a slow process.

“Communal’s not gone,” Bogdan said. “It’ll be a while before we’re back in a communal environment again, because I see this as a vetting, screening process to determine exactly who we think can go into a communal environment, and follow the rules and be compliant.

And that’s not a short process.”

But Carlos Warner warned that no amount of limited freedoms — books, DVDs, video games and outdoor soccer — would satisfy men whose true desire is a resolution of their indefinite detention.

“If you think keeping them in those conditions and proceeding in the way that you are is going to cause the strike to end, you’re wrong,” Warner said. “You’re driving their resolve deeper.”

Ryan J. Reilly is The Huffington Post’s justice reporter based in Washington, D.C.

HuffPost reporter Ryan J. Reilly discusses the problem of young guards at Guantanamo.

Tap here for the full interview on HuffPost Live.

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50 Cent, Where Are You Now?

MARIANNA MASSEY/WIREIMAGE/GETTY IMAGES

BY KIA MAKARECHI

Exit

S HE ADDS MORE business ventures and philanthropic efforts to his resume, 50 Cent has found himself in a curious spot.

Battling not only album delays (see: the upcoming Street King Immortal), but also a rapidly shifting hip-hop landscape, the man who exploded onto the scene 10 years ago with the inescapable night-out anthem “In Da Club” is once again hungry, and acutely aware that living legend-status doesn’t necessarily come with influence or relevance.

MAJA HITIJ/DAPD/AP PHOTO

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Consider this: When 50 Cent dropped “Get Rich or Die Tryin,’” it was still vaguely acceptable for his mentor Eminem to refer to homosexuals using gay slurs, rap was becoming the dominant music of American party and radio culture, and Snoop Lion was still a Dogg.

So, yes, time files. I asked 50 to lay aside all album delays, business stresses and take a look at his own legacy. If he never released another song, would he be pleased with his legacy? “I’m comfortable,” he says. “I’ve made some of the right steps. Of course I’ve made mistakes, and some of them aren’t visible because of momen-

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50 Cent performs at the 2012 IFA Consumer Electronics Fair in Berlin, where he also showcased products from his audio company, SMS Audio.

Exit tum, but I know I made them.”

That’s about all he has to say on the music. “At this point, I feel an extreme interest in philanthropy,” he continues unprovoked. “And not just in hip-hop or music, but my peers. Young entrepreneurs, you know? I want to promote conscious capitalism. According to World Bank numbers, 10 percent of business could alleviate all extreme poverty. If we adapt models where we have things like my Street King project, which provides a meal for every drink sold, or SMS audio which, provides meals through FeedingAmerica... ” There’s clearly a lot on the man born Curtis Jackson’s mind, but the message to which he constantly returns is a simple one: “Things could be worse.”

“It has been a consistent theme in hip-hop culture that if it ain’t about money, it ain’t about shit,” he says. “That has been so present because a lot of the artists come from low-income situations, and the visible restraint is financial.

So it bleeds into the music. I have problems in front of me. My grandmother is in the hospital right now, and I love her dearly. But it could be worse. It could be a lot worse. To adapt that type of thinking, where

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When 50 Cent dropped ‘Get Rich or Die Tryin,’ it was still vaguely acceptable for his mentor Eminem to refer to homosexuals using gay slurs … and Snoop Lion was still a Dogg.” you can sustain a positive mood, long-term, would be the goal.”

I let him continue. “The only thing we have in life that’s really precious is moments. Right now, we’re sharing. We’re sharing this moment, this time. Because you can’t get it back. I could be somewhere else, you could be somewhere else. So if you can’t figure out how to make something special out of it, or how to enjoy it, then you lost.”

Making something of a moment is a little harder in today’s music climate, if only because moments are at once shorter and influenced by a greater number of forces.

Ten years ago, Twitter, Instagram, search engine optimization and hashtags weren’t a part of a performer’s calculus — especially a “gangster rapper,” which is what 50 started out as before becoming a bonafide pop star. Jay-Z — with his lyrics about Windows 7 and “planking” — is an example of a

STEPHEN LOVEKIN/GETTY IMAGES FOR MOTOROLA

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rapper who is exceedingly talented at making the most of today’s hashtag world, but not everyone does it so gracefully. While he abstains from criticizing the current generation of rappers wholesale, 50 agrees that part of the problem is that today’s performers are so eager to find and chase the latest trend.

“I think it was a big problem 10 years ago too, but we didn’t have the social media to see it,” he says.

“When you have artists that don’t have a Plan B, they have to emulate what’s working. If you have no choice and what you’re doing has to work, you go, ‘What’s working right now?’ And you try to make a song

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that sounds like what’s playing on the radio, even if it’s not what you would do as an artist. And you can do it, but not as good as the guy who is in his pocket when he’s doing it.” (50 says he has no favorite rappers, only favorite “moments,” but he thinks Drake is a guy who seems to always “be in his pocket,” which is “relationshipbased content.”)

Ten years ago, 50 was “what’s playing on the radio,” and a “bottle full of bub” was all mainstream partiers used to underwrite their club nights. While that single — and 50’s ensuing string of hits (“Magic Stick,” “Disco Inferno,” “Just a Lil Bit,” “Piggy Bank,” “21 Questions,” “So Seductive,” “Candy Shop”) set the pace for radio-

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50 Cent performs during a Motorola launch party in New York City in October 2011.

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JOHNNY NUNEZ/WIREIMAGE/GETTY IMAGES

Exit friendly hip-hop for a few years, the explosion of electronic dance music and the resurgence of street rap from the likes of Chief Keef have shifted pop-rap from a weed and drink game to an MDMA one.

50 knows it. On a remix of Keef’s “Hate Being Sober” (Keef and 50 are both signed to Interscope), 50 raps that his female companion is “like a hot tamale when she pops a molly” (“molly” is a common term for MDMA). I ask him how he strikes the balance between keeping his music fresh for new listeners without straying from his own “pocket,” and what he would say to those who object to his stab at molly rap. “When you’re writing a record, I’m writing, and the girl that I’m with is actually popping a molly,” he says. “And between me and you, she was. You see what I’m saying? It’s within the experience.”

“When I write those things, about the lifestyle, I’m going to inject things that are around that apply to me,” he continues. “I’m not even aware of it at the actual point, it becomes clear to me afterwards.

And it’s a joke to me — ‘popped a molly I’m sweating, woo!’ It was something that you go, ‘Oh, OK.’ It was just a good line.”

Before we hang up, I ask if there’s

a particular song on the forthcoming Street King Immortal that’s his favorite. “I haven’t put it out yet,” 50 sighs, citing structural changes at Interscope (“we have a new president of music and he brought over a new president of what would be urban, or black music”), the passing of legendary hip-hop manager Chris Lighty and other business woes as the reason for the many delays of the album, which still doesn’t have a final release date.

“I didn’t want to release my stuff and be stuck in the middle of that while the record was out and have that damage my brand,” he says, obviously frustrated. “I don’t want to let summer pass though, fuck! I’m ready — I just have to get everything else ... in the pocket.”

50 Cent collaborated with Chief Keef (above) and Wiz Khalifa on “Hate Being Sober” in 2012.

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One Nation Under Stress IF YOU NEED to de-stress, you could add some cardio, try meditation — or move to Hawaii.

No surprise, that’s the least stressful place in the U.S. to live, according to a Gallup-Healthways survey on daily stress levels released in April. Researchers asked 350,000 Americans throughout 2012 if they were stressed “yesterday” on different days last year. The map below shows the resulting stress levels by state, as well as the nation’s 15 most stressful cities, ranked by a 2011 Forbes study that analyzed data on wellbeing

measures such as unemployment, cost of living, population density, traffic, air quality and more.

California is home to five of these cities, but sunny weather and some of the highest numbers of per-capita yoga studios may help keep city traffic and housing costs from dragging the state down.

As for the nation, more then 40 percent of Americans reported feeling stressed the day before. Some states are influenced, of course, by stressful metropolitain areas within their borders. — Katy Hall

PERCENT OF AMERICANS WHO FELT STRESSED ‘YESTERDAY’ 37.9 AND BELOW

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A weekly feature that highlights ways to handle the pressures around us.

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Don’t Be Scared, It’s Just a Bag of Dried Beans

BY REBECCA ORCHANT

RIED BEANS and I are having a bit of a kitchen love affair right now. But it hasn’t always been this way. For most of my cooking life up to this point, I’ve been firmly, wholeheartedly terrified of them. Three things helped turn this culture of avoidance into an all-out season of appreciation: 1) my husband’s general willingness to, through

FOTOGRAFIABASICA/ GETTY IMAGES

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EAT THIS

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EAT THIS

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HOW TO COOK DRIED BEANS: 1. T he quick-soak method is your friend. As Adler puts it: “If you didn’t put two cups of beans in a pot of cold water last night, get on the bandwagon today by putting them in a pot, covering them with five inches of water, bringing it to a boil, turning off the heat, and leaving them sitting in hot water, covered, for an hour. Then drain them and cover them with new water.” (The draining is essential, as that water contains all the parts of beans that make them the musical fruit.)

SHUTTERSTOCK / VINICIUS TUPINAMBA (POT OF BEANS); SHUTTERSTOCK/SERHIY SHULLYE (OLIVE OIL)

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trial and error, actually make a few pots of really excellent dried beans, 2) the discovery of Rancho Gordo beans (which cook faster and taste better than any other bean I’ve ever tangoed with) and 3) Tamar Adler. More specifically, an excerpt from Tamar Adler’s An Everlasting Meal, tucked away inside Best Food Writing 2012, in which she waxes particularly poetic about how nourishing and satisfying a pot of beans can be.

The biggest lie that every disciple of dried beans has ever told you is that you have to soak them overnight. You can soak them overnight. You should, if you have the foresight. Let me confess something to you: I have never had the foresight to soak dried beans overnight.

The major argument for using dried beans rather than canned is that you get to dictate what these beans taste like. Canned beans are great in a pinch, and

2. O kay, so you’ve covered your beans in new water — now what?

This part is a bit like making stock. Your beans are going to taste like whatever you flavor this next batch of water with.

There should be a bit of salt (you can always adjust later, so use a light hand), pepper, any herbs you have on hand, a chunk of carrot, celery, fennel, onion, a Parmesan rind. Most importantly, as Adler puts it, there needs to be an “immoderate, Tuscan amount of olive oil,” which I’ve taken to mean as much as I think is enough, and then a bit more.

FROM TOP: ZUMA PRESS, INC. /ALAMY; GETTY IMAGES/DORLING KINDERSLEY

Dried beans, cooked in this way taste like vegetables. Like they grew out of dirt.

And then drank a bunch of olive oil and herbs and swelled up like balloons full of flavor.”

I still use them when time is a concern or they are not the star of the dish, but they all just taste like canned beans. Dried beans, cooked in this way taste like vegetables. Like they grew out of dirt.

And then drank a bunch of olive oil and herbs and swelled up like balloons full of flavor. The older your beans are, the longer they’ll take, so if you pull a giant bag off the supermarket shelf, you’ll be able to make them delicious, but it will just take a little more time.

These are not the kinds of beans you’ll want to hide in any old soup or salad. These are the kinds of beans you’ll want to eat out of a bowl, topped maybe with some avocado and feta, with another immoderately Tuscan glug of olive oil over the top.

You’ll eat these for days. And you’ll feel pretty proud that you made what started out as colorful little rocks taste so delicious and feel so healthy. Not to mention you’ve saved yourself a boatload of money on beans. Deep breaths, you did it.

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3. You’ll want to bring all of these ingredients to a boil, and then immediately bring your pot down to a slow simmer, uncovered the whole time. How long should you cook these?

One more bit of advice from Adler: when five beans eaten straight from the pot are tender and full of flavor. If you’re using Rancho Gordo beans, it will take less time than you think.

Plan for an hour or two.

And a note on liquid: The goal is not to cook beans until the liquid is gone, like rice. If you do that, you will cook these into wallpaper paste. The liquid your beans cook in is delicious.

If the dish you’re using your beans in doesn’t require a bit of extra liquid/stock, save this bean broth for other uses. Like, um, drinking it from a mug because it’s so good.

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RAYMOND BOYD/MICHAEL OCHS ARCHIVES/GETTY IMAGES (CHICAGO SUN TIMES); YAMADA TARO/ GETTY IMAGES (BOTTLE); DANIEL ACKER/BLOOMBERG VIA GETTY IMAGES (WALMART); AP PHOTO/ROGELIO V. SOLIS (GOOGLE TRANSLATE); EMILE WAMSTEKER/BLOOMBERG VIA GETTY IMAGES (STARBUCKS)

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Chicago Sun-Times Lays Off Entire Photography Staff

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New Trend: Smoking Your Alcohol

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WALMART’S WAGES ARE SO LOW, MANY WORKERS RELY ON FOOD STAMPS

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Google Translate’s Algorithm Leads to Unintentional Sexism

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Starbucks Used Toilet Water to Brew Coffee in Hong Kong

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Nude Snapchats Are Being Screenshot and Secretly Posted

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All-Male Fox Panel Freaks Out About Female Breadwinners

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‘GAY CURE’ APP CLAIMS TO HELP USERS FIND ‘FREEDOM FROM THE BONDAGE OF HOMOSEXUALITY’

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Unemployment Kills LessEducated White Women

Tennessee Sex Education Presentations Misinform Students

Editor-in-Chief:

Arianna Huffington Editor: John Montorio Managing Editor: Gazelle Emami Senior Editor: Adam J. Rose Editor-at-Large: Katy Hall Senior Politics Editor: Sasha Belenky Senior Food Editor: Kristen Aiken Senior Voices Editor: Stuart Whatley Pointers Editor: Marla Friedman Quoted Editor: Gina Ryder Viral Editor: Dean Praetorius Editorial Assistant: Jenny Macksamie Editorial Intern: AJ Barbosa Creative Director: Josh Klenert Design Director: Andrea Nasca Photography Director: Anna Dickson Associate Photo Editor: Wendy George Senior Designer: Martin Gee Designer: Gloria Pantell Infographics Art Director: Troy Dunham Production Director: Peter Niceberg AOL MagCore Head of UX and Design: Jeremy LaCroix Product Manager: Gabriel Giordani Architect: Scott Tury Developers: Mike Levine, Sudheer Agrawal QA: Joyce Wang, Amy Golliver Sales: Mandar Shinde AOL, Inc. Chairman & CEO:

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