Table of Contents: August 9, 2010 IN THIS ISSUE EDITION: U.S. Vol. 176 No. 6 COVER Afghan Women And the Return of The Taliban (Cover) As the U.S. searches for a way out of Afghanistan, some policymakers suggest negotiating with the Taliban. But that would spell disaster for half the country's population: Afghan women Living Under the Taliban Threat Photographer Jodi Bieber meets the extraordinary women of a war-torn nation
ESSAY A Double Dip Recession? Who Cares? (Commentary / The Curious Capitalist) There won't be a second recession for a lot of people — because their first one hasn't ended Beyond the Leaks: Our Pakistan Problem (Commentary / In the Arena) Forget the secret documents and even Afghanistan. What counts is how we deal with Pakistan Private Spies: Rubicon Make 24 Look Sunny (Tuned In) Conspiracy thriller Rubicon replaces Jack Bauer's heroics with a dark story of post-9/11 intelligence for hire Aw, Nuts! (Commentary) I had an airtight, zero-tolerance stance on nut allergies. Then my son developed them
NATION The Battle for Ohio (The Well / Nation) Two tight races in the Buckeye State reveal a 2010 Democratic survival strategy: blame Bush and bash Wall Street. And with Barack Obama's political fate also at stake, the White House is watching closely Battleground Ohio Photos: Leading up to November elections, Democrats in Ohio and beyond hope voters are angrier at Republicans than at them The Spill's Psychic Toll (The Well / Environment) For all the environmental and economic harm caused by the disaster in the Gulf, the most lasting--and least visible--damage could be inflicted on the mental health of its victims Crabbing in the Gulf after the BP Oil Disaster Photos: A glimpse into the daily life of the Landrys of St. Bernard Parish, who navigate through daily closures and openings to find crab grounds that haven't been impacted by the spill Big Spill, Little Damage? (The Well / Viewpoint) So far, the predictions of ecological catastrophe on the Gulf Coast seem overblown Funny or Die: How the Web Is Changing Comedy (The Well / Comedy) Funny or Die is helping reinvent comedy for the Web — and everyone from Oscar winners to teen stars is
clamoring to jump on board Behind the Scenes at Funny or Die Photos: Everyone from Oscar winners to teen stars is clamoring to work with the hottest comedy site on the web
WORLD WikiLeaks's Julian Assange: The Wizard From Oz Who's the man behind WikiLeaks, the website that's caused so much trouble? An itinerant Australian hacker
ARTS & ENTERTAINMENT Rock Steady (Music) Mainstream pop may be struggling, but indie marches on--with Pitchfork Media leading the way The Pitchfork Music Festival Photos: Mainstream pop may be struggling, but indie rock marches on, and Pitchfork Media is leading the way Q&A Kevin Kline Short List TIME'S PICKS FOR THE WEEK
BUSINESS How to Make Cars And Make Money Too (Assignment Detroit) By keeping it simple, Ford's Alan Mulally has led the industrial comeback of the decade
SOCIETY Building a Better Playground (Life / Parenting) Swings and slides don't foster much creativity. Why cities are joining the loose-parts revolution Big-League Chew (Life / Sports) Some pros swear by high-tech mouth gear. Is the key to a better golf score in your jaw? The Doctor Is in — and Online (Life / Health) New pilot programs boost doctor-patient e-mailing The Origin of Cougar Sex Drives (Life / Behavior) A new evolutionary theory on why women's libidos ramp up premenopause
PEOPLE 10 Questions for Jorge Ramos (10 Questions) The Noticiero Univision anchor has a new book, A Country for All, out now. Jorge Ramos will now take
your questions
TO OUR READERS The Plight of Afghan Women: A Disturbing Picture This week's cover is disturbing, but the reality it shows in Afghanistan is something from which we cannot turn away
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BRIEFING The Moment 7|24|10: Iowa The World 10 ESSENTIAL STORIES Mark Halperin's Take: The Digital President Loses Two Rounds GOP Goes (Lame) Duck Hunting Dems Hedge a Florida Bet Lab Report: Health, Science and Medicine Verbatim Brief History: First Family Weddings First Family Weddings Photos: As former First Daughter Chelsea Clinton heads into her wedding weekend, TIME takes a look at other presidential kids and their nuptials The Skimmer Book Review: Packing for Mars: The Curious Science of Life in the Void by Mary Roach Daniel Schorr (Milestones) Alex Higgins (Milestones) Overturned (Milestones)
COVER
Afghan Women and the Return of the Taliban By ARYN BAKER Thursday, Jul. 29, 2010
Photograph by Jodi Bieber / INSTITUTE for TIME The Taliban pounded on the door just before midnight, demanding that Aisha, 18, be punished for running away from her husband's house. They dragged her to a mountain clearing near her village in the southern Afghan province of Uruzgan, ignoring her protests that her in-laws had been abusive, that she had no choice but to escape. Shivering in the cold air and blinded by the flashlights trained on her by her husband's family, she faced her spouse and accuser. Her in-laws treated her like a slave, Aisha pleaded. They beat her. If she hadn't run away, she would have died. Her judge, a local Taliban commander, was unmoved. Later, he would tell Aisha's uncle that she had to be made an example of lest other girls in the village try to do the same thing. The commander gave his verdict, and men moved in to deliver the punishment. Aisha's brother-in-law held her down while her husband pulled out a knife. First he sliced off her ears. Then he started on her nose. Aisha passed out from the pain but awoke soon after, choking on her own blood. The men had left her on the mountainside to die. This didn't happen 10 years ago, when the Taliban ruled Afghanistan. It happened last year. Now hidden in a secret women's shelter in the relative safety of Kabul, where she was taken after receiving care from U.S. forces, Aisha recounts her tale in a monotone, her eyes flat and distant. She listens obsessively to the news on a small radio that she keeps by her side. Talk that the Afghan government is considering some kind of political accommodation with the Taliban is the only thing that elicits an emotional response. "They are the people that did this to me," she says, touching the jagged bridge of scarred flesh and bone that frames the gaping hole in an otherwise beautiful face. "How can we reconcile with them?" That is exactly what the Afghan government plans to do. In June, President Hamid Karzai established a peace council tasked with exploring negotiations with Afghanistan's "upset brothers," as he calls the Taliban. A month later, Tom Malinowski, the Washington advocacy director for Human Rights Watch, a New York — based NGO, flew to Kabul seeking assurances that human rights would be protected in the course of negotiations. During their conversation, Karzai mused on the cost of the conflict in human lives and wondered aloud if he had any right to talk about human rights when so many were dying. "He essentially asked me," says Malinowski, "What is more important, protecting the right of a girl to go to school or saving her life?" How Karzai and his international allies answer that question will have far-reaching consequences. Aisha has no doubt. "The Taliban are not good people," she says. "If they
come back, the situation will be worse for everyone." But for others, the rights of Afghan women are only one aspect of a complex situation. How that situation will eventually be ordered remains unclear. As the war in Afghanistan enters its ninth year, the need for an exit strategy weighs on the minds of U.S. policymakers. The publication of some 90,000 documents on the war by the freedom-of-information activists at WikiLeaks — working with the New York Times, the Guardian in London and the German newsmagazine Der Spiegel — has intensified international debate. Though the documents mainly consist of low-level intelligence reports, taken together they reveal a war in which a shadowy insurgency shows determined resilience; where fighting that enemy often claims the lives of innocent civilians; and where supposed allies, like Pakistan's security services, are suspected of playing a deadly double game. Allegations of fraud and corruption in the Afghan government have exasperated Congress, as has evidence that the billions of dollars spent training and equipping the Afghan security forces have so far achieved little. In May, the U.S. death toll passed 1,000. As frustrations mount over a war that even top U.S. commanders think is not susceptible to a purely military solution, demands intensify for a political way out of the quagmire. Such an outcome, it is assumed, would involve a reconciliation with the Taliban or, at the very least, some elements within its fold. But without safeguards, that would pose significant risks to the very women U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton promised in May not to abandon. "We will stand with you always," she said to female members of Karzai's delegation in Washington. Afghan women are not convinced. They fear that in the quest for a quick peace, their progress may be sidelined. "Women's rights must not be the sacrifice by which peace is achieved," says Fawzia Koofi, the former Deputy Speaker of Afghanistan's parliament. Yet that may be where negotiations are heading. In December, President Obama set a July 2011 deadline for the beginning of a drawdown of U.S. troops from Afghanistan. That has made Taliban leaders feel they have the upper hand. In negotiations, the Taliban will be advocating a version of an Afghan state in line with their own conservative views, particularly on the issue of women's rights, which they deem a Western concept that contravenes Islamic teaching. Already there is a growing acceptance that some concessions to the Taliban are inevitable if there is to be genuine reconciliation. "You have to be realistic," says a senior Western diplomat in Kabul, who spoke on the condition of anonymity. "We are not going to be sending troops and spending money forever. There will have to be a compromise, and sacrifices will have to be made." Which sounds understandable. But who, precisely, will be asked to make the sacrifice? Stepping Out When the U.S. and its allies went to war in Afghanistan in 2001 with the aim of removing the safe haven that the Taliban had provided for al-Qaeda, it was widely hoped that the women of the country would be liberated from a regime that denied them education and jobs, forced them indoors and violently punished them for infractions of a strict interpretation of Islamic law. Under the Taliban, who ruled Afghanistan from 1996 to 2001, women accused of adultery were stoned to death; those who flashed a bare ankle from under the shroud of a burqa were whipped. Koofi remembers being beaten on the street for forgetting to remove the polish from her nails after her wedding. "We were not even allowed to laugh out loud," she says.
It wasn't always so. Kabul 40 years ago was considered the playground of Central Asia, a city where girls wore jeans to the university and fashionable women went to parties sporting Chanel miniskirts. These days the streets of Kabul once again echo with the laughter of girls on their way to school, dressed in uniforms of black coats and white headscarves. Women have rejoined the workforce and can sign up for the police and the army. Article 83 of the constitution mandates that at least 25% of parliamentary seats go to female representatives. During Taliban times, women's voices were banned from the radio, and TV was forbidden, but last month a female anchor interviewed a former Taliban leader on a national broadcast. Under the Taliban, Robina Muqimyar Jalalai, one of Afghanistan's first two female Olympic athletes, spent her girlhood locked behind the walls of her family compound. Now she is running for parliament and wants a sports ministry created, which she hopes to lead. "We have women boxers and women footballers," she says. "I go running in the stadium where the Taliban used to play football with women's heads." But Muqimyar says she will never take these changes for granted. "If the Taliban come back, I will lose everything that I have gained over the past nine years." It would be easy to dismiss such fears as premature. The Taliban leadership has not yet shown any inclination to reconcile with Karzai's government. But a program to reintegrate into society so-called 10-dollar Talibs — low-level insurgents who fight for cash or over local grievances — is already in place. Koofi worries that such accommodations may be the first step down a slippery slope. Reintegrating low-level Taliban could mean that men like those who ordered and carried out Aisha's punishment would be eligible for the training and employment opportunities paid for by international donors — without having to account for their actions. "The government of Afghanistan needs to make it clear, not just by speaking but by action and policy, that women's rights will be guaranteed," says Koofi. "If they don't, if they continue giving political bribes to Taliban, we will lose everything." Clinging to the Constitution Both the U.S. administration and Karzai's government say such worries are overblown. Afghanistan's constitution, they insist — which promotes gender equality and provides for girls' education — is not up for negotiation. In Kabul on July 20, Clinton said that the red lines are clear. "Any reconciliation process ... must require that anyone who wishes to rejoin society and the political system must lay down their weapons and end violence, renounce al-Qaeda and be committed to the constitution and laws of Afghanistan, which guarantee the rights of women." Afghan women cling to such promises like a talisman. But ambiguities abound. Article 3 of the constitution, for example, holds that no law may contravene the principles of Shari'a, or Islamic law. What constitutes Shari'a, however, has never been defined, so a change in the political climate of the country could mean a radical reinterpretation of women's rights. Karzai has already invited Taliban to run for parliament. None have done so, but if they ever do, they may find some like-minded colleagues already there. Abdul Hadi Arghandiwal, the Minister of Economy and leader of the ideologically conservative Hizb-i-Islami faction, for example, holds that women and men shouldn't go to university together. Like the Taliban, he believes that women should not be allowed to leave the home unaccompanied by a male relative. "That is in accordance with Islam. And what we want for Afghanistan is Islamic rights, not Western rights," Arghandiwal says.
Traditional ways, however, do little for women. Aisha's family did nothing to protect her from the Taliban. That might have been out of fear, but more likely it was out of shame. A girl who runs away is automatically considered a prostitute in deeply traditional societies, and families that allow them back home would be subject to widespread ridicule. A few months after Aisha arrived at the shelter, her father tried to bring her home with promises that he would find her a new husband. Aisha refused to leave. In rural areas, a family that finds itself shamed by a daughter sometimes sells her into slavery, or worse, subjects her to a so-called honor killing — murder under the guise of saving the family's name. Parliamentarian Sabrina Saqib fears that if the Taliban were welcomed back into the fold, those who oppress women would get a free ride. "I am worried that the day that the so-called moderate Taliban can sit in parliament, we will lose our rights," she says. "Because it is not just Taliban that are against women's rights; there are many men who are against them as well." Last summer, Saqib voted against a bill that authorized husbands in Shi'ite families to withhold money and food from wives who refuse to provide sex, limited inheritance and custody of children in the case of divorce and denied women freedom of movement without permission from their families. The law passed, and that 25% quota of women in parliament couldn't stop it. Saqib estimates that less than a dozen of the 68 female parliamentarians support women's rights. The rest — proxies for conservative men who boosted them into power — aren't interested. Despite her frustrations with her parliamentary colleagues, Saqib is a firm supporter of the constitutional quota. "In a society dominated by culture and traditions," she says, "we need some time for women to prove that they can do things." If the constitution were revised as part of a negotiation with the Taliban, she says, the article mandating the parliamentary quota "would be the first to go." Arghandiwal, the Economy Minister, would love to see the back of it. "Throughout history, constitutions have changed, so we have to be flexible on this," he says. The quota for women, he claims, "makes them lazy." Threats in the Night For many women, debates over the constitution are an abstract irrelevance. What matters is that mounting insecurity is eroding the few gains they have made. Taliban night letters — chilling missives delivered under the cover of darkness — threaten women in the south of the country, a Taliban stronghold, who dare to work. "We warn you to leave your job as a teacher as soon as possible otherwise we will cut the heads off your children and shall set fire to your daughter," reads one. "We will kill you in such a harsh way that no woman has so far been killed in that manner," says another. Both letters, which were obtained by Human Rights Watch, are printed on paper bearing the crossed swords and Koran insignia of the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan, the name of the former Taliban government. Elsewhere, girls' schools have been burned down and students have had acid thrown in their faces. In May, mounting violence in the west of the country prompted the religious council of Herat province to issue an edict forbidding women to leave their homes without a male relative. The northern province of Badakhshan quickly followed suit, and other councils are considering doing the same. The edicts are usually justified as a means of protecting women from the insurgency, but Koofi, the member of parliament, says there is a better way of doing that: improved governance and security. That will not just protect women but also strengthen the Afghan government's hand in the course of negotiations. "We need to marginalize the Taliban by focusing on good governance," she says, fearing that a quick deal would bring only a temporary lull in the violence — enough to permit the international
coalition a face-saving withdrawal but not much more than that. Afghanistan's women recognize that dialogue with the Taliban is essential to any long-term solution, but they don't want those talks to be hurried. They want a seat at the table, and they worry that Afghanistan's friends overseas are tiring of its dysfunctional ways. "I think it is possible to make things better if the international community supports good governance," says Koofi, "but they are too focused on an exit strategy. They want a quick solution." For Afghanistan's women, an early withdrawal of international forces could be disastrous. An Afghan refugee who grew up in Canada, Mozhdah Jamalzadah recently returned home to launch an Oprah-style talk show, which has become wildly popular. Jamalzadah has been able to subtly introduce questions of women's rights into the program without provoking the ire of religious conservatives. "If I go into it directly," she says, "there will be a backlash. But if I talk about abuse, which is against the Koran, and then talk about divorce, which is permitted, I am educating both men and women, and hopefully no one notices." Jamalzadah says her audience is increasingly receptive to her message, but she knows that in a deeply traditional society, it will take time to percolate. If the government becomes any more conservative because of an accommodation with the Taliban, she says, "my program will be the first to go." That would be Afghanistan's loss. Jamalzadah's TV show is an education for the whole nation, albeit sometimes in unexpected ways. On a recent episode, a male guest told a joke about a foreign human rights team in Afghanistan. In the cities, the team noticed that women walked six paces behind their husbands. But in rural Helmand, where the Taliban is strongest, they saw a woman six steps ahead. The foreigners rushed to congratulate the husband on his enlightenment — only to be told that he stuck his wife in front because they were walking through a minefield. As the audience roared with laughter, Jamalzadah reflected that it may take about 10 to 15 years before Afghan women can truly walk alongside men. But once they do, she believes, all Afghans will benefit. "When we talk about women's rights," Jamalzadah says, "we are talking about things that are important to men as well — men who want to see Afghanistan move forward. If you sacrifice women to make peace, you are also sacrificing the men who support them and abandoning the country to the fundamentalists that caused all the problems in the first place."
Women of Afghanistan Under Taliban Threat
Fawzia Koofi The former deputy speaker of parliament, Koofi is very outspoken on women's issues. "Reconciliation will not bring peace to Afghanistan," she says. "Peace is a result of democracy. You have to include everyone in that process, including women." She is running for a second term in parliament but fears that new election rules may make it more difficult to succeed and that outspoken women like her will be sidelined.
Robina Muqimyar Jalalai
In 2004, Muqimyar was one of Afghanistan's first two female representatives at the Olympics. She is now running for parliament.
Sabrina Saqib Saqib, Afghanistan's youngest parliamentarian, says having women in parliament was a huge step forward. "Women came back to life after the Taliban."
Mozhdah Jamalzadah
Part Oprah, part Hannah Montana, The Mozhdah Show, hosted by Jamalzadah, is the latest sensation to hit Afghanistan's television screens.
Mahbooba Seraj Women gather at a training conference for parliamentarians. "Women have just as much a right to take part in leading Afghanistan now as they did then," says Seraj, standing, referring to historical female heroes in Afghanistan. "We must not compare women in Afghanistan to women in France or Sweden. We have to compare women now to women in 2001. And we have made huge progress."
Sakina When Sakina was 14, her family sold her into marriage with a 45-year-old man who had a carpet-weaving business. "I didn't know about marriage," she says. "I didn't know about relations between men and women." He used her as an indentured servant and beat her with weaving tools when she didn't work fast enough. Once, when she dropped some tea glasses, the family cut off all of her hair. She ran away. Now she is trying to get a divorce, which her in-laws refuse to grant because, they say, they paid good money for her.
Islam Family conflict and a husband addicted to drugs pushed Islam to pour diesel fuel over herself in a suicide attempt. Her mother-in-law tried to extinguish the flames.
Prisoners Nasimgul, left, and Gul Bahar, holding another inmate's child, are serving time in the Afghan women's detention center in Kabul. Even under the new government, Afghan society still imprisons women for crimes that are never ascribed to men, like running away and adultery, further stunting women's progress.
Shirin Gul Convicted of murder and hijacking, Gul says she fell into a life of crime under pressure from her husband; she had six children, so she followed his wishes. Her husband, son and brother-in-law have all been hanged in connection with their crimes.
Zohal Sagar Sagar lost her father and two brothers in the war. Her mother hopes they can leave Afghanistan and find a new life in Canada.
The Abadini Family Though Afghan women are no longer required to wear burqas, as they were under Taliban rule, many women still wear them out of tradition or fear. The younger generation of Afghan women want more liberal and open ways of living in Afghan society.
Aisha Aisha, 18, was dragged from her home by the Taliban after running away from her husband. Despite her pleas that her in-laws had been abusive, that they had treated her like a slave, that she had no choice but
to escape, a Taliban commander said she must be punished, lest other girls in the village try to do the same thing. Aisha's family members carried out the punishment: her brother-in-law held her down while her husband sliced off her ears and nose, then left her to die. She is now hidden in a secret women's shelter, where she was taken after receiving care from U.S. forces.
ESSAY
A Double Dip Recession? Who Cares? By ZACHARY KARABELL Monday, Aug. 09, 2010
Illustration by Harry Campbell for TIME
Though global equities have rallied modestly after a sharp plunge in May and June and companies have announced strong earnings, sentiment about the future remains gloomy. In response to intense concerns about a looming double-dip recession, business leaders have complained to White House officials that government policy is inhibiting job creation and that uncertainty about new regulations is discouraging them from investing their $1.8 trillion in accumulated corporate cash. On the flip side, Democrats in Congress effectively cornered the Republicans to extend unemployment benefits yet again, a direct response to the undeniable fact that the unemployed are facing a severe challenge to find work. What should be most striking about these concerns, however, is how little they matter. A double dip is a period of economic contraction that follows a brief recovery after a recession. It's a useful prop for framing economic and political debates but doesn't describe what's actually happening across the country. The reality is that if you are doing well in this economy, either as a company or an individual, you will continue to do well regardless of a statistical double dip. If you are doing badly, you will continue to struggle whether or not the economic data are improving. GDP has been expanding since the third quarter of last year, graced by government spending and a steady though diminished level of domestic consumption. But as we all know, that growth — 5.6% in the fourth quarter of last year and 2.7% in the first quarter of this year — has been accompanied by high unemployment and little job creation. In short, this has been an economic recovery that has felt like a continued recession. That's because for a significant portion of the population, it is a continued recession. Not only is the real unemployment rate (combining workers who have dropped out of the workforce and the headline numbers, together with workers classified as marginally attached to the workforce) in the midteens, but the amount of hours worked has declined, as have many incomes. If you combine that with the scarcity of consumer credit and the uncertainty about the social safety net, tens of millions of Americans are facing a grave economic future. Particularly for men who lack a college education and were or are in an industry that depends on manual labor (construction and manufacturing above all), this is a perilous time.
But for tens of millions of others, there is no recession. For the college-educated, the unemployment rate is 4.4% (for college-educated women, less than that). For them, wages have been rising, since more-skilled workers command higher salaries and industries ranging from technology to health care have been hiring and expanding. Those workers are enjoying — in relative moderation — the fruits of modern society, including owning homes, buying millions of cool gadgets like iPhones and BlackBerrys, taking summer vacations, sending their children to costly but worthy colleges and worrying over their retirement accounts, which means that they have retirement accounts to worry about. And then there are millions of others who fall on the spectrum in between. Very few of these groupings will be altered by a double-dip recession. If the economy expands by 3% over the next quarters, there is little indication that the millions currently struggling or the many more in limbo will suddenly be less in limbo. Nor is there any reason to suppose that companies will suddenly start hiring again. They have integrated productivity-enhancing technologies, understand the dynamics of inventories and had been trimming workforces for years before the 2008-09 crisis. Better policy from Washington won't change that; nor is worse policy truly the cause of it, though it is a convenient excuse. On the flip side, if the economy contracts a bit, there is no reason to expect fewer iPads will be bought. After all, save for a brief few months at the very end of 2008 and the very beginning of 2009, the economic activity of the haves showed remarkable resilience. While contraction will lead to more negative sentiment, sentiment is already negative and is not a reliable indicator of activity. People can feel bad and spend money — and often do. So the double-dip question is yet another rabbit hole that distracts from the structural realities and challenges that the U.S. — and the rest of the world — faces. The debate speaks to a false belief that our macro statistics tell us something truly meaningful when in fact they are no better than shadows of shadows that offer at best a blurry facsimile. Until we begin to have a discussion about the multiple economies that constitute the U.S., our attitudes and our answers will fail to generate the desired — and shared — outcome of a more secure and prosperous future for all.
IN THE ARENA
Beyond the Leaks: Our Pakistan Problem By JOE KLEIN Thursday, Jul. 29, 2010
United States Marines from Bravo Company of the 1st Battalion of the 2nd Marines fire machine guns for suppression during a gunbattle. Kevin Frayer / AP
The release of 91,000 secret documents about the war in Afghanistan by WikiLeaks turned out to be your classic media bang-fizzle. The first-day bang was caused by the spectacular breach of security and the promise of devastating revelations, especially about Pakistan's clandestine support for the Taliban. The second-day fizzle was caused by the absence of much that was new in the documents. By the third day, it was pretty much over. But the war goes on, futilely at the moment. Indeed, the actual situation on the ground is worse than the secret documents describe — a fact that was made plain in testimony to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee on the third day of the story by David Kilcullen, a counterinsurgency expert close to General David Petraeus. "We need to kill a lot of Taliban," Kilcullen said, a statement that stands well outside the humanitarian spirit of counterinsurgency (COIN) operations. But then, Kilcullen admitted, the Afghan government is too unstable for COIN to work very well — a major concession from a charter member of the Petraeus camp and a signal, perhaps, of a change in U.S. tactics. As for the Taliban, he said, there was no question that they were being supported by Pakistan's Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI). Kilcullen recommended that the committee members read a recent paper by Matt Waldman of Harvard University's Carr Center for Human Rights Policy called "The Sun in the Sky." The paper is astonishing. From February to May this year, the author conducted separate interviews with nine active Taliban field commanders in Afghanistan and 10 former Taliban officials. The commanders are unanimous in their belief that the ISI is running the show. It is a field-level view of the hierarchy and probably an exaggeration, but even at half-strength, the commanders' accounts of direct ISI involvement are entirely convincing. Some of them received training and protection in Pakistani camps run by the ISI. "[The ISI has] specific groups under their control, for burning schools and such like," one commander says. "The ISI [also] has people working for it within the Taliban movement. It is clearer than the sun in the sky." The commanders insist the ISI is opposed to any negotiations between the Taliban and Hamid Karzai's government; several cite as proof the February arrest by Pakistani operatives of Taliban second-in-command Mullah Abdul Ghani Baradar, who was involved in informal peace talks with the Afghans. Why on earth are elements of the Pakistani military supporting the Taliban? In a word, India. India is, first and last, the strategic obsession of the Pakistani military. The U.S. has come and gone from the region in the past; the perceived Indian threat is eternal. With the defeat of the Taliban by U.S. forces in 2001, there was fear that the new government in Kabul would be sympathetic to India and provide a strategic base for anti-Pakistan intelligence operations. And so, despite professions of alliance with the U.S. by Pakistan's then dictator Pervez Musharraf, a decision was made to keep the Taliban alive. A spigot of untargeted military aid from the George W. Bush Administration helped fund the effort. A commander of the vicious Haqqani Taliban network tells Waldman that their funding comes from "the Americans — from them to the Pakistani military, and then to us." Waldman reports that the commander receives from the Pakistanis "a reward for killing foreign soldiers, usually $4,000 to $5,000 for each soldier killed." This is devastating and outrageous, but slightly outdated — and decidedly incomplete. In the months since Waldman completed his research, the relationship between Pakistan and the Karzai government has warmed considerably. Karzai removed his intelligence chief, Amrullah Saleh, whom the Pakistanis considered an Indian agent. There is talk of a reconciliation deal in which the Haqqani network will stand down militarily. Most important, the Pakistanis' sense of the perceived threat has changed dramatically
over the past 18 months. After a series of spectacular terrorist attacks, the army launched a major campaign against the indigenous Pakistani Taliban. More Pakistani army personnel have been killed in this fight than U.S. forces in Afghanistan by the Taliban. Are you confused yet? Let me make things more complicated: Afghanistan is really a sideshow here. Pakistan is the primary U.S. national-security concern in the region. It has a nuclear stockpile, and lives under the threat of an Islamist coup by some of the very elements in its military who created and support the Taliban. The one thing the U.S. can do to reduce that threat is to convince the Pakistanis that we will be a reliable friend for the long haul — providing aid, mediating the tensions with India; that we will help stabilize Afghanistan; that we will support the primacy of Pakistan's civilian government. Over time, this could reduce the extremist influence in the military and Pakistan's use of Islamist guerrillas against its neighbors. If it does not — well, the alternative is unthinkable.
Private Spies: Rubicon Make 24 Look Sunny By JAMES PONIEWOZIK Monday, Aug. 09, 2010
Illustration by Francisco Caceres for TIME; Rubicon: Craig Blankenhorn / AMC The most implausible thing in the series 24 was, in retrospect, not the effectiveness of Jack Bauer's torture methods or the improbably fast travel through L.A. traffic or the lack of real-time bathroom breaks. It was the competence. Time after time, over eight seasons, staffers at Bauer's Counter Terrorist Unit (CTU) would go to a wall of computers, plug in a cell-phone card, check some databases and — bingo! — pull up a picture and GPS location of a terrorist plotting an attack. In real life, the U.S. government proved unable to stop a guy trying to blow up his underwear, much less the 9/11 plotters. Last spring, 24 went off the air. The illusion of omniscient intelligence ended years before that. A two-year Washington Post investigation into the post-9/11 security complex revealed a sprawling "Top
Secret America," as the paper called it, in which spy operations churned out too many reports to process and security was farmed out to hundreds of thousands of private contractors with little accountability. This world of intel for hire is the setting for Rubicon (AMC, Sundays), a dark, wonkish conspiracy thriller set at a private intelligence firm. And it makes 24 look like a sunny tale of optimism. Rubicon is an entertainment first, a 1970s-style paranoid corruption story. Will Travers (James Badge Dale) is a young analyst with the American Policy Institute (API), a private think tank that analyzes raw intelligence for U.S. agencies. He stumbles on evidence — hidden in newspaper-crossword clues — of a conspiracy with its tentacles in the API and God knows where else. No one is going to mistake Will for Jack Bauer: he's a book-lugging data nerd in a V-neck sweater who looks as if he'd have a hard time breaking a pencil, let alone a neck. And the gloomy, academic API offices have none of the high-tech flourishes of CTU's headquarters. But executive producer Henry Bromell, whose father was an intelligence operative and who interviewed ex-spies to prep for the show, says that's the point. There are no magic computers, just too much information in too many different hands with too little coordination. "Since 9/11," Bromell says, "you're not just looking for a suspicious lump in the Iranian desert. You have to be looking bloody everywhere." There are millions of eyes and ears — wiretaps, satellites, data mining — but no single brain to synthesize all those nerve endings. When API head Truxton Spangler (Michael Cristofer) travels to Washington with Will to drum up business, he tells Will their job is to remind the national intelligence bigwigs that "the information they gather is useless unless they have us to make sense of it." In 24, there were moles and bad apples, but the system, ultimately, was intended to keep us safe. Rubicon suggests that the intelligence complex itself is a danger: a shadow government that may be rotting from within because of its reach, power and prerogatives. In 24 at least, the implied trade-off for Jack Bauer's entertaining civil rights violations was security. In Rubicon, it's not clear we're getting anything except the illusion of certainty. In one episode, a group of API analysts are assigned to determine whether the military should blow up a possible terrorist safe house — in an apartment block full of families. The attack could take out a mastermind who has murdered scores of innocent children. Or it might not. The team of brilliant minds crunch and debate the data, but in the end their ruling, they admit, is a "WAG": a wild-ass guess. It's a somber picture of national security, and it won't appeal to everyone. Since 24, most new spy shows have moved in the opposite direction, toward retro escapism. NBC's upcoming Undercovers is a light romantic drama about a married spy team, à la Hart to Hart. Chuck, Burn Notice and Covert Affairs offer espionage with comedy and kung fu, high tech and short skirts. Their touchstones are less the murky networks of Top Secret America than the recent Keystone Kremlin bust of suburban Russian agents — comical diversions that are as much Maxwell Smart as James Bond. Rubicon, on the other hand, looks not to the swinging '60s or the Reagan years but to the mistrustful Watergate era and '70s thrillers like
The Parallax View. Though set in the present, it's almost a period piece, like AMC's Mad Men, likewise substituting realism for nostalgia. Rubicon's argument is not that our international enemies are fake. Bromell hints that Rubicon's conspirators most likely have very good reasons for their actions. But the show — like so much real-world reporting — suggests that in the name of security we've created a monster: powerful, unrestrained and with far too many heads for even Jack Bauer to knock together.
Aw, Nuts! By JOEL STEIN Monday, Aug. 09, 2010
Illustration by John Ueland for TIME
Years ago, sitting on an ear doctor's examining table after causing my inner ear to bleed for days by puncturing it with a Q-tip, I looked up to see a framed copy of a column about how stupid it is to put Q-tips in your ears. It was a column I had written. When you publish hundreds of obnoxiously self-righteous proclamations, some of them are going to cause you embarrassment. Which doesn't seem all that big of a deal when you also have blood leaking from your ears. At the beginning of last year, I wrote a column that questioned whether the increase in food allergies among children was a matter of overreporting. It began with this carefully calibrated thought: "Your kid doesn't have an allergy to nuts. Your kid has a parent who needs to feel special." After that, I got a little harsh. The column was not the first thing that came to mind after my 1-year-old son Laszlo started sneezing, then breaking out in hives, then rubbing his eyes, then crying through welded-shut eyes, then screaming and, finally, vomiting copiously at the entrance of the Childrens Hospital emergency room an hour after eating his first batch of blended mixed nuts. But it was the second thing. Because after my nut-allergy column came out, many parents wrote me furious e-mails saying they hoped that one day I would have a
child with life-threatening allergies. I realized I was learning a terrible but valuable lesson: it's really mean to wish food allergies on a kid who isn't even born yet. After some Benadryl, instruction on using an EpiPen and shock at the fact that the Childrens Hospital contains a McDonald's, we went home. Sitting up at 3 in the morning, I found myself totally believing in the nut-allergy epidemic. I was ready to ban nuts from schools, parks and all the blue states, since I was unlikely to go to any of the other ones. I started to think that Jenny McCarthy was right about all kinds of things, even acting choices. Also, oddly, I really wanted some nuts. My lovely wife Cassandra luckily did not blame Laszlo's reaction on karma for my column. Instead, she blamed the fact that if one parent has an allergy, like my hay fever, his child has up to a 50% greater chance than average of having any allergy. Specifically, she said, "I'm sorry I married a Jew." I cannot tell you how relieved I was. Six weeks later, a blood test showed that Laszlo was very allergic to pistachios and cashews, pretty allergic to a bunch of other nuts and seeds and totally pissed at his father. At the end of our appointment with allergist and immunologist Dr. Rita Kachru, I told her about my column. And then hid behind my 1-year-old. "I don't take offense," she said. "There is a lot of craziness going on. There's a lot of 'science' that's not really science, where doctors tell them to hold the food in their hand and see how they feel." She said no one knew why food allergies were growing so quickly but that one factor might be improved hygiene. "Our immune system has developed over time to be protective. In third-world countries where they don't have a lot of allergies, they're fighting viruses and parasites, and their whole immunity is built up. But the mortality rate is very high. People on farms who are exposed to poop tend to not be allergic. If they can survive all that, they'll have a stronger immune system." I'm pretty sure Dr. Kachru was saying that, at some point in Laszlo's infancy, I should have pooped on him. Unfortunately, having only friends who don't farm meant I knew a lot of people with kids who had nut allergies, all of whom were still mad at me. So I started by telling my friend Heidi Miller, who writes the blog Living Well with Food Allergies. She said, graciously, that she was deeply upset to find out about Laszlo's reaction. "Laszlo is not the one I wanted to get a food allergy," she said. She added that she was hurt by my column, because, after all her fear and suffering with her daughter--who is five times more allergic to pistachios than Laszlo is--she thought I made it sound as if Heidi had been faking it for attention. Largely because that's exactly what I wrote. "I blog about food allergies because I can. Not because I crave the attention," she told me. "That is what my baking blog is for." We're not banning nuts from our house, and we aren't going to send Laszlo to a nut-free school. But knowing my son can never be a superspy because the enemy can so easily poison him with candy bars made in facilities that may produce other candy bars with nuts, I realize that the more I understand of other people's difficulties, the less funny they are. I only hope that Laszlo doesn't grow up to be a good-looking jock. I can't give up making fun of those guys.
NATION
Good News for Obama in Ohio? By MICHAEL CROWLEY Thursday, Jul. 29, 2010
Ohio Governor Ted Stickland meets with supporters at a home in Massillon, Ohio. Danny Wilcox Frazier / Redux for TIME
On a sweltering mid-June afternoon, Barack Obama stood at a construction site in Columbus to tout the 10,000th project funded by his economic-stimulus plan. But to Ohio Democrats, another number was just as important: it was Obama's seventh visit to their state. It's not the scenery that keeps the President coming back. It's the stakes — for both Obama and his party — in two closely watched races this fall. Ohio's Democratic governor, Ted Strickland, and his lieutenant governor, Lee Fisher, who is the party's U.S. Senate nominee, are facing what ought to be brutal election fights. The Strickland-Fisher administration has presided over the loss of 400,000 jobs here since 2007. Ohio's unemployment, at 10.5%, runs higher than the national average. And Fisher has the dubious honor of being the state's economic-development director, which these days is like being BP's top environmental executive. Yet early polls show that both Strickland and Fisher actually stand a chance in November. How is that possible? However frustrated with Democrats voters are right now, they're still dubious about a GOP brand that's skunky from the Bush years. A July TIME poll shows that likely voters nationwide are no more inclined to vote Republican than Democratic in November's congressional elections. And in Ohio, even wounded Democrats fare all right when matched up with individual Republicans lugging politically toxic baggage. "This cannot be an up or down vote on Barack Obama or the Democrats or the economy," says a Democratic Party strategist. "It has to be a contrast." That said, Ohio's governor doesn't have much to brag about. Strickland took office in 2007 promising to expand Ohio's economy, but it's been mostly downhill since. Still, Strickland, 68, hails signs of recovery: Ohio added almost 50,000 jobs this spring. "There is a difference now. There is less doom and gloom, and there is more hope," he explains. But the governor admits the obvious: "It's going to take some time." And that's not a luxury Strickland can afford now that he's facing a seasoned opponent: John Kasich, a former Republican Congressman known in the 1990s as one of Washington's toughest budget hawks. Fiscal discipline is just the theme Kasich hopes will define the race. The Republican Governors
Association set the tone in June with a TV ad featuring a pair of hardened construction workers who call Strickland "a bad governor" who "blames everyone else" for Ohio's huge job losses. The ad doesn't mention Kasich, so Strickland tries to do so at every turn. "The question is not Ted Strickland against the economy," the governor says. "It's Ted Strickland against John Kasich." There's a reason for that. The son of a steelworker from an Appalachian Ohio town, Strickland comes from origins that are wholesome (Roy Rogers grew up nearby) and humble (his family briefly slept in a chicken coop after a fire). He's also a former Methodist minister and an ex-Congressman with a culturally moderate record that appeals beyond cities such as Cleveland and Columbus. (He's been endorsed by the National Rifle Association.) "I like to talk about the difference between Ohio values and Wall Street values," Strickland says. That's a not-so-veiled attack on Kasich. During the 18 years he represented the Columbus area in Washington, Kasich, 58, cut a profile as a financially conservative working-class hero. He has his own up-by-his-bootstraps story, but soon after leaving Congress, Kasich took a job as a managing director at the ill-fated banking giant Lehman Brothers. And Democrats are making sure voters see him as a Wall Street Republican. "John Kasich got rich while Ohio seniors lost millions," declares an ad funded by a liberal independent group. Strickland has also hit Kasich for arranging meetings between Ohio pension officials and Lehman staffers. (Those meetings did not yield investments, but state public-pension funds did lose hundreds of millions through Lehman.) Kasich insists the attacks are both unfair and bound to fail. "I was one managing director in a company of 30,000 employees, and I ran a two-man office in Ohio," he protests. "Frankly, what we need more of are politicians who understand how to create jobs." But Kasich was concerned enough to air a response ad of his own: "I didn't run Lehman Brothers," he tells the camera. It's a similar story in the race to succeed the retiring Ohio Republican Senator George Voinovich. In Lee Fisher, 58, Democrats have a candidate who is no one's idea of a star — a career politician who lacks Strickland's folksy touch. Nor has Fisher proved much of a fundraiser in this race. His Republican opponent, former GOP Congressman and Bush Administration official Rob Portman, had nearly $9 million on hand (to Fisher's $1.3 million) as of June 30. Some Washington Democrats call Fisher the kind of candidate they would typically consign to the can't-win bin. But for the moment, they're still giving Fisher short odds. One reason is that Portman, like Kasich, presents a wide target for Democratic counterattacks on economic themes. True, Portman, 54, is one of Ohio's most respected political figures, known for an even temperament and a sharp mind. But after 12 years of representing Cincinnati in the House, he served as George W. Bush's Trade Representative and then Budget Director. In Fisher's eager telling, then, Portman is a Washington insider and Bush sidekick who promoted Bush's free-trade policies — particularly those involving U.S. steel trade with China — that killed Ohio jobs. Portman calls those charges off base, pointing to cases he filed with the World Trade Organization against Chinese trade practices. Promoting his jobs plan, he accuses Fisher of harping on the past to divert attention from the state's dismal economy. "The message is pretty clear: if you're happy with the status quo, then I'm probably not your candidate," Portman says. His lopsided financial advantage may yet swamp Fisher (though union spending will narrow that gap). But for now, Democrats are thankful for such an easy chance to start a conversation about Bush's economic legacy.
Economics, strictly speaking, isn't the only issue here. Democrats pilloried Kasich for his indifferent attitude toward whether NBA megastar LeBron James would leave the Cleveland Cavaliers. ("We've lost 400,000 jobs out here, and the last guy I worry about is LeBron James," Kasich huffed in a radio interview. Not that Strickland's cameo in a Web video urging LeBron to stay managed to keep him from going to Miami.) After a June rally in Lima, meanwhile, a local TV reporter confronted Strickland with another pressing question: What was he doing about the state's bedbug epidemic? (Yes, bedbugs.) But even if the issues can get picayune, these races have broad political importance. Outside groups are expected to spend millions to sway voters, to say nothing of the cash both parties are committing. Partly, that is a warm-up as they build their ground games for the next presidential election. Ohio, after all, remains the grand prize of presidential politics. Obama can lose every red state he turned blue in 2008 and still win re-election as long as he holds on to the Buckeye State. And that will be far easier with a Democrat in the governor's mansion. "It's more likely that Obama will win Ohio if I'm re-elected," Strickland says. That's why the President has already scheduled another trip to Ohio, in mid-August. However much Democrats say the races here are about the past, they are also about Obama's future.
Battleground Ohio
Tough Fight Having presided over a cratering economy, Ohio Governor Ted Strickland faces a difficult path to reelection, a dilemma that mirrors the troubles faced by the Democratic Party as a whole. Here, he meets with supporters at a home in Massillon, Ohio.
Up To his advantage, Strickland can claim an inspiring personal story. The son of a steelworker, he grew up poor. Once, after a fire ruined their home, his family slept briefly in a chicken coop.
Pros Strickland later worked as a guidance counselor at a children's home and taught psychology before entering politics. "Strickland comes across as a likeable, caring guy," says Herb Asher, a political science professor at Ohio State University.
Cons Still, Strickland has little to brag about. The state has lost 400,000 jobs since 2008.
Challenger Former Republican Congressman John Kasich is vying for Strickland's position. He is introduced here at a campaign stop by his running mate, Ohio Auditor of State, Mary Taylor.
Baggage Though Strickland's job loss numbers are so bad, early surveys show him running even with his opponent. A June Pew poll found that most voters still believe Democrats are "more concerned about people like me," and "can bring about the changes the country needs." It doesn't help that Kasich used to be a managing director at Lehmann Brothers, the former Wall Street banking giant whose 2008 meltdown was a key domino that set off the world financial crisis.
Rebuttal
"I was one managing director," Kasich protests, "in a company of 30,000 employees and I ran a two man office in Ohio." Pressed on the topic, Kasich quickly returns to his core issue: "Frankly, what we need more of from politicians are people who understand how to create jobs." These Kasich supporters outside of Cleveland seem to agree.
Hard Times The stakes in the election could not be higher. Cleveland, once a manufacturing powerhouse, has lost half its population since 1960. Thousands of houses have foreclosed; the city's poverty rate is amongst the highest in the country.
Federal The governorship isn't the only seat up in the air. Former Republican Representative and George W. Bush trade policy architect Rob Portman (center right) is trying to get the spot currently held by retiring Senator George Voinovich (far right). His Democratic opponent is the current lieutenant governor, Lee Fisher.
Consideration Guests attend a Republican event at which Portman spoke. Although he is known for his intellect and
even temperament, Portman's opponent presents him as a Washington insider who helped Bush implement economy-wrecking policies, like free trade measures (NAFTA, for example) and "fast-track" authority for international trade agreements, both anathema to union workers.
Implications The Obama White House is paying close attention. Not only would a Congressional shake-up affect Obama's legislative efforts over the next two years, but a loss for Strickland would also make an Obama reelection in 2012 much more difficult.
The Spill's Psychic Toll By Bryan Walsh / New Orleans Monday, Aug. 09, 2010
The Landry Family Matt Slaby for TIME
At J.F. Gauthier Elementary School, east of New Orleans, the kids of St. Bernard Parish are doing what kids are supposed to do in the summer: playing. Some of the older boys are shooting hoops; others are throwing a football to — well, at — one another. Younger children are getting a faceful of finger paint. Nearly all of them are buzzing with energy; an attempt by some of the adults on hand to gather them for lunch is futile. But look closer. The friendly woman serving potato salad at the lunch line is a counselor, here to talk with anyone who needs it. The finger painting? It's art therapy, to help the kids get in touch with their feelings about the BP oil spill, now more than 100 days old. This impromptu summer camp has been arranged by the St. Bernard Project, a community group that has begun augmenting its main work, rebuilding houses for Hurricane Katrina victims, with classes in stress relief. "The kids look all right," says Parker Sternbergh, a social worker at Tulane University, as she scans the children at play. "But sit down with them and you can feel the stress they're all under." These children may be the youngest victims of the disaster, but they're hardly the only ones. You can read the stress in the tired, worried faces of their mothers too. They fear for their husbands in the fishing industry, who face a bitter choice between unemployment and taking a cleanup job with BP, the company they hate. They fear for their kids, who have been living with the spill since spring and will continue to do so for months and years to come. "There's so much tension in the family now, and the wives have to deal with all of it," says Yvonne Landry, a St. Bernard native who helped organize the camp. "All you can do is take it day by day — but you can't recover from what hasn't ended yet." It was cheering to see BP finally record some success over the past few weeks in fixing its blown well, but for Gulf residents, that seeming ending is little more than a continuation of the beginning. And just as the worst environmental impact of the spill could be occurring out of sight, in the depths of the Gulf, the most lasting potential social damage is invisible too: anxiety and anger that erode community ties and the very psyches of the residents. Already there's a spike in demand for counseling, as well as increased reports of stress, excessive drinking and domestic violence. For a region that was still recovering from the serial traumas of hurricanes Katrina, Ike and Gustav, the spill couldn't have happened at a worse time. "These people are in crisis, and it's not coming across in the images we see on TV," says Dr. Irwin Redlener, the director of the National Center for Disaster Preparedness at Columbia University and the co-founder of the Children's Health Fund. "This is ground zero for psychological catastrophe." Disaster Déjà Vu Though the psychological trauma of the Gulf spill is just starting to become apparent, disaster experts know what to expect, because they've seen it before. The 1989 Exxon Valdez spill inflicted a psychic wound on the residents of Alaska's Prince William Sound that still aches more than 20 years after the tanker ran aground. Like southern Louisiana, Alaskan towns were full of fishermen whose way of life was threatened. Residents saw coastal waters fouled by millions of barrels of oil, and they raged against an incompetent response from government and industry. Previously close-knit communities were divided — those who
took well-paying cleanup jobs with Exxon were decried as "spillionaires" profiting from the catastrophe. And the wounds did not heal with time: a recent study found that stress levels among Alaskans involved in the oil-spill litigation were as high in 2009 as they were in 1991. "There are still significant levels of depression and posttraumatic stress," says J. Steven Picou, a sociologist at the University of South Alabama. "It was a constantly renewing disaster." By its nature, a man-made disaster like an oil spill differs from a natural one like an earthquake — and it can cause far more psychological havoc. The difference, in a word, is blame: while no one can really be at fault for a natural disaster, victims of man-made catastrophes have plenty of places to point fingers. That creates anger, and as it builds and builds, it leads to what Picou calls "corrosive communities." Further, in natural disasters, the suffering is more egalitarian, with everyone affected more or less equally. That can help a community rebuild, as happened to an extent after Katrina — even if the fecklessness of the federal response complicated things. But that's not the case after an oil spill; fishermen see their way of life destroyed, while other residents are barely affected. A sense of injustice stokes anger, which, says Dr. Elmore Rigamer, the medical director of Catholic Charities in New Orleans, "is a killer emotion. It's like going around with a closed fist full of crunched glass." That sharp, chronic pain can quickly turn into depression — something that's already occurring in Gulf Coast fishing communities. Darla Mooks, a 47-year-old shrimp-boat captain from Port Sulphur in southeastern Louisiana, says she's barely sleeping these days. With no shrimp to catch, she has only one other potential source of income: a cleanup job with BP — but Mooks hasn't been able to get one because, she charges, of gender discrimination. "I don't know how I'm going to get through it," she says while smoking a cigarette outside a town-hall meeting in Port Sulphur. "We have to, but I don't know how."
The trauma would be bad enough if, as with the Exxon Valdez, there had been a single spill. But the BP disaster has gone on for weeks, each day — until recently — bringing a fresh supply of oil. The underwater-camera feeds were an around-the-clock reminder of that. For Gulf residents, it was as if they'd been mugged and then forced to watch a video of the crime on an endless loop.
After just a little bit of this, trust erodes: Who in the Gulf believes BP when it says it will make things right or the government when it promises that chemical dispersants aren't toxic? Finally — inevitably — comes the fracturing of the community. Travel around southern Louisiana and you'll hear complaints that BP isn't handing out cleanup jobs fairly, that some captains are getting all the work and others are getting nothing. "We're a community," said Acy Cooper, vice president of the Louisiana Shrimp Association, at a hearing in New Orleans for the national oil-spill commission. "This isn't fair, and it has to change." How to Heal
Complicating things further, most Gulf communities lack the mental-health resources to help spill victims recover from emotional damage. The folks at J.F. Gauthier Elementary School may be doing wonderful work, but it's hardly typical of the region. Plaquemines Parish, in southeastern Louisiana — home to hard-hit fishing ports like Venice — has just a handful of available counselors, and while local governments have asked BP for money to fund mental-health programs, very little has arrived. (The company, characteristically dilatory, says it is considering what to fund.) Gulf states like Louisiana were
already in the red before the spill; they don't have the funds to pay for the mental aftercare that will be needed. "Nongovernmental organizations and others are trying to provide services," says Dr. Ben Springgate, executive director of community health at the Tulane School of Medicine. "But there's simply no financial support so far."
In the meantime, psychologists and other experts are working to determine where help should go when it becomes available, launching studies to track the social impact of the spill and gauge the mental-health needs of communities. "We're trying to utilize all the information we can," says Dr. Howard Osofsky, head of the psychiatry department at Louisiana State University. "We have to do whatever possible to help these families."
Until that help arrives, Gulf residents have to do what they've done before: take care of their own needs — and remember that they're capable of doing so. One of the most damaging effects of the spill is that it takes away victims' sense of power. They feel helpless before BP and the government — and even the oil itself, with its habit of disappearing and reappearing without warning. "That eats away at people," says John Trumbaturi, a social worker in Plaquemines. "We want to help them improve their own coping skills."
That's the thinking behind the work of the St. Bernard Project and a similar community mental-health center opening in Plaquemines. Yvonne Landry knows that her friends and family in the region's tight-knit fishing community are hurting, but that doesn't mean they want to open up. "The men will never talk to a counselor," she says. But if they're leery of professionals, local men might be willing to open up to one another in peer counseling sessions like the kind she's been involved with in the St. Bernard Project. "We can talk to each other, just sit down and breathe," Landry says.
Indeed, if anyone can bounce back from the worst environmental disaster in U.S. history, it is the people of this region, who've survived hurricanes, corrupt state governments, the once hopeless New Orleans Saints and more. But surviving and eventually thriving may require residents to let go of their anger and perhaps even put aside a quest for legal justice. One of the most surprising findings from Picou's Exxon Valdez research was that the biggest predictor of sustained stress years after the event wasn't whether you were a fisherman or lived close to the spill but whether you were involved in a lawsuit. Fighting Exxon in court led to what Picou calls a "secondary disaster," as litigants were forced to relive the spill over and over.
That's why traumatized Gulf residents might be smart to listen to Kenneth Feinberg, the gruff Boston lawyer overseeing the $20 billion spill-compensation fund. "The people of Louisiana are pretty resilient," he said at a town-hall meeting in Port Sulphur recently. "Get a check, and move on as best you can." It's not fair, but for the sake of their psyches — and their children's — it might be the best advice they are going to get.
Crabbing in the Gulf after the BP Oil Disaster
Fishing Family Raymond Landry Jr., his son, Raymond III, work the waters off of St. Bernard Parish. The spill occurred at the height of the crabbing season.
On Board Raymond III, 12, and his uncle, deckhand John Pohlmann, sort blue crab on the family's boat.
Daily Catch The Landrys count and sort their haul after a morning at sea. The local fisherman worry about the potential toxic effects of the spill on the sea life they rely on to make a living.
Crab Boil The Landrys prepare corn and crab for dinner.
Feast Raymond Jr.'s wife, Yvonne, her nephew Aaron Pohlmann, 14, Tommy Landry, 4, and Raymond III, eat blue crab caught off the family's fishing boat.
Front Yard The kids play in front of the Landry home.
Reading Material After running to the corner store to pick up newsprint on which to eat the crab dinner, the Landry children and their friends read through some of the coupon papers they found.
Comings and Goings The Landrys share their home with a number of cats and dogs.
The Bayou Though the Landrys and other fisherman continue to work the waters near St. Bernard Parish, it is unclear what long-term effects the oil spill will have on their livelihood.
VIEWPOINT
The BP Spill: Has the Damage Been Exaggerated? By Michael Grunwald / Port Fourchon, La. Thursday, Jul. 29, 2010
President Obama has called the BP oil spill "the worst environmental disaster America has ever faced," and so has just about everyone else. Green groups are sounding alarms about the "catastrophe along the Gulf Coast," while CBS, Fox and MSNBC are all slapping "Disaster in the Gulf" chyrons on their spill-related news. Even BP fall guy Tony Hayward, after some early happy talk, admitted that the spill was an "environmental catastrophe." The obnoxious anti-environmentalist Rush Limbaugh has been a rare voice arguing that the spill — he calls it "the leak" — is anything less than an ecological calamity, scoffing at the avalanche of end-is-nigh eco-hype. Well, Limbaugh has a point. The Deepwater Horizon explosion was an awful tragedy for the 11 workers who died on the rig, and it's no leak; it's the biggest oil spill in U.S. history. It's also inflicting serious economic and psychological damage on coastal communities that depend on tourism, fishing and drilling.
But so far — while it's important to acknowledge that the long-term potential danger is simply unknowable for an underwater event that took place just three months ago — it does not seem to be inflicting severe environmental damage. "The impacts have been much, much less than everyone feared," says geochemist Jacqueline Michel, a federal contractor who is coordinating shoreline assessments in Louisiana.
An extensive network of oil booms surround marshland off the coast of Louisiana on July 18, 2010 Mario Tama / Getty Images Yes, the spill killed birds — but so far, less than 1% of the number killed by the Exxon Valdez spill in Alaska 21 years ago. Yes, we've heard horror stories about oiled dolphins — but so far, wildlife-response teams have collected only three visibly oiled carcasses of mammals. Yes, the spill prompted harsh restrictions on fishing and shrimping, but so far, the region's fish and shrimp have tested clean, and the restrictions are gradually being lifted. And yes, scientists have warned that the oil could accelerate the destruction of Louisiana's disintegrating coastal marshes — a real slow-motion ecological calamity — but so far, assessment teams have found only about 350 acres of oiled marshes, when Louisiana was already losing about 15,000 acres of wetlands every year. The disappearance of more than 2,000 sq. mi. of coastal Louisiana over the past century has been a true national tragedy, ravaging a unique wilderness, threatening the bayou way of life and leaving communities like New Orleans extremely vulnerable to hurricanes from the Gulf. And while much of the
erosion has been caused by the re-engineering of the Mississippi River — which no longer deposits much sediment at the bottom of its Delta — quite a bit has been caused by the oil and gas industry, which gouged 8,000 miles of canals and pipelines through coastal wetlands. But the spill isn't making that problem much worse. Coastal scientist Paul Kemp, a former Louisiana State University professor who is now a National Audubon Society vice president, compares the impact of the spill on the vanishing marshes to "a sunburn on a cancer patient." Marine scientist Ivor van Heerden, another former LSU prof, who's working for a spill-response contractor, says, "There's just no data to suggest this is an environmental disaster. I have no interest in making BP look good — I think they lied about the size of the spill — but we're not seeing catastrophic impacts." Van Heerden, like just about everyone else working in the Gulf these days, is being paid from BP's spill-response funds. "There's a lot of hype, but no evidence to justify it." The scientists I spoke with cite four basic reasons the initial eco-fears seem overblown. First, the Deepwater oil, unlike the black glop from the Valdez, is unusually light and degradable, which is why the slick in the Gulf is dissolving surprisingly rapidly now that the gusher has been capped. Second, the Gulf of Mexico, unlike Alaska's Prince William Sound, is very warm, which has helped bacteria break down the oil. Third, heavy flows of Mississippi River water have helped keep the oil away from the coast, where it can do much more damage. And finally, Mother Nature can be incredibly resilient. Van Heerden's assessment team showed me around Casse-tete Island in Timbalier Bay, where new shoots of Spartina grasses were sprouting in oiled marshes and new leaves were growing on the first black mangroves I've ever seen that were actually black. "It comes back fast, doesn't it?" van Heerden said. Van Heerden is controversial in Louisiana, so I should mention that this isn't the first time he and Kemp have helped convince me that the conventional wisdom about a big story was wrong. Shortly after Hurricane Katrina, when the Army Corps of Engineers was still insisting that a gigantic surge had overwhelmed its levees, they gave me a tour that debunked the prevailing narrative, demonstrating that most of the breached flood walls in New Orleans showed no signs of overtopping. Eventually, the Corps admitted that van Heerden and Kemp were right, that the surge in New Orleans was not so gigantic and that engineering failures had indeed drowned the city. But there was still a lot of resentment down here of van Heerden and his big mouth, especially after he wrote an I-told-you-so book about Katrina. He made powerful enemies at LSU, lost his faculty job, and is now suing the university. Meanwhile, he's been trashed locally as a BP shill ever since he downplayed the spill in a video on BP's website. But van Heerden and Kemp were right about Katrina, and when it comes to BP, they're sticking to the evidence gathered by the spill-response teams — which all include a state and federal representative as well as a BP contractor. So far, the teams have collected nearly 3,000 dead birds, but fewer than half of them were visibly oiled; some may have died from eating oil-contaminated food, but others may have simply died naturally at a time when the Gulf happened to be crawling with carcass seekers. In any case, the Valdez may have killed as many as 435,000 birds. The teams have found 492 dead sea turtles, which is unfortunate, but only 17 were visibly oiled; otherwise, they have found only one other dead reptile in the entire Gulf. "We can't speak to the long-term impacts, but Ivor is just saying what all of us are seeing," says Amy Holman, a National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) director for Alaska who is working on van Heerden's assessment team in the Gulf.
The shoreline teams have documented more than 600 miles of oiled beaches and marshes, but the beaches are fairly easy to clean, and the beleaguered marshes don't seem to be suffering much additional damage. Oil has blackened the fringes of the marshes, but most of it stayed within a few feet of the edge; waves from a recent tropical storm did carry more oil a few meters inland, but very little of it infiltrated the wetland soils that determine the health of the marsh. LSU coastal scientist Eugene Turner has dedicated much of his career to documenting how the oil industry has ravaged Louisiana's coast with canals and pipelines, but he says the BP spill will be a comparative blip and predicts that the oil will destroy fewer marshes than the airboats deployed to clean up the oil. "We don't want to deny that there's some damage, but nothing like the damage we've seen for years," he says. It's true that oil spills can create long-term problems; in Alaska, for example, shorebirds that ate Exxon-tainted mussels have had diminished reproductive success, and herring fisheries have yet to fully recover. The potential long-term damage that underwater oil plumes and an unprecedented amount of chemical dispersants that BP has spread in the area could have on the region's deep-water ecosystems and food chains might not be known for years. Some scientists worry that the swarms of oil-eating bacteria will lower dissolved oxygen levels; there has been early evidence of modest reductions, though nothing approaching the dead zone that was already proliferating in the Gulf because of agricultural runoff in the Mississippi River basin. "People always fear the worst in a spill, and this one was especially scary because we didn't know when it would stop," says Michel, an environmental consultant who has worked spills for NOAA for more than 30 years. "But the public always overestimates the danger — and this time, those of us in the spill business did too." It's easy to overstate the policy implications of this optimistic news. BP still needs to clean up its mess; federal regulation of deep-water drilling still needs to be strengthened; we still need to use fewer fossil fuels that warm the planet; we still don't need to use more corn ethanol (which is actually dirtier than gasoline). The push to exploit the spill to gain a comprehensive energy and climate bill in Congress has already stalled anyway — even though the planet still needs one. The good news does suggest the folly of Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindal's $350 million plan to build sand berms and rock jetties to protect marshes and barrier islands from oil. Some of the berms are already washing into the Gulf, and scientists agree that oil is the least of the problems facing Louisiana's coast, which had already lost more than 2,000 sq. mi. of wetlands before the spill. "Imagine how much real restoration we could do with all that money," van Heerden says. Anti-oil politicians, anti-Obama politicians and underfunded green groups all have obvious incentives to accentuate the negative in the Gulf. So do the media, because disasters drive ratings and sell magazines; those oil-soaked pelicans you saw on TV (and the cover of TIME) were a lot more compelling than the healthy ones I saw roosting on a protective boom in Bay Jimmy. Even Limbaugh, when he wasn't downplaying the spill, outrageously hyped it as "Obama's Katrina." But honest scientists don't do that, even when they work for Audubon. "There are a lot of alarmists in the bird world," Kemp says. "People see oiled pelicans and they go crazy. But this has been a disaster for people, not biota."
Funny or Die: How the Web Is Changing Comedy By RICHARD ZOGLIN Monday, Aug. 09, 2010
Production chief Mike Farah, center, with the Funny or Die staff Jeff Minton for TIME
How many comedy writers does it take to make a Hollywood star laugh? A half-dozen staffers for the comedy website Funny or Die are sitting around a conference table on a recent Tuesday afternoon taking a stab at it. Their target: 23-year-old actress Camilla Belle (When a Stranger Calls), the latest Hollywood celeb to make the unlikely pilgrimage to a modest suite of offices on Hollywood Boulevard to discuss starring in a Funny or Die video. The writers come armed with ideas pegged to Belle's résumé along with a few pet projects in need of a star. Belle appeared in the prehistoric adventure film 10,000 B.C. and had a role in The Lost World: Jurassic Park. How about a sketch in which she insists she won't do another film unless it has prehistoric animals in it? She's into dance, and her mother is Brazilian — maybe a parody of Dirty Dancing using Brazilian fight dancing? The pitches come as fast as Belle can utter her polite, encouraging responses ("That's funny" ... "uh-huh" ... "yeah, yeah, yeah"). A celebrity photo shoot in which the pretentious photographer wields a cheesy cell-phone camera? A commercial for a line of anatomically revealing women's jeans? A fake TV promo for a girls' classic like Little Women or Anne of Green Gables done up in the style of The Hills? A dozen or so ideas later, Belle is out the door, and Mike Farah, 31, Funny or Die's president of production, has retreated to his office, a couple of writers tagging along, to check on some other projects in the works. He jabs at the speakerphone and puts in a quick call to Charlize Theron's manager to see if they can get her for a cameo in a World Cup bit they're shooting in South Africa. "She loves you guys," says the voice on the phone. "Can you just send me an e-mail?" A writer tells Farah there's a chance they can hook up with NBA star Dwyane Wade in Chicago for a piece they want to shoot at a sporting-goods store. Then an update on the search for a female star to make a cameo in their upcoming Glee takeoff: Meryl Streep said no. When they launched Funny or Die, or FOD, three years ago, comedy star Will Ferrell and his producing partner Adam McKay envisioned a clearinghouse for amateur comedy videos and a place "for our friends to play." But who knew they had so many friends? Since the website's first hit video, "The Landlord" — a two-minute masterpiece in which Ferrell is a deadbeat tenant arguing with his bullying, profane landlord,
played by McKay's 2-year-old daughter — FOD has become a celebrity magnet to rival Vanity Fair's Oscar party. Justin Bieber popped by to shoot a batch of videos casting him as an out-of-control teen star. (He bought the website and renamed it Bieber or Die.) Oscar winner Marion Cotillard starred in a video wearing a pair of fake breasts on her forehead. Paris Hilton used Funny or Die to respond to John McCain's jabs at her during the 2008 presidential campaign, Heidi Montag did one poking fun at her plastic surgery, and seven current and former Saturday Night Live impressionists got together for a "presidential reunion" sketch directed by Ron Howard to urge support for Obama's financial-reform bill. Now agents and managers are jamming the Funny or Die phone lines, offering up their clients for a chance to be part of the hottest comedy site on the Web. The pay isn't much — nothing, to be precise — but there are other rewards: the publicity boost when a video goes viral and the chance to show you can make fun of yourself and still be a star while doing it. "This is where people come between paying jobs," says Farah. "It shows the power that this piece of the whole entertainment pie now commands. It's become a real part of these people's careers, another way to position themselves."
Funny or Die launched in February 2007, after Sequoia Capital, one of Silicon Valley's top venture-capital firms, approached Ferrell and McKay about starting a website devoted exclusively to comedy. At first it was filled mostly with amateur videos. (Users can vote each one up or down — "funny" or "die" — with the top picks featured on the home page.) But after "The Landlord" created a sensation (it has been viewed more than 72 million times), the operation got professional fast. Andrew Steele, a 13-year veteran of SNL, was brought in to oversee the creative shop, and Dick Glover, a former exec for ABC and NASCAR, took over as business chief. Today the site has a staff of nearly 50, produces about 20 original videos a month (in addition to some 100 a day uploaded by users) and draws an average of 7 million unique visitors a month. With the help of a growing roster of advertisers — not to mention a bare-bones, nonunion staff and free acting talent — the site is actually turning a profit: a typical FOD video costs about $2,000 to make and generates at least $3,000 in ad revenue, much more if the video is a hit. Inevitably, the brand extensions have begun: a weekly series on HBO, a pilot for Comedy Central, a live comedy tour, a movie in development and talk of producing low-budget films for download. "We think there's an opportunity to redefine what comedy is, how it's made and distributed," says Glover.
Clubhouse for Comedy At the very least, Funny or Die has managed to harness the explosion of comedy on the Web, give it a professional coat of paint and bring it — for better or worse — some Hollywood cachet. Ferrell and McKay, who spend most of their time making movies together, are largely absentee owners, though McKay checks in daily and Ferrell stars in the occasional video. But in building a comedy clubhouse that harks back to such collaborative satire as Sid Caesar's Your Show of Shows or the early days of Saturday Night Live, they've created the go-to comedy site for Generation LOL.
FOD's success is also emblematic of a sea change in comedy. Stand-ups still whine about bad dates; sitcom plots keep getting rehashed; sketch comedy continues to limp along on Saturday Night Live. But the real cutting edge has shifted to a new form: short Web videos. Many of these are simply home-movie inanities — cats acting like people or toddlers dancing to Beyoncé. But the Web has also spawned a new generation of comedy creators and an array of distinctive styles, ranging from SNL-type skits like "The Landlord" to parodies, mashups and assorted other goofs on familiar media formats — TV promos, movie trailers, music videos, iPhone commercials, viral videos. They show up on YouTube (and on sites like
Barely Political, College Humor and the Onion), circulate via blogs and social-networking sites, spawn fresh variations. In the Jack Benny era, these memes — the Web-favored term — would have been known as running gags. Now everybody gets to run with them.
There was, for example, the slew of "Hitler Reacts" videos: re-edits of the climactic scene from the German movie Downfall in which the Führer goes ballistic after his generals give him bad news, with the subtitles rewritten to reflect whatever outrage is dominating the news at the moment — from Hillary Clinton's imploding presidential campaign to NBC's dumping of Conan O'Brien from The Tonight Show. So many Web smarties chimed in with their own versions that the film's distributor, Constantin Films, finally demanded that they be taken down because of copyright infringement. The beauty of the Hitler videos was that they could have been done nowhere but on the Web. Other popular comic themes are less unique to the medium but have reached their apotheosis there: the remixed TV promo, for example (Lost re-edited so it looks like Friends or Baywatch, or Seinfeld redone as a horror film), or the superliteral music video (old MTV hits with new lyrics that describe in ridiculously literal terms the outlandish imagery onscreen). The Internet itself has provided some of the ripest targets. Mel Gibson's recent telephone outbursts were combined, inevitably, with Christian Bale's audiotaped tirade on the set of Terminator: Salvation. A loopy video of a dude raving ecstatically over a rainbow in Yosemite National Park spawned a mashup with the Muppets song "Rainbow Connection." This is comedy perfectly suited to the Internet: short, democratic, endlessly self-referential — a running satiric commentary on the media stew we're all swimming in. "What I love about this job is that the Internet is everything," says Funny or Die writer-actor Seth Morris, who, like several other FOD staffers, came from the Upright Citizens Brigade improv troupe. "It's highs and lows. Jon Gosselin, scum-of-the-earth reality-show people, Oscar winner Ron Howard. I feel like I'm closer to the times I'm living in." Fending Off Stars Funny or Die has been smart about generating buzz, especially by combining celebrities with political advocacy. (Jack Black, John C. Reilly and Neil Patrick Harris appeared in an elaborate 2008 high-school-musical spoof to protest Proposition 8, California's gay-marriage ban.) But the influx of Hollywood star power has its downside as well: providing made-to-order videos for celebrities shopping for buzz is hardly in the renegade spirit of the Web. "If someone has a bad idea, we'll probably figure out a way not to do it," says Steele. "On the other hand, we don't like to reject people when they're putting themselves, and their own minds and creativity, out for free." Still, the site manages to subvert the Hollywood ethos even as it buys into it — as in Zach Galifianakis' portrayal of a surly, inept cable-talk-show host in his brilliant "Between Two Ferns" or Brett Gelman's superunctuous star encounters in his "Mr. Celebrity" series. And even as the productions grow more elaborate (like "Brostitute," a slick, funny docu-parody in which Tim Roth stars as a pimp for guys cruising for male buddies), FOD hasn't lost its scrappy, spontaneous spirit. When an aspiring Alabama agriculture commissioner named Dale Peterson caused an Internet sensation with an over-the-top campaign ad, writer-director Jake Szymanski found a horse, cast himself in the lead role and turned around a parody in a day.
"Sometimes it's better to do a video at 80% right now than 100% if it takes five days," says Szymanski, a Northwestern University grad who started uploading videos to Funny or Die when it launched, then got hired as the site's third full-time employee. "It's that vibe of picking up on the first funny joke you heard from your friend. You're grabbing on to the collective unconscious." And sometimes, of course, getting grabbed by it. "The Internet is the modern-day freak show," says Szymanski. "Your funny, smart, three-minute video can always get beaten by a cat with a printer." Yeah, but mash it up with Mel Gibson and you've got a comedy classic.
Behind the Scenes at Funny or Die
Laugh Factory Launched in February 2007 by comedy star Will Ferrell and his producing partner Adam McKay, Funny or Die has quickly evolved from a site largely populated by amateur videos to a small scale production outfit with a staff of nearly 50, producing about 20 videos a month. The site has featured videos with such stars as Justin Bieber, Marion Cotillard and Tim Roth.
Editing Bay Typical Funny or Die pieces are produced on a shoestring. The stars get paid nothing and production costs come in at around $2,000 per video.
Pitch Actress Parker Posey comes to the office to exchange ideas.
Founders Though Ferrell stars in the site's first hit video, "The Landlord" — a two-minute masterpiece in which he plays a deadbeat tenant arguing with his bullying, profane landlord, played by Adam McKay's 2-year-old daughter — he and McKay are largely absentee owners these days.
Jewel On the day that photographer Jeff Minton visited the offices, singer Jewel was getting made up for a video in which she would pretend to be a homely businesswoman at a karaoke bar who chooses to sing
— what else? — one of her own songs.
A New You Stars like to appear in Funny or Die videos because of the publicity boost, but also because it gives them a chance to show they can make fun of themselves and still be a star while doing it.
Writers' Room The success of the site has led to projects that will take FOD out of the realm of the Internet. There are
offers for a weekly series on HBO, a pilot for Comedy Central, a live comedy tour, a movie in development and more. "Funny or Die is all about that vibe of picking up on the first funny joke you heard from your friend," says staff writer Jake Szymanski. "You're grabbing on to the collective unconscious, (but) the Internet is the modern-day freak show. Your funny, smart, three-minute video can always get beaten by a cat with a printer."
WORLD
WikiLeaks's Julian Assange: The Wizard From Oz By EBEN HARRELL Monday, Aug. 09, 2010
Dead drop WikiLeaks founder Assange claims to have invented a system that solves the problem of press censorship Kate Peters for TIME Julian Assange is about to sit down to explain how his website, WikiLeaks.org, came to publish more than 90,000 secret reports from the war in Afghanistan when he starts to get restless. His chair is made of soft leather, and Assange doesn't like it. "There's no hard surface to slam my fist on and say, 'F______ bastards! I will crash them all!'" he says, smiling. It's hard to tell whether Assange is joking. A tall, wan, white-haired former computer hacker, Assange is so soft-spoken, it is sometimes difficult to hear him. But just a day earlier, his website released a log of documents that exposed in unprecedented detail the difficulties NATO troops face in Afghanistan. (See TIME's top 10 leaks.) Nothing gives Assange more pleasure than embarrassing the powerful: he founded WikiLeaks in 2006 as a sort of dead drop for whistle-blowers to anonymously post confidential material. And with six years of the Afghanistan war on display — including many reports of civilian casualties and suspicions that Pakistan's intelligence service and the Taliban are in collusion — Assange has his biggest scoop to date. "I am a journalist, a publisher and an inventor," Assange says. "I have tried to invent a system that solves the problem of censorship of the press and the censorship of the whistle-blower across the whole world." That's a big claim, but like they say, it ain't bragging if you can do it. In the past few years, WikiLeaks, which consists of six full-time volunteers and about 1,000 part-time encryption experts (the site's main server is in Sweden, though the operation is global), has published a manual from Camp Delta at Guantánamo Bay, an internal report commissioned by oil-trading company Trafigura detailing the dumping of potentially toxic material off the African coast and a video of a 2007 American helicopter attack that killed two Reuters journalists in Baghdad — which Reuters had lobbied unsuccessfully for
years to have released. WikiLeaks' release of documents alleging corruption in Kenya won the site an award from Amnesty International. And with the Afghan papers, Assange "has basically guaranteed that think tanks, academics and analysts will study his website for some time. It's history right there on the Internet for everyone to see," says Paul Rogers, a British academic and security correspondent for the website OpenDemocracy.net. (See a video of WikiLeaks' founder reviewing TIME's top 10 leaks.) Assange says he is motivated to "protect victims." His website's stated guiding belief is that "transparency in government leads to reduced corruption," and he's happy to take the fight to those governments that he thinks cover things up. Assange says he likes "intellectual combat," and he certainly knows how to throw and dodge a punch. Despite its growing notoriety and prominence, WikiLeaks has only one public spokesman: Assange. The material it posts is not always unfiltered. An abridged version of the 2007 helicopter attack posted on WikiLeaks — which had been edited by Assange and titled "Collateral Murder" — was criticized for failing to show that one of the men fired on by the chopper was carrying a rocket-propelled grenade launcher. Assange's tactics are part of the reason some open-government campaigners are wary of WikiLeaks even as they remain astonished by its scoops. "It is not journalism. It's data dissemination, and that worries me," says Lucy Dalglish, executive director of the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press. "Journalists will go through a period of consultation before publishing sensitive material. WikiLeaks says it does the same thing. But traditional publishers can be held accountable. Aside from Julian Assange, no one knows who these people are." Assange, an Australian, 39, who studied physics at the University of Melbourne as an adult student, moves between four bases — which he does not specify, citing security concerns. Assange's story is unique to the Internet age. His early career was as a hacker, using the handle Mendax, from the Latin splendide mendax, or "nobly untruthful." In 1991, at age 20, he broke into the master terminal of Nortel, the Canadian telecom company. Assange was caught and pleaded guilty to 26 charges; six other charges were dropped, and he paid only a small fine after the judge commended his "intelligent inquisitiveness." Assange has retained a hacker's mentality. He works from secret bunkers on major leaks and is convinced he is under surveillance from government intelligence agencies that tail him when he travels. There's a touch of paranoia in his style, but say this for Assange: he takes his work seriously. In discussion with TIME, he offers lengthy and reasoned arguments about U.S. jurisprudence and the importance of the First Amendment. It's a paradox. While Assange might like to pummel the U.S. for its performance in Afghanistan, he also understands that his work is founded on principles of which the U.S. and its Western allies remain important protectors. "We must make the default assumption that each individual has the right to communicate knowledge to other individuals," Assange says of his decision to publish the Afghanistan papers. "And the U.S. First Amendment is clear that publishers have the right to tell the people what is going on."
ARTS & ENTERTAINMENT
Rock Steady By CLAIRE SUDDATH / CHICAGO Monday, Aug. 09, 2010
Front row fans dance to Major Lazer at the Pitchfork Music Festival Lauren Fleishman for TIME
Big Boi isn't indie. Or is he? As one-half of the rap duo OutKast, he has sold some 18 million albums, won six Grammy Awards and appeared on more hit songs than even he can keep track of. Yet there he was on July 18 at the Pitchfork Music Festival in Chicago, playing alongside bands only a fraction as successful. As thousands of writhing, fist-pumping fans swarmed the main stage and climbed on top of fences to get a look at the hip-hop megastar, thousands more were across the park, stomping and dancing to the largely unknown noise-pop act Sleigh Bells (album sales: 47,000). That doesn't usually happen to Big Boi. But this festival is hosted by Pitchfork Media, the online music magazine that in recent years has become a commanding authority within the indie-music scene. Over three days in July, 46 acts — ranging from the recently reunited 1990s rock band Pavement to the weird, raunchy Jamaican-inspired dance group Major Lazer — blew the collective minds of 54,000 people (average age: 27) in Chicago's unglamorous, nonlakefront Union Park. "Rock used to be one living cell," says Victoria Legrand, vocalist for the dreamy pop duo Beach House, which performed on the third day of the festival. "It was all grunge or all metal. But I'm glad it's not like that anymore. The cells are dividing." The numbers back her up. U.S. album sales have dropped 38% in the past decade — but at the same time, there's more music out there than ever before. In 2005, according to Nielsen SoundScan, 60,000 new albums were released in the U.S.; by 2009, the number had risen to almost 100,000. Factor in the millions of songs being downloaded for free on file-sharing systems like BitTorrent or being swapped on social-networking sites like MySpace and you've got a picture of how most industry insiders see the music business: fragmented, lawless and less and less profitable. Yet flourishing among those fragments is Pitchfork. On a Scale of 1 to 10 In 1995, Ryan Schreiber was a 19-year-old Minneapolis record-store clerk who wanted to publish a
rock-music fanzine but lacked access to a photocopier. Instead, he started a website, called it Pitchfork and began posting his thoughts on bands like Sonic Youth, Fugazi and the Pixies — groups whose songs rarely (if ever) appeared on the radio or MTV. It was the first golden age of "indie" artists, back when the word was shorthand for music released on independent record labels, signifying the artistic freedom and cachet that came from operating on the fringes. By 2000, Schreiber had moved the site to Chicago, acquired some freelance writers and codified the Pitchfork review into a signature formula — a long, rambling personal opinion of an album, accompanied by a rating on a scale from 0.0 to 10.0. But the site's readership was still, to use his word, "negligible." That changed in October of that year, when Pitchfork posted a fawning, grandiloquent 10.0 review of Radiohead's experimental rock album Kid A. Critic Brent DiCrescenzo's paean included lines like "butterscotch lamps along the walls of the tight city square bled upward into the cobalt sky" and became an Internet sensation — for all the wrong reasons. "The writing was so purple, so outrageous. People passed it around because it was funny," Schreiber says. Pitchfork's readership jumped exponentially, to about 5,000 hits a day. Then an odd thing happened: people made fun of the prose, but they kept reading Pitchfork. Schreiber and his writers knew what they were talking about; Kid A., which later debuted at No. 1 on Billboard, really was a 10.0 album. Pitchfork's reviews of artists previously considered unknown or underground — like xylophone-prone Icelandic band Sigur Rós and harmonizing rockers Modest Mouse — began to act as stepping-stones to mainstream coverage. In 2000, Modest Mouse moved from independent label Up Records to Sony-owned Epic; by 2005, they had performed on Saturday Night Live, been nominated for two Grammys and guest-starred on Fox's teen drama The O.C. Their songs are now used in car commercials. Bands like Modest Mouse still weren't as big as Pearl Jam or U2, but then again, neither was anyone else. Last year, only 11 artists released new albums that received a platinum certification from the Recording Industry Association of America; as recently as 2006, there were 56. "There isn't really such a thing as mainstream rock anymore," says Scott Plagenhoef, Pitchfork's editor. "There are a lot of bands who shouldn't be considered indie rock, like Modest Mouse, but they still are because you can't hear them on commercial radio." That doesn't mean you can't hear them at all — far from it. Over half the top-billed acts at the Pitchfork festival are on major labels. Singer-songwriter St. Vincent, who took the stage right before Big Boi, is featured on the Twilight: New Moon sound track. Indie rock never had its Beatles-on-the-Ed Sullivan Show moment; it seemed to seep slowly into listeners' ears, one song at a time. By 2004, when a rave Pitchfork review of Funeral, the debut album by a small Montreal band called Arcade Fire, helped turn it into the biggest-selling record in the 21-year history of its label, indie — and Pitchfork — were on a roll. Record companies courted reviews. Stores used them to make purchasing decisions. "If they give a really high number to a new band, that puts it on our radar because we know people will come in and request it," says Doyle Davis, a co-owner of Grimey's, an independent record store in Nashville. "We definitely pay attention to Pitchfork." That goes for hip-hop stars too. In his high-rise hotel
room before the festival, Big Boi said he hadn't heard of Pitchfork until last year. "They reviewed one of my songs," he said, "and my manager got excited and said that was important." Taking It Outside Pitchfork started its music festival in 2006 for largely the same reasons that Schreiber founded the website: no other venue was showcasing the type of music he and his friends wanted to hear, for a price they were willing to pay. At $40 a day, admission costs less than half that at Lollapalooza. And while this summer has been a dismal one for many artists — overall ticket sales are down 17% so far, according to industry trade magazine Pollstar, and some tours like Lilith Fair have had to cancel dates — Pitchfork's festival sold out months in advance. It's here at Union Park that the evolution of the term indie most clearly manifests itself. After nearly 20 years of changing tastes and label consolidation, indie has become a catchall that suggests less what the music sounds like than the type of people who listen to it. The music may be rock or dance or hip-hop, but it all appeals to Pitchfork's shaggy-haired, skinny-jeans-wearing crowd, sitting on blankets with eyes closed in the summer sun. But when the sun sets, people get on their feet and start to move. Some watch Big Boi speed-rap his way through OutKast's 2000 hit "B.O.B.," while others opt for the unpolished, unfamous Sleigh Bells, the Brooklyn-based band praised by Pitchfork before they'd even released a single. "I wanted to see if they were as good as Pitchfork said," explained Nick Mayor, 24, from Chicago. "I came [here] for stuff I hadn't heard before."
The Pitchfork Music Festival
Rock On This year's Pitchfork Music Festival featured 46 acts, drawing 54,000 people to Chicago's Union Park.
Guitar Hero Among the many acts that appeared were indie stars like Modest Mouse, Major Lazer, Pavement and Wolf Parade, above.
Groovy Scene During the day, many of the concertgoers enjoyed picnics in the grass.
Face Paint Hannah Beller and Cameron Benton came from Tulsa, Oklahoma to attend the show.
Indie Nation One of this year's top draws was Big Boi, one of the rappers from the hip-hop group Outkast, who entertained the crowd, above, with a string of the band's radio hits.
Rapt LCD Soundsystem, one of the festival's highly anticipated performers appeared as the final act on the Saturday night of the festival.
Excitement The raunchy Jamaican-inspired dance group Major Lazer entertains the crowd on the festival's last day.
Downtime A couple rests on the second day of the festival.
Fan Maxwell Palmer was photographed outside the festival grounds.
Closing Though Pitchfork has always been associated with indie rock, it is hard to say, after three days of performances, what exactly that means. "Rock used to be one living cell," says Victoria Legrand, vocalist for the dreamy pop duo Beach House, which performed on the third day of the festival. "It was all grunge or all metal. But I'm glad it's not like that anymore. The cells are dividing."
Q&A Kevin Kline By BRYAN ALEXANDER Monday, Aug. 09, 2010
Matt Carr / Getty Images
A Oscar-winning actor who can move effortlessly from sensitive guy (The Big Chill) to absurd eccentric (A Fish Called Wanda), Kline is flying his freak flag high again as playwright Henry Harrison, a penniless social escort to wealthy widows, in The Extra Man. Kline spoke to TIME about cross-dressing, Shakespeare and the global sock crisis.
The filmmakers said they immediately thought of you for this part — a broke, outlandish social sponge. Were you flattered? Who wouldn't be flattered? Funny, they told me they wanted me because I was a man of the theater. I'm enraged.
Your character's dance is so odd and fantastic. Is it part of your morning routine? I skipped it this morning because I had a very full day. Actually, it's not. I'd be in the hospital. My character basically moved whatever he felt was rotting. So we just assumed everything was rotting. I did the dance for like three or four minutes, and you see about 30 seconds. Maybe it will be in the DVD in the entirety. Dance is the best exercise there is.
I thought Thigh-Master was the best exercise. What is that?
Suzanne Sommers sells them on television, for stronger thighs. I see. I feel a degree of mastery over my thighs as it is.
Your character uses dark paint for socks to save money, have you tried that? I have not. I have never been that far down. But I love my character's inventiveness.
It would actually solve the worldwide one-missing-sock crisis. Exactly. But rather than paint, why not just wear different colored socks? What is this uniformity of sock color? I may try to introduce that as a trend.
I'll push that in the piece. Okay, but I want a piece of the action. I want everyone to send me the other sock they are not using.
Done. Your costar, Paul Dano, dresses in drag. What's the appropriate on-set compliment? What do you say? 'Nice teddy?' You don't want to say, 'Jesus, what has happened to your career?' You want to be encouraging, but there is even chagrin at getting complimented for wearing women's clothes. I've dressed as a woman a couple of times on film. And I have to say I make an extraordinarily ugly woman. Hideous. Even clean-shaven.
If I was an aspiring drag queen, what advice would you have for me? I'd say go for individual style rather than following fashion. Because clearly you have issues that are
unique to you that you need to work through. But hey, I'm for socks of a different color; it's a gateway move that could lead to cross-dressing.
You play Edwin Stanton, Lincoln's secretary of war, in Robert Redford's The Conspirator. That's serious facial hair. I have seen Civil War movies that become about bad facial hair. So we did a modified version of the Edwin Stanton beard. There are two to three pictures of Stanton and we can assume in between those shots he trimmed his beard. And that's the one I give you. I think Mr. Redford eschewed the idea of too much beardage.
Is it your beard or the prop department's beard? No, it's me. It's different. It's so different that Woody Harrelson visited the set and I was talking to Mr. Redford and he came over. And after five minutes I said, "It's me — Kevin." He didn't recognize me. Roger Ebert said that when I do comedies I wear a mustache and when I do drama I don't wear a mustache. Interestingly, you'll see in "The Conspirator" that that changes. Wait a minute. It's a beard, but no mustache. Never mind. But I did do a part in an Ivan Reitman comedy with no facial hair.
You've done Shakespeare so many times. What's your dream Bard project? I've always wanted to play Othello. And I have only done Hamlet twice. One really can improve the third time around.
Could you make it a happy ending this time? It is a happy ending, because everyone's so sick of him grousing for four hours. They are happy he's dead. Hamlet's last line is, "the rest is silence." It's almost to assure the audience that I'm shutting up now.
The Short List of Things to Do WEEK OF JULY 30
Dinner for Schmucks Now in theaters
Tim (Paul Rudd) has one big chance to impress his boss: by bringing an idiot — Barry (Steve Carell), who makes mouse dioramas — to a dinner at which mockery is the main course. Director Jay Roach's remake of a French farce neatly juggles big laughs with the subtler ribaldry of acute pain.
PHOTO-ILLUSTRATION BY SEAN MCCABE FOR TIME
Huge Airs on ABC Family
What stands on the fault line between the child-obesity crisis and the teen-body-image crisis? Fat camp. ABC Family's dramedy would
be
special
just
for
featuring
nonemaciated bodies on a teen soap. But its snarky wit and big heart make it a plus-size pleasure.
BRUCE BIRMELIN / ABC FAMILY
Super Sad Love Story
True
Now in stores
Gary
Shteyngart,
the
absurdist
behind
Absurdistan, gives us a dystopic world whose citizens are obsessed with digital media, their credit scores and living forever. It's funny with a side of bleakly familiar. But if love can't find a way among these ruins, it's not for lack of trying.
Hugh Hefner: Playboy, Activist and Rebel Now in theaters
He still refers to women as girls, still keeps a harem at the mansion and, at 84, still runs America's most famous men's magazine. Brigitte Berman's doting doc focuses on Hef's censorship busting and philanthropy while making room for the centerfolds.
The Kim Collection
Novak
Now in stores
In the '50s, this lavender blonde with the sullen sensuality was "the next Marilyn Monroe" and probably made more good movies. Here are five — dramas (Picnic, Jeanne Eagels, Middle of the Night), a comedy (Bell Book and Candle) and a musical (Pal Joey) — all smartly restored.
BUSINESS
How to Make Cars And Make Money Too By Bill Saporito / Dearborn Monday, Aug. 09, 2010
Alan Mulally Gregg Segal for TIME
Listen to Ford Motor Co.'s excitable CEO, Alan Mulally, for five minutes and you are almost ready to march down to the assembly line, grab a torque wrench and start knocking bolts into Mustangs. "We are fighting for the soul of American manufacturing," he begins. "We are leading the way on, What does it take for America to compete in the global economy? That's what this is about. And it starts with making the best products in the world. That's why we can have this lifestyle — because you have to earn it." Ford is certainly earning quite a bit of it. After the industrial Armageddon that left GM and Chrysler in bankruptcy and the car industry's 5,000 top suppliers hanging by a fraying fan belt, Ford is flying the flag of resurgence. The company earned $2.6 billion on sales of $31.3 billion in its second quarter. Its pretax operating profit — a measure of how well the core business is running — was $2.9 billion, vs. a loss of $424 million a year earlier. Ford's market share jumped 1.4 points, to 17.5%, at the expense of GM and Chrysler. In rankings compiled by Kelley Blue Book, an auto-marketing research firm, Ford recently claimed the top spot from troubled Toyota as the best-regarded auto brand in the U.S. Pulling off the biggest business turnaround of the Great Recession has been a pretty good second act for Mulally, who turns 65 on Aug. 4. The CEO arrived at Ford in late 2006 after 37 years at Boeing, amid some sniping that he wasn't a "car guy" — as if the car guys in Detroit were doing a bang-up job. Yet if Ford is going to change gears from world-class survivor to world-class manufacturer, Mulally will have to show that he is indeed a car guy — just his own kind of one.
He's about to get the chance. This year the company is introducing new models that will reflect Ford's strategic direction and test its ability to create cars that Americans want to buy even without getting a discount. The Fiesta, which debuted in May, is evidence of Ford's commitment to producing profitable small cars. The Fiesta is a spiffy-enough $13,300 subcompact, available in four-door sedan and five-door hatchback models. The car was largely designed in Germany but meets the demands of American buyers: it's sporty, smart, thrifty, cool. "The old Fiesta was total crap," says Patrick Olsen, editor in chief of Cars.com "This one looks better and is more solidly built than any of their previous small cars" — even if the rear seat in the sedan version "is too small for most humans." In late July, Mulally traveled to Manhattan to reveal the new Explorer, an SUV reborn as a more mom-friendly, stable, fuel-efficient vehicle built on a Taurus platform, as opposed to the gas-gulping truck frame it once inhabited. The company plans to export the Explorer to 90 countries from its Chicago plant, where it will create 1,200 assembly jobs and 600 supplier jobs, underlining Mulally's commitment to manufacturing on the global playing field. Ford's most important new family member arrives later this year, when the company unwraps the latest version of the Focus, which will be the first global car built from the ground up based on Mulally's signature strategy, known as One Ford. In its broadest sense, One Ford means selling the same model, built the same way, in all markets. About 85% of the Focus' parts will be common to all regions. One Ford is possible because the world's consumers are becoming more alike: they value quality, safety, fuel efficiency and design. This allows Ford to meet global needs with fewer models and thus ratchet costs down, since the company can engineer a single Focus to sell everywhere. If One Ford works, Ford can sell each model at a higher volume, with costs that are as much as 20% lower than for earlier versions. Although Ford will still be building such purely American cars as the Mustang and the highly profitable F-150 pickup series, One Ford means that the very definition of what a Ford is — steering, handling, the sound of a door slamming shut — may change as the company's global DNA evolves. One spin in a Fiesta will tell you as much: it's as much Milan as it is Milwaukee. For a manufacturing enterprise, One Ford is radical simplification. Ford was a company with too much of everything: brands, models, engines, platforms, factories, people. Mulally has reduced it to a manageable core. He delights in presenting the company's entire strategy — its products, standards and operating plan — to a visitor on a single 11-by-17-in. piece of paper.
SOCIETY
Building a Better Playground By HARRIET BAROVICK Monday, Aug. 09, 2010
Kids build and dismantle giant foam structures at a New York City playground Gus Powell for TIME
I know I am supposed to like play grounds. But my happy childhood memories of spontaneous kick-the-can games on suburban lawns make me a little wistful whenever I watch my twin 6-year-old sons in our local urban park. Sure, it's fun to swing and slide, but after a while there's not much new to glean. Turns out, there are other parents feeling unsatisfied by the same old playground equipment. Fortunately, one of them is the restless, preternaturally intelligent architect David Rockwell, designer of theater sets (Hairspray), restaurants (Nobu) and hotels (W). He was so frustrated by the fixed nature of the playgrounds his kids frequented that he set out to reinvent them. Rockwell spent five years consulting with experts on children and play, testing out his ideas at schools and then working pro bono with New York City officials to produce a play space that does something revolutionary: instead of prescribing activities — climb this, sit on that — the water-friendly environment encourages kids to be creative, messy, constructive and, yes, even destructive as they build with and topple giant foam blocks. Some of the 350 bright blue blocks at the Imagination Playground, which opened July 27 in a former parking lot in Manhattan, are shaped like wheels, others like cogs or giant noodles. The blocks can be used to make anything children can think of — a car, a river, a fort, a flower — and are deliberately big so kids will be more likely to assist each other with them. Visitors probably won't even notice that there are no swings or seesaws. The 12,000-sq.-ft. (about 1,100 sq m) multilevel space has plenty of room for running, climbing and other gross-motor activity: ropes dangle underneath the ramps that sweep around one side of the peanut-shaped playground. But the blocks and other movable materials provide ample opportunity to exercise the mind as well. A giant sandpit and nearby shallow pool are not just for digging and splashing but also for utilizing pulleys, wheelbarrows, plastic pipes and other tools. A gleaming steel crow's nest with a spiral staircase offers a
quiet spot from which to view the action — and doubles as a storage site for the blocks, shovels, fabrics, etc. Rockwell's design, which was inspired in part by European "adventure playgrounds" where supervised kids can get creative with a wide variety of objects, follows the prevailing theory that free, child-initiated play is a critical component of healthy social, emotional and intellectual development. A leading missionary for that idea, Darrell Hammond — who heads the nonprofit Kaboom!, the largest builder of playgrounds in the U.S. — was so excited by the Imagination Playground concept when it was announced in 2007 that he cold-called Rockwell to suggest they create portable versions to enhance existing play sites around the country. In 2008, two years before the opening of the New York City park, Rockwell and Hammond unveiled Imagination Playground in a Box, a walk-in-closet-size container with at least 75 foam blocks, among other components. The portable sets, which start at $6,150, now complement play spaces in such cities as Chicago; Honolulu; Yuma, Ariz.; and Winston-Salem, N.C., and have prompted calls from several mayors eager to build permanent Imagination Playgrounds. One additional expense is that both the portable and permanent versions need to be staffed by grownups. These so-called play associates are tasked with making sure kids use the equipment safely and, with any luck, keeping helicopter parents from hovering too close. Associates can also help prevent people from walking off with the loose parts. New York City has a mix of public and private sources to fund the staffers, who require training and earn at least $14.90 per hour. Other cities have relied on grants or volunteers. To Hammond, the greater cost would be not making a priority of this sort of children's play. "We view this as the start of a movement," he says. "When kids are the experts who design, tear down and rebuild their own scenarios, when there's no right or wrong way to play, it helps them deal with everything that happens in their worlds, and it builds a foundation for healthy, active lives." Most parents won't be thinking quite that deeply. But they seem to appreciate happy chaos when they see it. "It's good that it's messy," Molly Weinberger said recently as her two boys dug into an Imagination Playground in a Box that had been wheeled into an otherwise ordinary Manhattan park. "Not many kids now get to just go out and play with things that don't go beep or boop. " Her 4-year-old had used the blocks to fashion a 4-ft.-long (1.2 m) car with oddly shaped wheels and interior seating. He inserted a noodle into a hole in the side of the vehicle, but when I caught up with him to ask what he had been pumping, he responded quickly, "Now I'm finished with that." And he was. He was busy helping another boy spray water through a window in a fort they had just made.
Big-League Chew By STEPHEN GANDEL Monday, Aug. 09, 2010
Danny Kim for TIME
If you've read other stories of mine but think this one is better, here's why: I'm writing it while wearing a high-performance mouth guard. I recently spent two weeks doing everything, aside from sleeping and eating, with a thin piece of plastic and two large yellow bite pads snapped over my lower teeth. Mouth guards are common in football, hockey and boxing, but a growing number of pros in noncontact sports have been wooed by claims that jaw-positioning retainers can improve strength, power and accuracy as well as help them think more clearly under pressure. Derek Jeter wears one. So does Shaq. I tested a $495 model made by Bite Tech, a Minneapolis company that began selling its patented technology in September through the sports brand Under Armour. Canadian firm Makkar sells a similar device for $695. Both products require a trip to the dentist to have a mold of your teeth made. But starting in January, Under Armour plans to sell a Bite Tech model for $60 that can be fitted at home. Boil the mouthpiece, bite down for 30 seconds and your jump shots will start dropping like the Dow. Or so the theory goes. Clenching your teeth pinches the nerves that run through the temporomandibular (jaw) joint, causing the body to produce the hormone cortisol, which increases your heart rate and blood pressure--and can trigger a fight-or-flight response. That's good when you're actually in danger but distracting when you're playing softball. Bite Tech aims to improve your physical and mental performance by preventing you from clenching. It also moves your lower jaw forward. The combination opens the throat, improving breathing. (Some dentists recommend the gear for night grinders too.) I noticed a slight difference. On a stationary bike, I typically go 6.3 miles (10.1 km) in 30 minutes. With the mouthpiece, I easily made 6.6 miles (10.6 km). My golf score dropped a few strokes, but my wife still beat me at Scrabble. I called golfer Hunter Mahan to find out how long it took him to see results. Turns out Mahan, whose picture and testimonials about Bite Tech take up most of the company's home page, wears the mouthpiece when he practices but not during tournaments. Maybe he doesn't want to lisp in public?
Studies that Bite Tech funded show a small improvement--less than 10 milliseconds--in subjects' response times. Shawn Arent, director of exercise science at Rutgers University, got similar results when he tested 22 athletes wearing a Makkar mouthpiece vs. a generic $20 protector. The athletes were able to jump higher with the Makkar, by one inch. That's not a heck of a lot, but Arent concedes, "For top athletes, that little bit extra might matter." So, uh, can I take this thing out now? Mouthing Off
The Doctor Is in — and Online By KATE PICKERT Monday, Aug. 09, 2010
Illustration by Oliver Munday for TIME
Have you ever felt slightly under the weather, called your doctor for advice and been asked to drag yourself to her office — only to be told to rest up and drink lots of fluids? Or, worse, have you ever spent a day playing phone tag so you could get the results of an important diagnostic test? Chances are these inconveniences could have been avoided if your doctor used a simple, ubiquitous tool: e-mail. A study published in the July issue of Health Affairs indicates that patients who use e-mail to communicate with their doctors not only save time and money but also have healthier outcomes. The authors reviewed more than 500,000 patient-doctor e-mails sent within the Kaiser Permanente network and found that people with hypertension or diabetes (or both) who e-mailed their doctors managed their blood pressure and blood sugar better than non-e-mailers. Given this news and given that millions of Americans have had e-mail accounts for more than a decade, why is it that only a small percentage of physicians report that they use the tool with patients? One reason is that primary-care providers, the doctors most likely to be able to coordinate care via e-mail, generally get paid $60 to $100 per office visit and $0 per e-mail. This kind of electronic communication is not recognized as a billable activity by Medicare, Medicaid or most private insurers.
Kaiser is a special case in that the people it insures receive care at Kaiser-owned facilities where the doctors are essentially paid per patient, not per procedure. Its physicians "don't get paid by generating more visits, so they find a more efficient way," says study co-author Terhilda Garrido. "It's in their best interest to use e-mail." The new Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act could help spread the use of e-mail, since the law is funding pilot projects similar to the Kaiser system. Dr. Fred Ralston, president of the American College of Physicians and an internist in private practice in Tennessee, is one of thousands of doctors across the country experimenting with such a model. The extra funding — which, in Ralston's case, comes from BlueCross BlueShield of Tennessee — could allow more primary-care doctors to fully embrace e-mail. "It's a wonderful thing," he says. "You can spend probably 30 seconds and give patients commonsense advice." Most doctors who e-mail don't use Gmail or Outlook. To comply with federal privacy laws, they contract with software vendors to set up secure independent websites. Some private insurers will reimburse for secure, third-party electronic communication but won't do so for standard e-mail. Cigna, for instance, pays doctors about $25 for an "eVisit," in which patients, rather than writing free-form messages, fill out discrete Web-page fields. Dr. Richard Baron, a Philadelphia internist, takes a different approach. Patients can log on to his practice's secure website and write as much as they like. "When people want to interact with their doctor, they want to do it in a conversational mode," he says. Thanks, Doc. :)
The Science of Cougar Sex: Why Older Women Lust By JOHN CLOUD Friday, Jul. 09, 2010
Frederic Cirou / Es Photography / Corbis
Men who cheat on their spouses have always enjoyed an expedient explanation: Evolution made me do it. Many articles (here is one, and here is another), especially in recent years, have explored the theory that men sleep around because evolution has programmed them to seek fertile (and, conveniently, younger) wombs. But what about women? If it's really true that evolution can cause a man to risk his marriage, what effect does that have on women's sexuality? A new journal article suggests that evolutionary forces also push women to be more sexual, although in unexpected ways. University of Texas psychologist David Buss wrote the article, which appears in the July issue of Personality and Individual Differences, with the help of three graduate students, Judith Easton (who is listed as lead author), Jaime Confer and Cari Goetz. Buss, Easton and their colleagues found that women in their 30s and early 40s are significantly more sexual than younger women. Women ages 27 through 45 report not only having more sexual fantasies (and more intense sexual fantasies) than women ages 18 through 26 but also having more sex, period. And they are more willing than younger women to have casual sex, even one-night stands. In other words, despite the girls-gone-wild image of promiscuous college women, it is women in their middle years who are America's most sexually industrious. By contrast, men's sexual interest and output, usually measured by a reported number of orgasms per week, peaks in the teen years and then settles to a steady level (an average of three orgasms per week) for most of their lives. As I pointed out in March, most men remain sexually active into their 70s. According to the new study, as well as the study I wrote about in March, women's sexual ardor declines precipitously after menopause. Why would women be more sexually active in their middle years than in their teens and 20s? Buss and his students say evolution has encouraged women to be more sexually active as their fertility begins to decline and as menopause approaches. Here's how their theory works: Our female ancestors grew accustomed to watching many of their children — perhaps as many as half — die of various diseases, starvation, warfare and so on before being able to have kids of their own. This trauma left a psychological imprint to bear as many children as possible. Becoming pregnant is much easier for women and girls in their teens and early 20s — so much easier that they need not spend much time having sex. However, after the mid-20s, the lizard-brain impulse to have more kids faces a stark reality: it's harder and harder to get pregnant as a woman's remaining eggs age. And so women in their middle years respond by seeking more and more sex. To test this theory, Buss and his students asked 827 women to complete questionnaires about their sexual habits. And, indeed, they found that women who had passed their peak fertility years but not quite reached menopause were the most sexually active. This age group — 27 through 45 — reported having significantly more sex than the two other age groups in the study, 18 through 26 and 46 and up. Women
in their middle years were also more likely than the younger women to fantasize about someone other than their current partner. The new findings are consistent with those of an earlier Buss paper, from 2002, which found that women in their early 30s feel more lustful and report less abstinence than women in other age groups. In both studies, these findings held true for both partnered and single women, meaning that married women in their 30s and early 40s tend to have more sex than married women in their early 20s; ditto for single women. Also, whether the women were mothers didn't matter. Only age had a strong affect on women's reported sexual interest and behavior. And yet there are a few flaws with the data in the new paper. Chiefly: some three-quarters of the participants in the study were recruited on Craigslist, a website where many go to seek hookups, meaning there was a self-selection problem with the sample. (The other participants were students at the University of Texas in Austin.) The authors also note that there are some alternative explanations for why women in their 30s and early 40s might be more sexual. Many of them may simply be more comfortable with sex than women in their teens and early 20s. Still, that raises the question of why they are more comfortable: perhaps evolution programmed that comfort. Buss is the author of The Evolution of Desire: Strategies of Human Mating, now in its fourth edition, and has become associated with evolutionary explanations for sexual behavior. His theories help explain why men can be cads — and why women can be cougars.
PEOPLE
10 Questions for Jorge Ramos By JORGE RAMOS Monday, Aug. 09, 2010
Jorge Ramos Univision
As a Mexican-born, naturalized U.S. citizen, what is your take on the immigration debate? —Ndukwe Kalu, LOS ANGELES The Declaration of Independence says that all men are created equal, but right now millions of men and women in Arizona and in other parts of the U.S. are not being treated as equals, and I can't believe that. Countries are judged by the way they treat the most vulnerable, and the most vulnerable population in the U.S. right now is undocumented immigrants. Do you think U.S. borders need to be better secured? —Erik Davalos, RENO, NEV. Border security is not enough. We have to have immigration reform. It doesn't matter how many guards you send to the border. It doesn't matter how high the fence is going to be, because almost half of all undocumented immigrants who come to the U.S. come by plane. It's an economic problem. Do you see an end soon to the drug war in Mexico? —Sandra Chávez, CIUDAD JUAREZ, MEXICO President Felipe Calderon is losing the war on drugs. This problem is not going to be solved — because of corruption and because it's not the right strategy. On the other hand, there is violence and drug trafficking in Mexico in part because there's a huge market for drugs in the U.S. Mexico cannot win this war alone. Do you think Mexico would ever allow U.S. military intervention? —Albert Morales, WASHINGTON Mexico will never accept U.S. military intervention. Mexicans always remember 1848. That's when
Mexico lost more than half its territory [in a war with the U.S.]. Having said that, I think that the presence of U.N. soldiers in parts of Mexico, including Ciudad Juárez, should be a possibility. What does it take to be the anchor of Noticiero Univisión? —Miguel Cortina, SUGAR LAND, TEXAS I laugh when I remember that there was a news director in Los Angeles who told me that I would never work in this country because Latinos weren't going to assimilate. At the end, he lost his job, and I got mine. It's a privilege to work as an anchor for Univision, but more important, I am amazed by how Latinos are transforming America. What advice do you have for someone hoping for a similar career in journalism? —Angelica Montes, MAYWOOD, CALIF. My only advice is, follow your dream, and do whatever you like to do the most. I chose journalism because I wanted to be in the places where history was being made. What was your impression of President Obama when you first interviewed him? —Sonia Hernandez, SAN ANTONIO I spoke with Obama when he was running for President. He needed the Hispanic vote. He promised us that he was going to have an immigration bill during his first year in office. And President Barack Obama broke his promise. He gave Latinos a lot of hope, and right now many are deeply disappointed. Whom would you like to interview whom you have not yet interviewed? —Maria de La Luz Sierra, WILLIS, TEXAS Nelson Mandela. He always understood that injustice cannot last forever, and that same message is one we can now apply in the U.S. Hispanics are now the largest U.S. minority and growing. In your view, what is the most important implication of that fact? —Benjamin Figueroa Pereira, SAN JUAN, P.R. The process of change is well under way. The U.S. is the largest Spanish-speaking country in the world, with the exception of Mexico. It means — and I am completely convinced of this — that the first Hispanic President has already been born. What is preventing Latinos from uniting to exercise their power in this country? —Kyoko Tsuru, NEW YORK CITY It's lack of political representation. We are 15% of the population, and we have only one Senator. We need not only one Cesar Chavez; we need a thousand Cesar Chavezes.
TO OUR READERS
The Plight of Afghan Women: A Disturbing Picture By Richard Stengel, Managing Editor Thursday, Jul. 29, 2010
Our cover image this week is powerful, shocking and disturbing. It is a portrait of Aisha, a shy 18-year-old Afghan woman who was sentenced by a Taliban commander to have her nose and ears cut off for fleeing her abusive in-laws. Aisha posed for the picture and says she wants the world to see the effect a Taliban resurgence would have on the women of Afghanistan, many of whom have flourished in the past few years. Her picture is accompanied by a powerful story by our own Aryn Baker on how Afghan women have embraced the freedoms that have come from the defeat of the Taliban — and how they fear a Taliban revival. I thought long and hard about whether to put this image on the cover of TIME. First, I wanted to make sure of Aisha's safety and that she understood what it would mean to be on the cover. She knows that she will become a symbol of the price Afghan women have had to pay for the repressive ideology of the Taliban. We also confirmed that she is in a secret location protected by armed guards and sponsored by the NGO Women for Afghan Women. Aisha will head to the U.S. for reconstructive surgery sponsored by the Grossman Burn Foundation, a humanitarian organization in California. We are supporting that effort. I'm acutely aware that this image will be seen by children, who will undoubtedly find it distressing. We have consulted with a number of child psychologists about its potential impact. Some think children are so used to seeing violence in the media that the image will have little effect, but others believe that children will find it very scary and distressing — that they will see it, as Dr. Michael Rich, director of the Center on Media and Child Health at Children's Hospital Boston, said, as "a symbol of bad things that can happen to people." I showed it to my two young sons, 9 and 12, who both immediately felt sorry for Aisha and asked why anyone would have done such harm to her. I apologize to readers who find the image too strong, and I invite you to comment on the image's impact. But bad things do happen to people, and it is part of our job to confront and explain them. In the end, I felt that the image is a window into the reality of what is happening — and what can happen — in a war that affects and involves all of us. I would rather confront readers with the Taliban's treatment of women than ignore it. I would rather people know that reality as they make up their minds about what the U.S. and its allies should do in Afghanistan. The much publicized release of classified documents by WikiLeaks has already ratcheted up the debate about the war. Our story and the haunting cover image by the distinguished South African photographer Jodi Bieber are meant to contribute to that debate. We do not run this story or show this image either in support of the U.S. war effort or in opposition to it. We do it to illuminate what is actually happening on the ground. As lawmakers and citizens begin to sort through the information about the war and make up their minds, our job is to provide context and perspective on one of the most difficult foreign policy issues of our time. What you see in these pictures and our story is something that you cannot find in those 91,000
documents: a combination of emotional truth and insight into the way life is lived in that difficult land and the consequences of the important decisions that lie ahead. To learn more about Aisha and her reconstructive surgery in the U.S., visit www.GrossmanBurnFoundation.org and www.WomenForAfghanWomen.org.
LETTERS
Inbox Monday, Aug. 09, 2010
Home Economics Michael Crowley's "The Good and Bad Economy" clearly points out that a solid majority of Americans favor reducing spending for the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq [July 26]. Only 12% favor reducing the deficit by cutting Social Security. Yet Crowley disregards his own data by concluding that President Obama's deficit commission will propose "long overdue cuts to entitlement programs like Social Security and Medicare." How about going to national security for deficit reduction and letting seniors receive the Social Security benefits they earned and deserve? Edward Ferreira, NEW SHARON, MAINE Your article pushes consuming to revive the U.S. economically. Many citizens are moving in another direction--using fewer resources, raising our own food, and using solar panels for hot water and a bicycle and legs for travel. We should not return to being the consuming culture that we were. Catch up to the times, TIME. Bill Denneen, NIPOMO, CALIF. The stimulus package has been great and staved off great turmoil. But if the President really wants to double down, he should do two things. The first: bottom out interest rates on 30-year mortgages to 4% and lend directly to the public. Then everyone would stop waiting for interest rates to fall, borrow money and refinance their lives. The second: tax oil and spend the proceeds directly on energy. Taxing gasoline at the pump and oil as it is imported into this country would generate steady revenue for years to come. Chris Green, FALMOUTH, MASS. My Bonnie Is the Bomb Re "And Now, Your Moment of Men" [July 26]: I have two words to deliver us from the late-night talk-show man cave: Bonnie Hunt. Jay Leno is an uncomfortable interviewer, and David Letterman's sarcasm has lightened only a bit with age. But I watch Bonnie Hunt from beginning to end. She's a great listener, and she's hilarious. Plus, she's a gifted singer and actor and manages to make me think and laugh without sacrificing kindness. Men seem to love her too. Bring us Bonnie! Mary Dittoe Kelly, COLLEYVILLE, TEXAS A Jolt from the Volt? As you describe in "Can the Volt Charge GM?" electric cars are finally heading to the market, and this is a good thing [July 26]. There always seems to be one detail that doesn't get much attention, though. Unless that electric car is plugged into a solar, hydro or wind source of electricity, there's a pretty good
chance a coal-fired power plant will be at the other end, so the only result is moving the source of pollution from the tailpipe to the power plant. We need to continue to perfect the electric car while developing clean and nonpolluting sources of electricity. That will be the real achievement and the real solution. Sid Darden, PENROSE, COLO. Of Mama and Baby Bears By calling herself a mama grizzly, Sarah Palin implies that she would stop at nothing to defend her young from attack ["A Foot in the Race," July 26]. However, in 2008 she chose the opportunity for personal advancement, knowing full well that by doing so she would expose her pregnant 17-year-old daughter to national embarrassment and ridicule. I have a daughter a few years older than Bristol, and I cannot imagine a scenario in which I would throw my child to the wolves. Palin has every right to follow her dreams, but her self-righteous posturing to generate political buzzwords is hypocritical. Bethany Parsons Perry, GROSSE POINTE WOODS, MICH. It comes as no surprise to me that Palin is having success reaching out to the "mom vote." Too often the Democratic Party has allowed stay-at-home moms to be characterized as uneducated and unmotivated. Kelly Cahill Thompson, GRASS VALLEY, CALIF. Please recycle this magazine and remove inserts or samples before recycling
BRIEFING
The Moment By STEPHEN GANDEL Monday, Aug. 09, 2010
As Washington fights over whether to extend assistance for millions of out-of-work Americans, it is easy to forget where our money is going. A pair of late-July dam breaks--one at Arizona's Tempe Town Lake and the other at Iowa's Lake Delhi--offered a wet reminder. The latter was by far the bigger disaster, flooding hundreds of homes, submerging 6,000 acres of farmland and causing millions of dollars in damage. The American Society of Civil Engineers says 4,095 of the nation's 85,000 dams are in need of repair, including 1,826 that could cause loss of life if they failed. That same group says our nation's infrastructure, everything from highways to sewers, is in need of a $2.2 trillion upgrade, while our ports and transportation systems are far less productive than many emerging nations', a fact that is hobbling our already ailing manufacturing sector. In the highly political and philosophical debate over which will cost the U.S. more--crumbling bridges or rising deficits--the bursting of two little-known dams serves as a stark reminder that ignoring our infrastructure is not a strategy that can long hold much water.
The World By Harriet Barovick; Ishaan Tharoor; Alexandra Silver; Claire Suddath; Frances Romero; Kayla Webley; Nate Rawlings Monday, Aug. 09, 2010 1 | London Too Little, Too Late Nearly 100 days after the Deepwater Horizon oil rig exploded in the Gulf of Mexico, BP announced July 27 that its embattled CEO will step down. Tony Hayward, who has become the public face of the disaster, will be replaced Oct. 1 by American executive Robert Dudley. The oil giant also said it will set aside $32.2 billion to cover the long-term costs of the spill, the worst in U.S. history. The news came as the company posted a $17 billion loss for the second quarter of 2010--one of the largest losses in British corporate history. For his part, Hayward will leave with benefits valued at $18 million and a potential job with the company's joint operation in Russia. "Life isn't fair," he told reporters. [The following text appears within a chart. Please see hardcopy or PDF for actual chart.] Sinking Stock. BP's fall since the rig explosion 4/20 Explosion on Deepwater Horizon DOW JONES INDUSTRIAL AVERAGE
DOW JONES OIL & GAS TITANS 30 INDEX BP STOCK PRICE* * HIGH: 4/20, $60.48; LOW: 6/25, $27.02; 7/26, $38.65. SOURCE: YAHOO! FINANCE 2 | Arizona Judge Blocks Law's Key Provisions Less than a day before Arizona's immigration law, known as SB 1070, was to take effect on July 29, U.S. District Court Judge Susan Bolton blocked some of its most disputed parts. The injunction applies to sections that call for officers to check immigration status when enforcing other laws and that require immigrants to always carry papers. Seven lawsuits, including one by the Justice Department, have been filed against SB 1070. The law's opponents have argued that it could lead to racial profiling, while its proponents say the state must address the influx of illegal immigrants because the federal government has not. 3 | San Francisco Lutherans Welcome Gay Clergy On July 25, the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America formally accepted seven openly gay pastors who had previously been barred from serving in the ministry, making it the largest Protestant church in the U.S. to admit noncelibate, openly gay clergy. The 4.6 million--member church voted last year to allow gay clergy in monogamous relationships to serve. Since then, 1% of its congregations have left the denomination; more are expected to sever ties in the coming months. 4 | Uganda African Leaders Agree on New Rules in Somalia At a July 27 meeting in Uganda attended by leaders from across the continent, the African Union (A.U.) agreed to expand the size and mandate of a peacekeeping force deployed in the troubled state of Somalia. The A.U. contingent had previously been barred from firing at the country's Islamist militias, including fighters from al-Qaeda-linked al-Shabab, unless provoked. Now they can strike first. 5 | Cambodia Khmer Rouge Torture Chief Found Guilty More than three decades after the Khmer Rouge's murderous reign came to an end, its torture chief, Kaing Guek Eav (known as Duch), was found guilty by a U.N.-backed tribunal July 26 of crimes against humanity. The radical regime, which ruled Cambodia's Killing Fields from 1975 to 1979, oversaw the
deaths of some 1.7 million by execution or as a result of torture, overwork and starvation. Under Duch's watch at Tuol Sleng prison, at least 14,000 people lost their lives. His 35-year sentence, which was reduced to 19 because of time served and other factors, means Duch, 67, may one day walk free--a fact that made surviving victims and their families weep with rage. Duch plans to appeal. 6 | Pakistan DEADLY PLANE CRASH All 152 people aboard a Pakistani passenger plane were killed July 28 in the worst air disaster in the nation's history. Airblue Flight ED 202, which was traveling from Karachi to Islamabad, crashed near the end of its journey in the midst of poor weather conditions in the Margalla Hills, north of the capital. Rescue workers searching the site found no survivors. The Pakistani government declared July 29 a national day of mourning. 7 | Serbia Kosovo? No In response to a July 22 U.N. court decision, which ruled that Kosovo is an independent state and that its 2008 secession from Serbia did not violate international law, Serbian lawmakers passed a resolution announcing that they would never recognize the former province's sovereignty. Serbia plans to send 55 envoys to foreign countries to ask for support. Currently, 69 countries, including the U.S. and most of the E.U., recognize Kosovo. 8 | Spain Catalonia Exits the Bullring Bullfighting has long been a cornerstone of Spanish culture, but not all parts of the country still welcome matadors. On July 28, the legislature of Catalonia, based in Barcelona, voted to outlaw the sport. The ban, which is set to take effect in 2012, is a victory for animal-rights activists but is also seen as a feather in the cap of the Catalan movement for greater autonomy. 9 | Honduras Nike Pays Its Dues A year and a half after closing two Honduran factories, Nike finally succumbed to pressure to create a $1.5 million fund for its laid-off workers. Having initially denied them severance wages, the sports-apparel company was forced to take action when the Washington-based Worker Rights Consortium persuaded U.S. colleges to threaten to cancel Nike contracts. United Students Against Sweatshops also agitated in favor of the workers. [The following text appears within a map. Please see hardcopy or PDF for actual map.]
Many nations vie for control of the South China Sea CHINA'S CLAIMED TERRITORIAL WATERS BOUNDARIES SUGGESTED BY A U.N. CONVENTION DISPUTED ISLANDS SOURCES: U.N. CONVENTION ON THE LAW OF THE SEA; CIA 10 | Hanoi A Confrontation at Sea As U.S. warships conducted war games off the Korean coast, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton waded into other troubled waters this week, declaring at a regional summit in Vietnam that a multilateral resolution of age-old disputes in the South China Sea was in the U.S.'s "national interest." Such a call, though seemingly benign, rankled China, which claims the sea in its entirety and is irked by the U.S.'s continued regional primacy. * | What They're Seeking in Kenya: A team of Chinese archaeologists arrived in Kenya on July 26 to begin a three-year mission in search of a nearly 600-year-old shipwreck. The vessel is believed to have been part of the trading armada led by Ming-dynasty admiral Zheng He. According to DNA analysis, a few survivors may have swum to shore and formed a medieval Afro-Chinese community.
HALPERIN'S TAKE
Mark Halperin's Take: The Digital President Loses Two Rounds Mark Halperin's Take: The Digital President Loses Two Rounds
Photo-Illustration by Wes Duvall for TIME; Obama head: Rod Lamkey Jr./ AFP / Getty Images; Obama Body: Saul Loeb / AFP / Getty Images; Crist: Lynne Sladky / AP
Ever since the computer trounced the television as America's main information source, our Presidents have been confounded in their efforts to navigate the perils of digital media. Bill Clinton and George W. Bush both struggled in this new arena. Clinton was nearly ruined by Matt Drudge, while Bush was reduced to a cartoonish, smirking warmonger by bloggers and YouTube. Barack Obama set out to conquer the digital age. As a candidate, he was all high-tech cool, from Facebook to inspirational viral videos (think the Black Eyed Peas' will.i.am) to electronic voter outreach. Obama's White House team has outdone its predecessors in spreading an e-message, even blogging from the West Wing. But the past two weeks have shown the limits of Obama's info-age wizardry. When Drudge disciple Andrew Breitbart posted a video clip of African-American Department of Agriculture employee Shirley Sherrod that made it seem as if she had discriminated against a white farmer, the Administration panicked and forced Sherrod out — though even a cursory check of her full remarks would have revealed a tale of racial tolerance. It was a low point for a team that claims to transcend the slash-and-burn tactics of the new-media freak show. A few days later, Obama took another digital sucker punch when news organizations reported on thousands of leaked Pentagon documents obtained by the website WikiLeaks detailing the true chaos of the Afghanistan war. The President denounced "the disclosure of sensitive information from the battlefield that could potentially jeopardize individuals or operations," but he knew full well he was powerless to stop it. Obama is as tech-savvy as he is coolheaded. But despite his early successes, he has proved no more able than his predecessors to tame the digital hydra.
Are the Democrats Planning a Lame-Duck Donnybrook? By Jay Newton-Small / Washington Wednesday, Jul. 28, 2010
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, Representative Paul Kanjorski, Senate majority leader Harry Reid and Senator Chris Dodd attend the signing of the financial-reform bill in Washington, July 21, 2010 Charles Dharapak / AP
If you listen to Republicans, the lame-duck session of Congress — a special session held on Capitol Hill between the November midterm elections and the seating of a new Congress in January — will be filled with scary Democratic attempts to pass controversial climate-change legislation, tax hikes and union sops before the party loses some or all of its majority. Listen to Democrats, and that lame-duck session promises to provide a brief, postpartisan window in which there's a chance of addressing some of the country's most pressing issues such as immigration, global warming and the skyrocketing federal deficit. In reality, the much anticipated lame-duck session is likely to be far less eventful than advertised. The GOP alarm bells play well with a base petrified of further Democratic spending and convinced the Dems will use any obscure tactic to ram through controversial bills. Republican parties in several states are going so far as to look into ways the state laws can be interpreted so that winners might be seated immediately after the midterms — for example, special elections for the Senate seats in Delaware, New York, Colorado and Illinois. As Republican chances of taking back the House — and maybe even the Senate — have increased, the dire warnings are also an attempt to delegitimize any potential legislation Democrats may attempt. House minority leader John Boehner has already called upon Democratic leaders to promise not to pursue a "sour grapes" session after the election, and on Tuesday he asked voters to join him in that effort by pressing Democrats on the matter over the August recess. "A couple of weeks ago I challenged [House Speaker Nancy] Pelosi and [House majority leader Steny] Hoyer to pledge right now that they won't use a lame-duck session to pass controversial bills like a job-killing national energy tax," Boehner told the press. "We should all be calling on the Democrats to pledge that they won't do this." Representative Chris Van Hollen, head of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, which works to elect Democrats to Congress, on Tuesday denied the existence of any secret plan to pass climate-change legislation in a lame-duck session. Still, some in the party may have other ideas. Democrats have floated the idea of passing the Employee Free Choice Act, a controversial bill that makes it easier for unions to organize, as well as voting on recommendations from President Obama's deficit-reduction commission during the lame-duck session. And Senator John Kerry, who's leading the Senate efforts on climate change, says he hopes to pass a bill to regulate greenhouse gases. "We will continue to try over the next weeks, but if it is after the election, it may well be that some members are free and liberated and feeling that they can take a risk or do something," Kerry told Bloomberg News. It may be a long shot, but Kerry does have some reason for hope. In past lame-duck sessions, the results of the elections have sometimes freed members to take controversial votes they might have avoided before — like in 2004, when the large GOP wins persuaded some in Congress to help push through a debt-limit increase and the 9/11 commission's recommendations. Some major pieces of legislation have passed in previous lame-duck sessions, including raising the gas tax and immigration reform in 1982 and passing the Clean Air Amendments of 1970. But it's highly unusual for a party that has lost one or both chambers to ram through controversial legislation in the waning days of their power. More often the session has led to bipartisan agreements: in 1994 Republicans worked with President Clinton to pass the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade, and in 2002, when Democrats lost control of the Senate, they worked with President George W. Bush to push through the creation of the Department of Homeland Security as well as the Defense and Intelligence Authorization Acts. The most controversial lame-duck
measures have come not in legislation but in actions like the 1998 House impeachment of President Bill Clinton, the 1954 Senate censure of Senator Joe McCarthy and the 1974 confirmation of Nelson Rockefeller as Vice President. In any lame-duck session, the Democrats would still have one important problem: having less than the 60 votes needed to overcome a GOP filibuster in the Senate. Finding GOP votes for a climate-change bill appears unlikely; it's equally doubtful any Republicans would vote for raising taxes, even if recommended by the bipartisan Deficit Reduction Commission. And to pass the union bill, Democratic Senator Blanche Lincoln, a staunch opponent, would have to have a sudden change of heart. Still, a lame-duck session will almost certainly take place this year, for a very practical reason. With Republicans latching on to Democratic spending as a campaign issue, Dems are postponing passage of next year's funding bills until after the election to avoid providing the GOP with more political fodder. That will likely mean that the lame-duck session will feature a noncontroversial resolution that continues funding the government, until Congress can pass the delinquent spending bills in a new session next year — after a new Congress is seated.
Dems Hedge a Florida Bet By MICHAEL SCHERER Monday, Aug. 09, 2010
When President Obama last visited Florida, he walked Pensacola's white-sand beaches with Governor Charlie Crist to talk about the Gulf oil spill. Photos of the two leaders strolling through paradise looked like a campaign ad for Crist, the Republican turned independent running for the Senate. Now, irritated Democrats, including members of the Congressional Black Caucus, are demanding that Obama do more to aid Democrat Kendrick Meek. "Come on down and show me that you mean it," says Florida Representative Alcee Hastings. Although Meek already has Obama's endorsement, Hastings says, "I need to see him say it." But a photo op may not save Meek. After a weak start, he's in a primary fight with billionaire Jeff Greene. Meanwhile, Crist is leading in the polls. And some cagey political hedging is at work, as two key Democratic advisers have joined Crist's team. Democrats quietly hope that if Crist wins, he'll vote with them in the Senate — a possible bright spot in an otherwise dismal election year.
Lab Report: Health, Science and Medicine By ALICE PARK Monday, Aug. 09, 2010
CHILD BEHAVIOR
How Routine Can Help Kids Stave Off Anxiety Keeping young children on a stable schedule of activities — with consistent wake and sleep times, regular play periods and reliable intervals between meals — can make them less anxious about new situations and environments as they grow older. That's the conclusion of a unique new study led by Timothy Monk at the University of Pittsburgh. Monk asked the parents of 59 1-month-old babies to document when they performed specific tasks, such as feeding, changing, playing with and comforting their infants. Over the next 13 years, the parents answered periodic questionnaires about their children's developing mental state, including how often they cried or felt fearful about new situations in school. Monk found that babies who had more dependable routines at 1 month were less likely to be anxious at age 10. He thinks the reason may have to do with both physiological factors — like the levels of the hormones cortisol and melatonin, which help regulate sleep and eating — and environmentally influenced ones like sociability, which is encouraged in children who feel secure in their daily routines and interactions with their parents. DRUG POLICY
Veterans Get the Go-Ahead to Use Medical Marijuana The U.S. department of Veterans Affairs has issued a long-awaited directive allowing its patients to use marijuana for medical reasons without jeopardizing their access to government-sponsored health care. Until now, physicians and patients were unclear on whether veterans using medical marijuana, even in the 14 states where it is legal, were breaking federal law — which prohibits possession or use of the drug for any reason — and thus were ineligible to participate in VA-based pain-management programs. The uncertainty made some VA physicians reluctant to treat medical-marijuana users and led patients to avoid seeking care there. With the official policy clarification, VA patients who register for a medical-marijuana card in states where such use is legal may use the natural painkiller to alleviate conditions including nausea caused by chemotherapy, chronic pain, insomnia and anxiety. VA physicians still cannot prescribe, dispense or endorse cannabis use for any reason, in accordance with federal law. But patients who obtain the drug for medicinal purposes outside the VA system in a state where it is legal may discuss the use of marijuana with their doctor as part of their pain-management program. FROM THE LABS
Risk at the RegisterBisphenol a (BPA), the estrogen-mimicking compound found in plastic, also coats many cash-register receipts, according to a new study by the Environmental Working Group. Tests found that 40% of receipts from gas stations, fast-food outlets, grocery stores and other retailers contained significant amounts of the potentially cancer-causing chemical. But experts note that while BPA can rub off paper when handled, it's not clear how much is actually absorbed by the body.
Clues to Alzheimer's Researchers at MIT have found a protein in the sirtuin family that interrupts the formation of sticky protein plaques in the brains of mice with Alzheimer's disease. Sirtuin has also been associated with longevity in mouse studies, though drugs that boost the protein do not appear to extend life. ON CALL: BEDBUG CZAR New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg redirected $500,000 to fund a war on bedbugs to rein in the city's exploding rates of infestation. But New York is hardly the only town with a pest problem: a new survey finds that nearly 95% of U.S. exterminators have responded to bedbug calls in the past year — from residences, hotels, offices, laundromats and even movie theaters — compared with only 25% before 2000. Global travel is largely to blame, say experts.
Verbatim 'We are at war with al-Qaeda.' FRANÇOIS FILLON, Prime Minister of France, a day after news broke that French aid worker Michel Germaneau ( right ) had been murdered by the terrorist network's North African branch 'They're making more than the President.' CORY CHRIST, a resident of the Los Angeles suburb Bell, where three top city officials resigned after they admitted to severely inflating their salaries; one of the trio was earning nearly $800,000--about one-fifteenth of the city's entire budget 'I can't sing forever.' WYCLEF JEAN, the Haitian-born musician, cryptically responding to reports that he is planning to run for President of the earthquake-ravaged country in its Nov. 28 election 'It's an audacious blend of eccentricity, artistry and rebellion, changing the general perception of beer one stuffed animal at a time.' JAMES WATT, a co-founder of BrewDog, a Scottish brewer that has created what it claims is the world's strongest beer, dubbed the End of History; each bottle comes inside a taxidermied animal 'Even if we have to eat stones, we would stop sending oil to the United States.'
HUGO CHAVEZ, Venezuelan President, threatening to cut oil supplies to the U.S. in the case of a military attack by Colombia, an American ally that Chรกvez broke diplomatic ties with on July 22; Venezuela gets more than 90% of its export income from oil sales, mostly to the U.S. 'I'm here to give this law some teeth.' ERIN ANDREWS, ESPN reporter who was victimized by a stalker last year, supporting a new law that makes it easier to prosecute stalkers and increases the maximum jail sentence for offenders 'It is just wrong to say that Turkey can guard the camp but not be allowed to sit in the tent.' DAVID CAMERON, British Prime Minister, arguing on a July 27 visit to Turkey that the country should be allowed into the European Union because, as a member of NATO, it has defended Europe and has a military presence in Afghanistan TALKING HEADS Lisa A. Goldstein A deaf journalist, writing in USA Today on the 20th anniversary of the Americans with Disabilities Act: "Though the ADA established rights, it has not reduced the need for advocacy. People with disabilities have always had difficulty finding jobs. In fact, there is a 42% employment gap that separates working-age people with and without disabilities ... Right now, a real problem is the gap in the ADA regarding the Internet. People with sensory loss are routinely being left out when it comes to online content ... It has been 20 years. Why are we still struggling?" --7/26/10 Peter Lauria On the Daily Beast, explaining why Shark Week has become so popular: "Perfectly combining education and camp--a giant, inflatable shark currently sits on top of Discovery's headquarters--it was an immediate hit with audiences ... Shark Week has also helped clear up many of the fears associated with the animal and misconceptions about why they sometimes attack humans ... [It] is also a powerful platform to raise awareness about the dangers sharks face from commercial fishing." --7/26/10 Clyde Haberman Setting the record straight in the New York Times about a planned Muslim cultural center near Ground Zero:
"That it may even be called a mosque is debatable. It is designed as a multi-use complex with a space set aside for prayer--no minarets, no muezzin calls to prayer ... It would seem to qualify as a mosque about as much as a chapel in a Roman Catholic hospital qualifies as a church." --7/26/10
Brief History: First Family Weddings By ALEXANDRA SILVER Monday, Aug. 09, 2010
Tricia Nixon was the only child of a President to be married in the Rose Garden, in 1971 Co Rentmeester / Time & Life Pictures / Getty Images Weddings can pose logistical problems for any couple, but Chelsea Clinton and Marc Mezvinsky had the added challenge of keeping the details of their July 31 wedding under wraps despite ravenous media interest. Though the bride's father had been out of the Oval Office for nearly a decade, Chelsea, like many presidential children before her, was faced with reconciling matrimonial privacy and publicity, intimacy and grandeur. First Family weddings have typically been major social events, especially those rare ones that have taken place in the White House. Nine presidential kids have gotten hitched there, starting with Maria Monroe in 1820. Nellie Grant's 1874 nuptials were much hurrahed: after all, Walt Whitman may have celebrated all Americans, but he didn't write poems for just any bride. Nellie's day was trumped, however, by Alice Roosevelt's spectacular 1906 wedding, at which at least one guest fainted and Teddy's famously boisterous daughter cut her cake with a sword. Luci Baines Johnson's 1966 wedding sparked intense network coverage, and comedian Edie Adams quipped that only "the immediate country" had been invited.
But for all the presidential kids who've reveled in America's version of a royal wedding, there are also those who've shunned the strictures of Washington. Jenna Bush headed down to the family ranch in Crawford, Texas, for her ceremony, perhaps inspired by her aunt Dorothy (daughter of George H.W. Bush), who tied the knot at Camp David in 1992. JFK Jr. managed to have a secretive wedding with Carolyn Bessette on Georgia's Cumberland Island in 1996, and that same year, Amy Carter was married outside Plains, Ga., with less pomp and circumstance than most. The 39th President was present, but Jimmy didn't give his daughter away. Amy said she "didn't belong to anyone." Least of all, the public.
Chelsea's Big Day: A Brief History of White House Weddings
Nellie Grant, 1874 Ulysses S. Grant's only daughter wed in the White House at the age of 18, in "perhaps the greatest American social event of the nineteenth century," according to presidential historian Doug Wead. Nellie's romance, which captivated the nation with its storybook overtones, began when she met Englishman Algernon Sartoris on an Atlantic cruise.
Alice Roosevelt, 1906 Upon returning from the Philippines, Theodore Roosevelt's famously boisterous daughter announced her engagement to the much-older Congressman Nicholas Longworth. At the wedding reception, fearless Alice cut her wedding cake with a sword.
Jessie Wilson, 1913 The same year her father Woodrow Wilson took office, Jessie married Harvard Law graduate Francis B. Sayre in the White House — in the same spot (the East Room) as both Nellie Grant and Alice Roosevelt.
The couple's engagement went largely unnoticed by the press, and to make up for lost time, the Washington Post used its entire front page to cover the details of the wedding.
Eleanor "Nellie" Wilson, 1914 Despite turning down Secretary of the Treasury William McAdoo's first proposal of marriage, Nellie accepted when he asked again. After a quiet courtship — Nellie stole away to the Blue Room to teach McAdoo how to foxtrot during her sister Jessie's wedding without anyone noticing — the two married and soon became a Washington power couple.
FDR Jr., 1937 The family's golden boy, Franklin D. Roosevelt Jr. married Ethel DuPont, the first of his five wives, in 1937 in Delaware. The news of the couple's engagement sparked controversy, as DuPont was an heiress to one of the nation's prominent Republican families. The ceremony was hailed as the "wedding of the decade."
Margaret Truman, 1956 Margaret opted to have her wedding in the same Independence, Mo., church as her parents, though
without any of the "hurly-burly," as she called it. She spent a week in seclusion before the big day, emerging from the Truman home only a handful of times, including once to partake in a small press conference.
Luci Baines Johnson, 1966 Luci and her mother planned for a Texas-size ceremony in D.C. At one point, the guest list included 700 people and her seven-tiered wedding cake weighed 300 lb. She was only 19 years old when she married Patrick Nugent.
Patricia Nixon, 1971 Despite fears of rain, Patricia, or Tricia, as she was called, insisted that her wedding be in the White House Rose Garden — the first and only wedding ceremony hosted there. Tricia married Edward Cox, a Harvard Law student, and appeared on the cover of LIFE magazine in her wedding dress.
Caroline Kennedy, 1986 After graduating from Columbia University with a law degree, Caroline took a job at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City, where she met her future husband Edwin
Schlossberg. Jackie Kennedy planned their Massachusetts wedding, and Caroline was walked down the aisle by her uncle Teddy.
Amy Carter, 1996 Amy met her husband while she was an employee at an Atlanta bookstore where he was the manager. Her wedding, outside of Plains, Ga., was as stubbornly low-key as she was. Amy refused to let her father Jimmy Carter give her away and baked her own cake for the reception, and the couple drove off in a car with a pro-choice bumper sticker.
America's prince John F. Kennedy Jr. married his girlfriend Carolyn Bessette in secret on an island off the coast of Georgia. Forty guests were in attendance, excluding most of the Kennedy clan — they would draw too much attention. The chapel in which the small ceremony was held didn't have electricity.
Jenna Bush, 2008 Jenna met Henry Hager while he was working for her father's 2004 re-election campaign. Jenna chose to have a private ceremony on the family ranch in Texas rather than a White House celebration. When asked if he was helping with the wedding plans, George W. Bush said, "They're letting me spend money."
The Skimmer By GILBERT CRUZ Monday, Aug. 09, 2010
Packing for Mars: The Curious Science of Life in the Void By Mary Roach W.W. Norton; 334 pages Mary Roach sure is a curious person. The author of Stiff: The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers and Bonk: The Curious Coupling of Science and Sex has once again discovered a winner of a subject with her latest effort, which delves into the ins and outs of zero-gravity living. "Everything one takes for granted on Earth must be rethought, relearned, rehearsed," writes Roach of those who are lucky (or are they?) enough to go into space. While she touches on topics from simian astronauts to the ideal shape and configuration of space food, Roach saves the bulk of her exploration for questions that often remain undiscussed outside schoolyards and NASA experiment rooms. What happens if you vomit in your helmet during a space walk? Is it possible to have sex in space? How exactly does one defecate in a zero-gravity toilet? Roach's strange enthusiasm for all things oddball (combined with her sometimes annoying, though mostly amusing, tic of ending paragraphs with rim-shot-worthy punch lines) makes Mars a more than worthy destination. READ [X] SKIM TOSS
Daniel Schorr By Donald A. Ritchie Monday, Aug. 09, 2010 Aggressive reporting put Daniel Schorr on a presidential enemies list, got him investigated by Congress and cost him jobs with CBS and CNN, but his insightful analysis captured audiences for six decades. Schorr, who died on July 23 at 93, was recruited into news broadcasting by Edward R. Murrow. He entered the profession as veteran radio reporters were resisting the switch to television, which they dismissed as little more than putting pictures to headlines. Their reluctance opened the way for Schorr's generation of television newscasters. CBS sent him to Moscow in 1955 and then to Washington in 1966. Rising through the ranks at CBS News' Washington bureau, Schorr jockeyed for airtime within a squad of talented correspondents. Finding the regular beats at the White House and Capitol already covered, Schorr claimed his own territory by covering Lyndon Johnson's Great Society programs. During Richard Nixon's presidency, Schorr won Emmys for his reporting on the Watergate scandal. At the peak of his television career, Schorr obtained and passed along a leaked copy of the Pike report on illegal activities by the CIA and FBI. He refused to divulge his source to congressional investigators, and while he managed to avoid a contempt citation, the incident ended his employment at CBS. Schorr's pull-no-punches approach to the news also shortened his stint as an analyst for Ted Turner's CNN in the '80s. But Schorr found his true niche on National Public Radio, where for the rest of his life, he served listeners with a voice, wit and depth of experience that remain unmatched. Ritchie, historian of the Senate, is the author of Reporting from Washington: The History of the Washington Press Corps
Alex Higgins By KAYLA WEBLEY Monday, Aug. 09, 2010
Had "Hurricane" higgins never picked up a cue, snooker as we know it may not exist. As a young punk with a quick stroke and an even quicker temper, he elevated the unpopular, old man's game from a sport played in dark, dank billiard halls to one played under the glare of television cameras. Higgins, who was found dead July 24 at age 61 in his Belfast home, sank even the toughest shots with ease. When asked how he did it, he shrugged his shoulders, unsure of where his innate talent came from. He simply took aim, and the balls followed suit. From working-class roots in Northern Ireland, he stumbled upon a snooker hall at age 11 while taking a shortcut home; 12 years later he was a world champion (which at the time made him the youngest player
ever to hold the title). He went on to win the title a second and final time in 1982, in a series of matches still featured in highlight reels. Higgins' trademark fedora and flamboyant swagger loosely garbed a proclivity for raising hell. Nicknamed Hurricane for both his fast style and his destructive habits, he once head-butted a tournament director when asked to take a drug test. But it was that mix of charisma and intensity that made him a joy to watch, made snooker a British phenomenon and put sponsorship money in players' pockets. Remembering his legacy, fellow snooker pro Adrian Gunnell said, "We all owe our careers to him."
Overturned By FRANCES ROMERO Monday, Aug. 09, 2010
In his second legal victory this summer, on July 27, Warren Jeffs--the polygamist leader of the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints (FLDS)--saw the Utah Supreme Court reverse two convictions against him of complicity to rape. Just a month and a half earlier, an Arizona judge dismissed similar charges against Jeffs that originally plunged him into national headlines in 2006. The Utah court ruled that the jury in the case had received incorrect instructions before convicting Jeffs for his role in the "spiritual marriage" of a 14-year-old girl to her 19-year-old first cousin. Prosecutors are considering whether to retry Jeffs, who was serving two consecutive terms of five years to life in a Utah state prison. While the reversal is significant and could make a retrial problematic, Jeffs still has a long legal road ahead. He also faces extradition to Texas on charges of bigamy and sexual and aggravated assault stemming from evidence found during a 2008 raid on the Texas FLDS Yearning for Zion ranch. Defense attorney Walter Bugden cheered the Utah order, calling Jeffs a victim of "religious prosecution" and "religious persecution."