Atlantic Monthly Contributors's Blog, page 1072

2012 Was a Cold Year in a Spectacularly Hot Decade

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For twenty-seven years, the world's average temperature has been hotter than the average during the second half of the 20th century. Last year, it was the ninth-warmest in recorded history — but still cold for the past ten.

The United Nations' World Meteorological Organization released its annual climate report this week. Compiled using data from NASA, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, and the UK's Met Office, the group's calculations show the global trend clearly: It's getting warmer.

Below is an approximation of that data, excluding the Met Office's set which wasn't available. The blue line is the NOAA data; the red, NASA. The average of the two is in gray. The zero line represents no deviation from the average global temperature between 1951 and 1980. Anything above zero, then, means the year was warmer than that average.

The WMO report also notes that "2001–2012 were all among the top 13 warmest years on record." As seen below. The numbers associated with each year indicate its rank out of the last 163. 2012 was the ninth-warmest year in the last decade — but only because we've just seen the hottest decade in recorded history.

The report — which can be read in full here — is replete with other unpleasant information about the state of the climate. Precipitation was up. Snow cover was down. But it's what we don't know that's disconcerting. "Climate change," the report says, "is aggravating naturally occurring climate variability and has become a source of uncertainty for climate-sensitive economic sectors like agriculture and energy."

If you're an optimist, we recommend you look at this news in another way: Only 154 years since 1850 were colder than 2012.

       

The Superhero Movie Era Won't End

Iron Man 3 comes out today, making it the fourth movie featuring Iron Man in the past five years. And as a character, Iron Man seems to be winding down. I doubt his Marvel buddies Thor or Captain America have more than one or two more movies left in them. There are no current plans for another Hulk movie. All told, the whole Avengers team will probably start looking a little long in the tooth in just a few years. Over at DC Comics, Superman is getting a reboot this summer, so if that's a success we could have another franchise or Dark Knight-esque trilogy on our hands. But Superman hasn't fared well recently. Meaning, we ought to be in for a lull in the superhero onslaught, right? No. For good or bad, the superhero movie era shows no signs of ending.

The last time we had a summer which saw nothing caped or crusading come thundering into multiplexes was 1999. (Well, unless you count that season's Mystery Men, which you shouldn't.) So if this is a superhero "trend," it's a pretty long-lasting one. And it's not as if the '90s that preceded were without their superheroes. From 1989 to 1997, Batman movies came flying by every couple of years, while plenty of comic book-based duds like The Shadow and The Phantom tried to coast off their success. Really, we've been consuming a fairly regular diet of superhero movies since Christopher Reeve put on Superman's suit in 1978. The '80s were certainly quieter than the '90s, and the '00s louder still, but we have been dealing with the genre for about 35 years. So maybe there's nothing trendy about this! It could be that superhero movies are a constant, just with some contained ups and downs within the system.

Marvel is aware of the aging of the Avengers, and is thus developing a Guardians of the Galaxy film franchise, but will those lesser known characters (with names like Star-Lord and Drax the Destroyer) hold the same interest as the iconic Avengers team? I suspect the studio will have to do a lot of savvy marketing to make up for the lack of built-in familiarity and interest. (I know comic book fans will flame me for implying that interest in Guardians of the Galaxy is low, but in the broader world I don't think there's any denying that fact. Look at how Watchmen underperformed.) DC is trying to swoop in and fill the gap with its planned Justice League film, but it's likely they'll have only Henry Cavill's Superman as the lone familiar face in that film. It's doubtful that Christian Bale will put the Batman suit back on, and Ryan Reynolds's Green Lantern is a moot point, his standalone movie bombing as it did.

So yes, with no new surefire, for-definite Avengers-style construction plan in the works, it might seem like superhero flicks are going to take a break. And they might, but it will be brief. After all, there are still those pesky X-Men and the newly refurbished Spider-Man, proof that reboot turnaround time can be extremely short. And what will that interim look like, that somewhat less super world? Pretty familiar. The year 1999 gives us a clue. The big movie that summer? The Phantom Menace. Yes, Star Wars. (There was also The Matrix and The Sixth Sense. Read this Entertainment Weekly article about 1999, "The Year That Changed Movies." It's a fascinating document from the era.) And sure enough, what do we have coming down the pipeline, first arriving in 2015? Three more Disney-backed Star Wars films. What's old is new again. Just as it's always been.

       

Extremely Loud & Incredibly Contrived: Jazz Experts on the 'Gatsby' Soundtrack

Everyone knew Baz Lurhmann's The Great Gatsby was going to be weird. Everyone knew Jay-Z was producing the soundtrack. And from the second "No Church in the Wild" struck up in the first trailer for next week's blockbuster, to the moment NPR started streaming the whole album the other day, to the reactions ever since from everyone who's listened to the 14 songs therein (groan-worthy will.iam, vintage Lana Del Rey, bouncey "Crazy in Love"), this much we have learned: This movie sounds different, and some of it doesn't sound right to everyone. All of it, most certainly, is not what you might expect from 1922 or the Gatsby we've come to know and love, even if it is true to form for Luhrmann, who gave us the time traveling soundtracks for Romeo + Juliet and Moulin Rouge! — and described his vision for the record to Jay-Z's site Life + Times as an effort to "translate the African-American music that came from the streets called hip-hop, and weave it into a jazz language." So how does the new Gatsby soundtrack sound to those who study that language for a living? We reached out to several jazz musicians and scholars for their take on the Lurhmann sonic experiment.

Tad Shull 
The Center for Jazz Studies at Columbia University

While Schull said that he's "not a fundamentalist about using exact music of the era," he didn't get any of "that atmosphere out of this" after he first listened to will.i.am's "Bang Bang" and Emeli Sandé's "Crazy in Love" cover with the Bryan Ferry Orchestra. Though Shull likens the "Crazy in Love" track to a "version of Macbeth set in Gallipoli in World War I," he said the will.i.am track "doesn't add a modern cut on an older style because it was musically poorly executed." He added: "It was like hearing somebody read the Gettysburg Address over a background created by the Glenn Miller Orchestra. They have nothing to do with each other." Other tracks that have that profess to have that jazzy vibe, like Fergie's "A Little Party Never Killed Nobody," struck Schull as nothing like the Jazz Age. 

David Schroeder
NYU Steinhardt Jazz Studies Director

In an email to the Wire, Schroeder characterized himself as a "purist who believes that soundtracks should match the periods that  films are attempting to capture." He added: "There is a fine line between modernizing a classic novel and separating the period music that gives the audience a more accurate representation and feeling of the times. Can you imagine, for example, using soundtracks by Jay-Z, Q Tip or GoonRock to underscore Schindler's List?" Plus, in his opinion, the artists that were playing during the 20s and 30s were "just as outrageous, shocking and cutting edge as the modern day artists chosen for the Gatsby soundtrack." 

Art Gottschalk
Professor of Composition and Theory at the Shepherd School of Music at Rice University

Gottschalk had some words for Luhrmann. In an email to the Wire, he explained that he finds Luhrmann's use of pop "disingenuous at best and jejeune at worst." He elaborated: "Disingenuous because film-makers often use hit music of the day to attract a secondary audience to their films, or to create an au courant perception to a subject that they are afraid may be of little interest to a popcorn-buying young public. Jejeune because his use of pop music seems to imply a sort of superiority inherent to the music that he (or his alter ego, Jay-Z, in this case) selects, as if saying that this music speaks more to the emotional and dramatic arc of the story than, perhaps, the period music might." (In a follow-up phone conversation, he said he thought the will.i.am song "sounded like somebody that doesn't know period-era jazz making stereotypical sounds and trying to pass it off.") 

But Gottschalk also explained how Luhrmann basically has the wrong idea when it comes to Fitzgerald's use of music in his text. Fitzgerald is not referencing "African-American street music." Instead: "All the musical references provided in The Great Gatsby are to vaudeville type numbers popularized by such artists as Al Jolson, and written by well-trained Tin Pan Alley types like Gus Kahn. But even the hot dance bands of the period, such as Fletcher Henderson and Bix Beiderbecke, were composed of virtuoso musicians and were decidedly NOT of 'the street.' The social level portrayed in Gatsby was familiar with black music of the time primarily through white entertainers who pretended to bring such music to them in a socially acceptable form, such as Jolson's black-faced performances. I fail to see how anything that Luhrmann or his musical collaborators did sheds any light on this fact." 

Tommy Kay
Jazz Musician

Kay, a jazz guitarist based in Los Angeles, came out in the soundtrack's defense—to a certain extent. In a phone conversation he told us that, for him, the Gatsby era is epitomized by George Gershwin's chord progressions in the song "I Got Rhythm." He thought there were a couple of songs on the soundtrack that "really utilized that," and cited will.i.am's "Bang Bang" and Bryan Ferry's "Love Is The Drug." As for will.i.am's contribution, Kay said: "He really made an effort to have it be thematically and musically relevant to that era and I thought that was a actually cool." And the soundtrack as a whole? Kay thinks you can make the case for it, since jazz was the pop music of its day. On the other hand, he said that there's no sense of improvisation, another element that makes jazz, well, jazz. 

       

Ari Fleischer Reminds Everyone Why Nazi Comparisons Are Never Good

You'd think people would learn by now to avoid ever invoking the Nazis to defend yourself in an argument, but Ari Fleischer probably wishes he could take his most recent debate point back. Appearing in a roundtable discussion on Anderson Cooper's CNN show last night, the former Bush press secretary turned pundit not only tried to defend the tactics of housing prisoners without trial at the Guantanamo Bay prison camp, but claimed we wouldn't have needed such a prison during World War II, because the German army "followed the law of war."

Fleischer, who was White House Press Secretary when Guantanamo opened in 2002, argued that we need the camp because al-Qaeda fighters "didn't even wear a military uniform. They engaged in battle against America as terrorists, a violation of the laws of war." (Never mind for now the shaky logic of saying the normal rules don't apply to you, because your enemies broke them first.)

To be fair to Fleischer, he was not the one who brought up the Germans first. It was Jeffrey Toobin who suggested that Adolf Hitler and the Nazis were far worse than Osama bin Laden and al-Qaeda, saying, "We managed to defeat Adolf Hitler by following the rule of law." But Fleischer then took the bait, taking the argument a step further by saying (we think) that he thinks al-Qaeda is worse simply because they don't wear uniforms or march anywhere. Here's his quote:

They followed the law of war. They wore uniforms and they fought us on battlefields. These people [terrorists] are fundamentally, totally by design different. And they need to be treated in a different extrajudicial system.

If the only rule of war was that you have to wear a uniform, then, yeah, we guess they followed that. But there are other rules, too: Like don't commit genocide. Or turn civilians into slave labor. Or perform unauthorized medical experiments on them. Or a whole host of unspeakable things that Hitler's army did to Europe—even while wearing their uniforms.

So, yes, al-Qaeda is a lot different than the Nazis, but not in the ways that he probably thinks. Also, Fleischer seems to have forgotten that a lot of the laws of war that al-Qaeda (and Guantanamo Bay, for that matter) has broken had to be created because the Germans re-defined how horrible war could be. Just help reminder that the next time you find yourself self saying something complimentary about the Nazis, just hold your tongue until the commercial break.

       

Marco Rubio Won't Please Everyone, and Not Everyone in the GOP Is Very Pleased

There is only so much Marco Rubio will do to placate conservatives who oppose immigration reform. In an op-ed for today's Wall Street Journal, the Florida senator lists the many ways the "gang of eight" have incorporated "the true wisdom of the nation" into their immigration bill. There will be more border security. The path to citizenship will be even harder. But you can't please everyone. Rubio writes:

Of course, there are those who will never support immigration reform no matter what changes we make. Even if we address every concern they raise, they will likely come up with new ones. They have a long list of complaints but typically never offer a solution of their own.

[image error]Rubio told Sean Hannity's radio show Thursday that without stronger border security measures, "This bill will not pass the House and, quite frankly, I think, may struggle to pass the Senate if it doesn't deal with that issue, so we've got some work to do on that front." That's only one of the many conservative complaints about the bill. Ann Coulter suggested it would merely create millions of new Democratic voters. Texas Sen. Ted Cruz opposes a path to citizenship. The National Review's latest cover, at right, is not a great one for the senator. The Washington Examiner notes just winning the Latino vote won't necessarily win presidential elections. Rubio has been touring conservative talk radio, and not every host has been convinced. Rubio's op-ed says that while he'll listen to upset voters, there's only so much criticism from professional conservatives he'll put up with.

       

China Is Censoring Jokes About Its Propaganda Machine's Penis-Shaped HQ

The People's Daily is the main state-owned newspaper of China's communist party, and everyone was pretty psyched about the paper's new Beijing headquarters. The building is massive, imposing, and, uh, currently shaped like a colossal penis. Now, as construction workers try to finish the engineering, the country's censors are working overtime to stop Chinese people on social media from laughing at the expense of the very paper in charge of controlling the country's message. According to The International Business Times, the nearly 500-foot tower won't be finished until this time next year, but the war on mocking it has already begun. 

You see, China likes its censorship — remember when the country censored Men in Black 3 for talking about the country's censors? — and the government tries to have nearly as tight a grip on its Internet free speech as it does on its newspaper headlines. Back in December, China passed a law that would allow the government to delete online messages deemed "illegal." The communist censors even have control over monitoring Weibo, the Chinese equivalent of Twitter, effectively controlling what goes viral — even "Gangnam Style.". So, yeah, making fun of that thing up there on social media wasn't going fly, especially since it was the new home of the state-run media. 

Agence France Presse is reporting that censors on Weib are cracking down on the People's Daily toilet humor. The IB Times adds:

A search on Sina Weibo for “People’s Daily” and “building” results in a message that says the keywords have been blocked “in accordance with relevant laws, regulations and policies, search results cannot be displayed”.

Of course, some clever Weibo users have snuck around the censors by way of the double entendre. "It seems the People's Daily is going to rise up, there’s hope for the Chinese dream," reads one message that got through filters, according to the AFP. Another: "Of course the national mouthpiece should be imposing."

And then you have papers like The Times of India, with (unintentionally funny?) introductions to their architecture stories: "The new 150-meter tall headquarters of the People's Daily, the main organ of the Communist Party...." And then you have this:     

Huge Sighs of Relief as Unemployment Falls Again

After having expectations significantly lowered by a week of depressing numbers, the monthly jobs report came in on Friday as a pleasant surprise. The Labor Department claimed 165,000 new jobs were added in April, dropping the unemployment rate to its lowest level in four years. The markets are responding accordingly, with the Dow Jones average approaching a new milestone at 15,000 and the S&P 500 already breaking (again) its all-time record high.

Here's some more good news: Last month's disastrous number (originally 88,000) was revised upward to 138,000, and February's jumped to 332,000. That means an average of 208,000 new jobs each month for the last six months. The previous six-month average before that—during the heart of the 2012 presidential campaign—was just 138,000.

And there's even more good news! The unemployment rate improved from 7.6 percent to 7.5 percent, even though the labor force participation rate remained unchanged. Part-time jobs were up, average earnings were up, and the number of "discouraged workers" and long-term unemployed (people out of a job for more than six months) both dipped slightly. Again, not huge moves still going in the right direction.'

The 165,000 number is still not where economists would like to see it, especially when you're hoping to get an economy roaring again. But after this week's ADP employment report (a private survey that is usually seen as precursor to the Labor Department's) came in very sluggish, business watchers were bracing themselves for the worst. Everyone keeps waiting for the sequester cuts that took place in March to grind the economy to a full stop, but so far the effects are not being seen, at least not in the job market.

It's time to admit: The recovery has been remarkably persistent, and resilient, though we may wish it were more rapid.

— Justin Wolfers (@justinwolfers) May 3, 2013

Oh, and one final piece of good news: The release of the report went off without a hitch, even though there was a fire at the Labor Department last night that closed most of the building and forced all employees who were working on the report to stay home.

       

Texas Fertilizer Plant Was the Target of 'Breaking Bad'-Style Meth Recipe Theft

The fertilizer plant in West, Texas, that exploded two weeks ago was a frequent target of theft and sabotage. Not from farmers looking for free soil supplements, apparently, but from people looking to acquire one of the key ingredients for making methamphetamine.

Anhydrous ammonia, a key element in fertilizer production, is also used to make the highly popular drug, as any fan of Breaking Bad is likely aware. (If you're curious, the Riverfront Times, an alt-weekly in St. Louis, explains the role the ammonia plays.) Drug manufacturers, often looking to save on production costs, apparently learned that West Fertilizer was an easy source of cheap raw material. This isn't Walt and Jessie's fictional run on methylamine. As Reuters reports, the plant's history of tampering is very much real.

Police records show West Fertilizer began complaining of repeated thefts from the facility in June 2001, when burglars stole 150 pounds of anhydrous ammonia from storage tanks three nights in a row. Nearly a year later, a plant manager told police that thieves were siphoning four-to-five gallons of the liquefied fertilizer every three days.

After a series of break-ins a few years ago, the company installed a security system, but that wasn't enough of a deterrent.

The last record of tampering was in October 2012, when a 911 caller reported an odor "so strong it can burn your eyes." The firm dispatched Cody Dragoo, an employee often sent after hours to shut leaking valves and look into break-ins. That night, he shut off the valve but reported it had been tampered with.

Dragoo was killed in the explosion.

Texas is actually not a big meth-producing state. According to the DEA's latest data, it had far fewer production sites in 2012 than most states, especially given its size. Only 32 meth labs were found in the state, compared to 1,800 in Missouri or 147 in New York. There's one big reason for that: much of its methamphetamine is smuggled in from Mexico.

It's not yet known what caused the fire that led to the explosion that killed 14 people and damaged scores of buildings in the small Texas town. Various reports have suggested that the plant was storing far more fertilizer than it was allowed to. It also hadn't been inspected by the government in nearly 30 years.

Last week, the Waco Tribune ran an editorial downplaying the risks of fertilizer production. Gary Johnson, a former aerospace engineer, walks through why such a facility might become dangerous, emphasizing that it usually isn't. At the end of the piece, Johnson identifies the real threat.

[N]ow something new must be considered: terrorists breaking into agricultural supply businesses at night with blasting caps and dynamite, deliberately using that shock sensitivity to start explosions. No fire is required. This is a lot more sinister and dangerous than druggies breaking in to steal ammonia to make meth.

The Reuters report doesn't appear to include any incidents in which terrorists were tampering with West Fertilizer's ammonia tanks.

       

The Drudge Report Fell Hard for This Fake Bloomberg Pizza Revenge Story

Plenty of people fell for a harmless, Onion-esque satire about pizza on Thursday night, but the biggest fish reeled in by the the humor site that likes to reel in big fish appears to be Matt Drudge. For a few brief shining moments on Friday morning, The Drudge Report's splashy top story linked to a "news" report about New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg that is not even close to being true.

The story appeared Thursday on The Daily Currant, a satire website that traffics in headlines that are slightly more believable The Onion, but not quite as funny as The Blaze. The Currant previously caught another influential conservative news site, Breitbart.com, believing that Paul Krugman filed for bankruptcy... shortly Breitbart and others called out a Washington Post blogger for taking the bait on a Current story about Sarah Palin. As for this latest game of gotcha, there were plenty of Twitter and Facebook users who passed around the Bloomberg story believing it to be true, but it had pretty thoroughly been debunked by the time it made it Drudge on Friday morning. Yet, he (or an editor) still made it the site's lead story and even tweeted out the link. It lasted only a minute or two, around 8 a.m. Eastern, before the error was realized and the story replaced. (The tweet is still out there for now.)

The Current's tale imagines Mayor Michael Bloomberg, the enemy of gigantic sodas everywhere, being denied seconds at a Brooklyn pizzeria as revenge for his ban on 16-oz. sugary drinks. There were plenty of clues that the story was fake: The mayor of America's largest city holding a budget meeting in a pizzeria; with the indicted city comptroller (who doesn't determine the budget); the fact that the pizza place in question doesn't actually exist; the mayor swearing and calling people "jackass" in public. Also, the site's other headlines displayed in the margins, like "Pope Benedict Comes Out as Gay" and "North Korea Demands to Negotiate With Michael Jordan," should have given the game away. Although some of the others are just boring enough ("Egypt Issues Arrest Warrant For Jon Stewart") to be somewhat believable.

Not sure if the Daily Currant should lauded or mocked for the fact that no one can tell its satire stories are satire.

— Jay Yarow (@jyarow) May 3, 2013

Like most fake news stories that catch on and go viral, it's often because the people who spread it really, really want it to be true. The business and economics blog Zero Hedge, which also re-published the story (without fully qualifying it) said, "we should probably suggest that there is a 'modest' element of satire to this piece. Which of course means there is a substantial amount of implicit truth." In other words, it's not a lie if you believe it.

       

The Daily Show Goes 'Zero Dark Thirty' on Veteran's Benefits

In taking on the backlog of benefits claims at the VA, Daily Show correspondent Samantha Bee engaged in the "greatest paper hunt of all time," a two-part segment last night called Zero Dark 900,000. Bee, doing her best Jessica Chastain/serious reporter impression, confronts a veteran and proclaims that she is the "motherf**ker that's going to find [his] claim." Her plan includes shaming the VA by filming interviews with veterans. See how the hunt unfolds: 

The Daily Show with Jon Stewart
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