Atlantic Monthly Contributors's Blog, page 1107

The Growing Burden of College Fees

At the University of California Santa Cruz, where tuition runs to nearly $35,000 for non-residents, students every year pay more than 30 additional fees — including a small charge for what's billed as "free" HIV testing. Students at Oklahoma State University pay a handsome sum to attend one of the state's flagship schools, but they are also responsible for covering 18 different fees, including a "life safety and security fee."

The $100 "globalization fee" at Howard University is listed — without explanation — in the school's tuition and fees brochure. A school spokeswoman said the fee "supports internationalization initiatives" such as study abroad. Students pay the fee even if they have no intention of studying abroad themselves.

Worcester State University in Massachusetts, however, might have one of the most arresting fees. Students fortunate enough to be admitted face the challenge of paying the required tuition. But before they step foot on campus, they also will be hit with a fee to, well, step foot on campus. A portion of the school's "parking/pedestrian fee" goes to the upkeep of the sidewalks on campus.

Student fees have been something of a known irritant for years, often criticized as a kind of stealth, second tuition imposed on unsuspecting families. But such fees are still on the rise on many campuses. And though their names can border on the comical — i.e., the "student success fee" — there's nothing funny about how they can add up.

"It's a way for colleges to increase the cost that may not be as apparent to as many students," said Mark Kantrowitz, a financial aid expert and the founder of finaid.org and fastweb.org. "You focus in on tuition and when you get the bursar's bill, there are lots of little lines for all these fees, but because each is a relatively small amount, you may not notice it as much. You focus in on the big figure but not on these little figures that collectively add up to a lot."

This week, anxious high school seniors will be opening letters and emails of acceptance or rejection. For them, there will be a mix of joy and disappointment. But for those students and their parents, there will also be an initial reckoning with the expensive, often opaque issue of college fees.

Lauren Vaughn, a senior at UMass Amherst, is also an organizer for the UMass Students Against Debt coalition. She said appreciating the collective cost of additional school fees is often critical to determining whether any particular school is, in fact, affordable.

"It does seem as though we are not informed about these fees often until it is too late," Vaughn said, noting that such fees "can be the thing that puts some students who are financially strained over the edge."

The federal government has made efforts in recent years to make true college costs more transparent. U.S. Department of Education data shows that in more than half the states across the country, degree-granting institutions reported that fees comprised a greater portion of combined tuition and fees in the 2010-2011 school year than they had in 2008-2009.

But fees for specific programs and courses typically get left out of that data. The same goes for fees that apply to specific pockets of students, such as honors students or international students.

Many school officials say they do their best to make sure the necessary information about tuition and fees is clear to students and their parents. But there's no one definition that schools stick to when deciding what's covered by tuition and what falls under fees, and the very structuring of tuition and fees can vary wildly between different schools.

"It's all smoke and mirrors in some ways, the issue of tuition and fees," said Terry Meyers, a professor of English at the College of William and Mary. "It seems to be one area of the academic world where no one is looking and no one wants to look too closely."

To best appreciate how confusing — even upside-down — the world of college costs can get, consider this: At state schools in Massachusetts, where the state board of higher education has held tuition flat for more than a decade, "mandatory fees" wind up far outstripping the price of tuition. At the University of Massachusetts Amherst, the flagship of the UMass system, mandatory fees are more than six times the cost of in-state tuition.

And that isn't the end of it: Students are then hit with still more charges — the $300 "freshman counseling fee," the $185 "undergraduate entering" fee, and several hundred dollars more if your parents or siblings attend freshman orientation. Honors college and engineering students face still more fees.

A number of forces are driving fees upward. For public institutions, declining state support has left many schools scrambling to find other types of revenue. As well, since the notion of straightforward tuition hikes is often politically toxic, there is considerable appeal to using fees to make up shortfalls.

But it has all required ever-greater attempts at creativity. In the last few years, a number of public colleges across the country have added fees with vaguely pleasant names — "academic excellence and success fees," or "student enhancement fees," for instance.

Some school officials admit openly that these fees aren't all that different from tuition.

Since 2009, students at Georgia's public colleges have been paying hundreds of dollars a year in what are called "special institutional fees," separate from tuition. The fees vary, depending on the campus; at the Georgia Institute of Technology, which charges the most, they now top $1,000 a year. All of it goes straight into schools' general funds.

"The special institutional fee goes to the exact same things your tuition goes to," said John Millsaps, spokesman for the state Board of Regents.

The charges are simply called "fees" instead of "tuition," he said, because at a time when the state slashed funding, several classes of entering students had already been promised that their tuition would be locked in at the same rate as part of a "guaranteed tuition plan." Calling any increase "tuition" would break that promise. The intent was also that the fee would be temporary, Millsaps said. Instead, the fees have grown on every campus.

College administrators also acknowledge that sometimes a "fee" is easier for students to stomach than a "tuition" increase — even if the difference is more about semantics than substance.

"Unfortunately, the word tuition is a little bit of a lightning rod these days," said Colette Sheehy, vice president for management and budget at the University of Virginia. "And not just here, but in other places as well."

This year, the university began imposing two new charges on students taking engineering courses or enrolled in the nursing school in order to better reflect the higher costs of running those programs. But rather than take the step of raising tuition on certain students, the school opted to implement the new charges as fees, as many other schools have already done. For an engineering major, the new fee typically adds up to an extra $750 per year, Sheehy said.

Within the 23-campus California State University system, six schools have adopted some form of what's called a "student success fee" since the beginning of 2011. The annual fees, which different campuses have been using to cover a broad array of things from technology to mentoring programs to athletics, range from as little as $162 to as much as $430 a year depending on the school.

At Auburn University in Alabama, mandatory fees have been steadily increasing for several years. They now make up 16 percent of an in-state student's combined tuition and fee costs. Part of this increase stems from self-imposed fees that students voted for because they wanted a new recreation center, said Mike Reynolds, executive director of student financial services.

But a major component of the increase is Auburn's new $400 "proration fee," also introduced in 2011 to make up for a loss of state support. Reynolds said the charge was labeled a fee because it was intended to be temporary.

"That fee could go away. Whether that will happen, I don't know," Reynolds said.

Critics suggest that some schools likely keep their fee costs fuzzy as a way of seeming more financially attractive to prospective students. But if students are still paying for the additional costs in the end, any marginal marketing benefit on the front end may engender bad feelings after the bill arrives.

"It is hard not to feel a little misled," said one parent of a student at UMass Amherst who did not want to be quoted by name. "Yes, they are on the web somewhere, but they are not always easy to find. Unless you dig out the list and closely analyze it, you don't realize there are all these extra expenses. Schools don't go out of their way to publicize it."

School spokesman Ed Blaguszewski said in an email that the school makes an effort to be clear about total costs.

"In publications and [on] our website, extensive details about the tuition, fees and the estimated overall cost of attendance are shared with students in advance," Blaguszeqski said. "Our Admissions and Financial Aid staff believe prospective students are well informed about cost, and the info is publicly posted."

 

 

All of Facebook's Phone Secrets, Divulged

If Facebook leaks everything about their big phone event a week before their big phone event, does Facebook's big phone event need to exist? Since the social network sent out invites Thursday night, no fewer than five reporters, by way of anonymous "sources" that sound awfully familiar, reported exactly the same thing: Facebook will debut special "modified Android" software on an HTC phone. You'll see a Facebook home screen when you turn on the phone, basically. You can read this at The New York Times, TechCrunch, 9to5Google, or The Wall Street Journal, where Evelyn M. Rusli and Amir Efrati also got these sources to tell them that Facebook "has been working to reach similar arrangements with other device makers." But for now, the long awaited "Facebook phone" is just a new HTC phone that will look like all of the Facebook mobile apps, put together on an Android device.

Despite refusing to say anything on the record before Thursday's big "unveiling," Facebook certainly isn't going for the whole hush-hush, leak-proof reveal pioneered by Steve Jobs at Apple (and then copied by Samsung, obviously). In fact, tech reporters have known about this HTC Facebook phone for years, and now they're getting the early word really early. Which is a bit surprising, considering how many phone makers have upped the sex appeal of their new gadgets by holding their new secrets behind the curtain — or at least waiting until some executive takes a stage. But maybe this is a smart move for Facebook, a novice to partnering with the phone industry that hasn't exactly had the best experience as a publicly traded company and doesn't want to risk spooking investors with too many surprises. Now the Wall Street people already know what to expect. And so far that's working just fine. The analysts think the HTC OS sounds like a decent idea: "A phone, even an Android phone, makes sense," one analyst told Computer World. 

Plus the last thing Facebook needs is for its rumor economy to turn against it. 

 

Peeps, Solved

Ah, yes, I'm hearing from sources that this Sunday is Easter, which brings up all sorts of important religious, metaphysical, emotional, whimsical, rhetorical, and candy-based questions to mind. For the purposes of this piece, I will focus on questions of candy, and in particular, on questions of Peeps. PEEPS! You know what they are, surely, and if not, there are photos placed throughout this piece to help you learn, but for added information, there's always Wiki, too: "Peeps are marshmallow candies, sold in the United States and Canada, that are shaped into chicks, bunnies, and other animals." Ah yes, Peeps. It's the time of year for Peeps. So let's answer some questions about Peeps: 

What Are Peeps Made of?
"They are made from marshmallow, corn syrup, gelatin, and carnauba wax." Yum.

How Should I Feel About Peeps?
People tend to fall into one avid camp or another on the subject, identifying as Peeps-Lovers or Peeps-Haters, or, colloquially, "Peeovers" or "Phaters." I suggest you do the same. (Does anyone feel ambivalent about Peeps? That person is rare, because Peeps do tend to evoke feelings. Feeling nothing about Peeps is like feeling nothing about Sarah Palin. Sort of.) Peeps are divisive!

Why Is That?
We feel things about Peeps, because they are weird. They are mushy. They taste delightful and sweet at first, so sweet, and a bit crunchy, which is an unusual mouthfeel, like biting through the sugar-crusted skin of something with the consistency of tofu, or, well, marshmallow and carnauba wax. Also: They are pretty! Pink and green and yellow and blue, the very colors we associate with the holiday of Easter bunnies and something religious, maybe, too. They are adorable, shaped like adorable things, chicks and bunnies and cuteness in a handbasket, lined in green confetti that gets all over the place. 

If you hate Peeps, though, it's probably because they make you feel a little bit nauseated when you eat them, they give you that sugar rush, and then you feel dizzy and a bit confused and maybe need to chug a Diet Coke to set yourself right again. Maybe your children eat Peeps and go cuckoo crazy on them. Or maybe you have a traumatic Peeps memory; perhaps you came home after church at a young age to find all of the heads sliced off those marshmallow chicks and stuffed into the oven, the white-necked bodies left on the floor, and though it smelled just like S'mores, you've never recovered (how could you?). If this is you, distaste for Peeps is quite reasonable.

What Can I Do With Peeps?
Ever so many things! One can tell the stories of Easter through dioramas, or shadow puppetry, or Peeps Passion plays. One can make a Peeps sacrifice to the chickens in the backyard, who work so hard for you everyday. One can make art:

Or art:

One could, alternatively, stage a horrible revise of a Billy Joel song, or vote for their favorite newsworthy Washington Post Peeps diorama, or, yes, make something, a slideshow, anything. Really, anything you can make with anything you can make with Peeps! Crowns, for instance. Crazy-adorable dessert concoctions, a whole spate of them, compliments of Fox News. You can make Easter crafts out of them. You can set a booby-trap for your coworkers in the old office! People cover them in chocolate, people shellack them and preserve them for posterity, handing them down from one generation to the next. People keep them as pets until they expire and then compare them to pictures of other Peeps-esque things:

There are also existential things one might do with Peeps, without ever having to purchase Peeps. One can wonder whether they're truly indestructible, or what their name spells backwards and what that means (if one must).

As for that indestructible thing: "In 1999, scientists at Emory University jokingly performed experiments on batches of Peeps to see how easily they could be dissolved, burned or otherwise disintegrated, using such agents as cigarette smoke, boiling water and liquid nitrogen. In addition to discussing whether Peeps migrate or evolve, they claimed that the eyes of the confectionery 'wouldn't dissolve in anything.'" Yum.

Are the Other Holiday Peeps Real Peeps?
No. The only real Peeps are the chicks and bunnies you know and love, in the pastel colors you (maybe) paint your fingernails. Bastardized Halloween Peeps are just Heeps. Valentine's Day Peeps are Veeps, and Christmas Peeps are Santa's Lunch.

Must One Share One's Last Peep?
You're human, not a bunny-or-chick-shaped candy. Do whatever you want, you have to live with you.

Is Learning to Love Peeps This Weekend Only Going to End in Heartbreak?
Peeps are something of the long-distance relationship of candy. You don't get to see them all the time, so when you do, it's a real party. They are unusual, they are special, you give them the benefit of the doubt, and even if they don't taste that great, they're only here for a little while. When they are, we should probably appreciate them for what they are. Heartbreak, no. Stomachache, yes. Cling to your chocolate bunny, nibbling at the ears, as need requires. 

Images via Flickr/TheBazile; Flickr/Marin; Flickr/Rakka, Flickr/Craft*ology, Wikipedia.

Bitcoin Is Now a Billion Dollar Industry

A tremendous thing happened in the weird world of bitcoin on Thursday. For the first time in the currency's history, the total value of all bitcoins in circulation topped $1 billion.

That's right: A billion bucks, right out of thin air. That's oversimplifying things a bit, but we'll get back to that. (By the way, if you still don't understand how bitcoin works, read this.) For now, let you jaw drop — watch the drool — and start wishing you'd bought a bunch of the cybercurrency way back when the exchange rate was less than $5, because on Thursday it zoomed past $95 per bitcoin. Just to rub that in: if you'd invested $500 in bitcoin about a year ago, which is probably less than one month's rent for you city dwellers, you'd have nearly $10,000 worth of stuff today. That's about a year's worth of rent. Stings doesn't it?

In a way, this is just a microcosm of our financial system as a whole. Haters love to point out how bitcoin just appeared out of thin air on January 3, 2009. It was a pet project of Japanese mathematician Satoshi Nakamoto. Or rather, bitcoin was created by some talented coder slash economist slash enigma using what's probably a made up name. Nakamoto had an axe to grind, too. The basic idea was to create a currency that exists independent of any state government. "The root problem with conventional currency is all the trust that's required to make it work," he wrote in an essay about government-backed currencies. "The central bank must be trusted not to debase the currency, but the history of fiat currencies is full of breaches of that trust. Banks must be trusted to hold our money and transfer it electronically, but they lend it out in waves of credit bubbles with barely a fraction in reserve."

Over the course of the next four years, though, bitcoin proved that this virtual currency was just as capable as complex financial products like derivatives when it comes to producing wealth from nothing. Bitcoin's value first exploded in the summer 2011, when Gawker's Adrian Chen wrote about a website called Silk Road, where you could buy any drug you wanted with bitcoin. The value of the virtual currency spiked and then settled down. (See the chart below.) The currency sort of waved for the rest of 2011 and most of 2012, sometimes dropping down to a couple bucks per bitcoin. But then a weird thing happened earlier this year. Bitcoin exploded.

Exactly why bitcoin has skyrocketed in value these past couple of months is up for debate. It's up 152 percent this month, and nobody's really sure why. A lot of people think that the crisis in Cyprus and the situation in Spain to blame, but some have a more sober read. As Quartz's Zach Seward argues, it's nothing but a good old fashioned bubble. Basically the currency is surfing on a wave of hype that's bound to come to an end, sending the exchange rate tumbling onto the beach with sand in its teeth. On the eve of bitcoin's billion dollar milestone Seward writes:

Bitcoin is going through a "demand crisis"… As bitcoin's value rises, so does interest in it, which drives the price up even further, leading people who own bitcoins to expect even more gain, making them reluctant to sell, reducing the available supply of bitcoins, driving the price still higher, leading to more interest…

Frankly, the legend of bitcoin is an extraordinary one, and one day it might be just that: a legend. If skeptics are correct and we are witnessing a bitcoin bubble, then we'll mourn it's demise as we would the death of a video game character. Sure, some people will lose money. But many of the people who've been mining bitcoin — that is, creating it from thin air using powerful computers — will simply lose a little pride.

But if this value holds, this could be something big. 

North Korea Just Aimed Its Rockets at U.S. Bases

Hours after the chest-thumping Air Force leaders flew stealth bombers over South Korea, Kim Jong-Un has ordered North Korea's rocket units to be prepare for an attack on American bases. In the words of the country's state news agency, the 30-year-old leader "judged the time has come to settle accounts with the U.S. imperialists in view of the prevailing situation." This feels a little scary, doesn't it?

Calm down. Just because Kim Jong-Un put his bombers on stand by does not mean that North Korea is about to attack the United States. Over the past few years, we've seen North Korea make empty threats time and time again, but they've remain threats. Recently, they have gotten a little bit worse. Earlier this month, North Korea threatened "a preemptive nuclear attack" on the U.S., despite the fact that it's not entirely clear if they have a rocket capable of sending a nuclear warhead across the Pacific — not that we know of anyways. 

This time around, Kim Jong-Un has "signed the plan on technical preparations of strategic rockets" aimed at U.S. bases in the Pacific and the mainland itself. After the U.S. let its B-52 fly over South Korea and ahead of the call to put the rockets on stand by, North Korea threatened to "remove Anderson [sic] air force base [on Guam] off Earth." Evidently, we're all in the crosshairs now. As always, we've got big threats bellowing out of Kim Jong-Un's regime and little action to back it up. That said, we'll have to wait and see what putting the rockets on stand by actually means.

What we might want to worry about is an attack on South Korea. After North Korea abandoned its 60-year-old cease fire agreement with its neighbor on the other side of the 38th parallel, anxieties spiked. Just one stray shot could set off a war, one that would almost certainly involve the U.S. Meanwhile, North Korea is teaming up with the the despotic regimes from Iran and Syria to cause trouble to cause trouble in the United Nations. So everybody's a little bit on edge right now. Again, don't get too too anxious. This is just a natural side effect of war games.

Famous People Tend to Stay Famous

Discovered: Get used to Bieber and Kardashian; a human/Neanderthal love child; DNA tests could predict cancer risks; the intuition of rats.

Famous people tend to stay famous. Pop artist Andy Warhol once declared that everyone, at some some point in the future, "would be world-famous for 15 minutes." But according to two professors — one at McGill, the other at Stony Brook — true fame is everlasting: "Contrary to popular belief, the people who become truly famous, stay famous for decades." The pair's paper shows that, despite our animosity toward the super-famous — think Justin Bieber or Kim Kardashian — they're pretty much here to stay. Why? The authors suggest fame is something of a self-fulfilling prophecy: "Both media and audiences are trapped in a self-reinforcing equilibrium where they must continue to devote attention, airtime, and newspaper space to the same old characters because everyone else does so as well." [American Sociological Review]

Skeletal remains indicate a human/Neanderthal hybrid. We know all about Neanderthals — a human-like ape species that inhabited west-central Asia and Europe hundreds of thousands of years ago. But until now we didn't know if they ever successfully bred with ancient humans. A skeleton recently discovered in Italy, however, indicates that that at least one female Neanderthal was able to mate with a male human. Still, this doesn't that the populations converged: "Although the hybridization between the two hominid species likely took place, the Neanderthals continued to uphold their own cultural traditions [which] suggests that the two populations did not simply meet, mate and merge into a single group." [NBC Science]

DNA markers portend risk of cancer. A simple test of one's genes could one day predict your risk of cancer. That's the takeaway from a study of 200,000 individuals which indicates that certain markers embedded in one's DNA are routinely associated with a pronounced risk of cancer. It's not so much each marker that's important — it's the number of them and pattern they form that could indicate a higher propensity to develop cancer. Even though the routine use of these markers is still far out in the future, the medical application is already obvious: "Under certain assumptions, a gene test using all known markers could reduce the number of mammograms and PSA tests by around 20 percent, with only a small cost in cancer cases missed." [Associated Press]

You should trust your intuition. Is pondering useless? In rats, at least, it seems so. A group of researchers in Portugal found that the rodents performed equally well on a series of tasks when given a short time and a long time to decide. "When rats were challenged with a series of perceptual decision problems, their performance was just as good when they decided rapidly as when they took a much longer time to respond. Despite being encouraged to slow down and try harder, the subjects of this study achieved their maximum performance in less than 300 milliseconds." It's yet to be seen whether the results bear on the intuitive faculties of the human race. The researchers are optimistic, though: "Decision-making is not a well-understood process, but it appears to be surprisingly similar among species," one said. [Neuron]

At Long Last, 'Before Midnight'

Today in show business news: The first trailer for Before Midnight is here, Matthew McConaughey may have received a hell of an offer, and Taylor Swift heads to television.

Hold onto your wistful, lovestruck butts. The first trailer for the last film in Richard Linklater, Julie Delpy, and Ethan Hawke's beautiful Before Sunrise trilogy has been released. Before Midnight finds our hero lovebirds, Jesse and Celine in Greece, seemingly in a steady relationship (with kids!), some nine years after they reunited in Before Sunset. And a horrifying 18 years after they first met in Before Sunrise. Will they stay together forever? Will they realize it was never meant to be? Who knows! All we do know is that they will talk and talk and talk and talk. And that's a great thing. Apparently a really great thing, actually. Guys, this is very exciting. Nothing more to say.

Matthew McConaughey's amazing career reinvention continues! There's a rumor swirling around that the Fool's Gold actor — wait, no, that's not fair anymore — that the Magic Mike actor has been offered the lead role in Christopher Nolan's Interstellar. Which is to say he's been offered the lead role in a likely box office smash and possible critically acclaimed event picture. Which is a huge deal for him! He'd be a dum-dum not to take it. You're going to take it, right Matthew? I mean come on. We're talking Christopher Nolan here. This is primetime if ever there was primetime. This thing's a hit and you're set for life. Not that, y'know, Matthew McConaughey is struggling, but, he could use a little respect, y'know? This could be big. [Deadline]

Oh dear. There goes the neighborhood. Taylor Swift has been set to guest star on the season finale of Fox's amiable sitcom New Girl. No word yet on who she's going to play, but unless she's wearing an enormous top hat and doing a bad British accent, I don't wanna see it. [The Hollywood Reporter]

Innnteresting. The guy who played the mayoral campaign staffer on The Killing who [SPOILER ALERT ABOUT A SHOW NOBODY REALLY LIKED] ended up being the killer has been cast on Boardwalk Empire for next season. He'll be playing a young J. Edgar Hoover! That could be a very interesting character to have rattling around on that show. Y'know, with the megalomania and the cross-dressing and the whole Clyde Tolson thing. This show has done a much more expansive job of weaving in historical figures than I thought it would. It can seem a bit gimmicky at times, but mostly it works. So there's no reason to think this won't. Carry on, Boardwalk Empire! [Deadline]

 

The U.S. Has a Case Against Its Army Vet for Using a 'WMD' Against Assad in Syria

There aren't a lot of rebels fighting against the Assad regime in Syria who update Facebook regularly. There are fewer still who were born in Phoenix, Arizona, and are U.S. Army veterans. But that's not why Eric Harroun faces federal charges. The FBI arrested him because he fought alongside Al Qaeda, employing a "weapon of mass destruction."

Harroun — whose last three jobs have been serving in the Army state-side until his discharge following a car accident, working as a mortgage loan officer in Phoenix, and sneaking into Syria to push for the armed overthrow of its leader, in that order — was profiled by Foreign Policy earlier this month, despite the difficulty of having a conversation with him.

Pinning Harroun down is never easy. At times, he appears willing to provide very specific details about himself, while at others he becomes more reserved, preferring to not comment or flat-out denying his previous statements -- only to retract his retractions. He can become inexplicably hostile, hurling accusations of lying and anti-Semitic or anti-Zionist comments, or respond with flippant or jocular comments. He will also, in the middle of a line of questioning, simply write "bye" or "halas" (his rendering of the Arabic word for "enough"), and cease communication.

At the time, the magazine was exploring Harroun's involvement with Jabhat al-Nusra, a group the State Department has identified as being an arm of Al Qaeda. Harroun was reticent to discuss any involvement with the group — at one point, he responded to a question with a flat "5 Amendment" — but Foreign Policy noted his appearance in videos alongside known members of the group.

It appears that Harroun ended up incriminating himself after all. In the FBI's complaint against Harroun, filed today (and visible at the bottom of this article, via Huffington Post), it notes that a magistrate judge authorized a search of Harroun's Facebook page. Through that search, the FBI found comments and posts linking Harroun to the conflict in Syria generally — like the video below, showing Harroun and other fighters looting a downed Syrian helicopter, which also first appeared on his Facebook page.

That video opened a door for the FBI. In a series of interviews with Harroun at an American consulate in Turkey, the FBI probed deeper, eventually getting Harroun to admit to engagement with Jabhat al-Nusra and, more importantly, to the use of a rocket-propelled grenade, something he'd alluded to when describing the helicopter video. RPGs are categorized as a "weapon of mass destruction" by the United States government, and use of such weapons by citizens is illegal, regardless of who's around when it happens. (They also asked him about his statement that "the only good Zionist is a dead Zionist", to which he replied that he "equated Zionism with Nazism and Fascism.")

The Washington Post reports that Harroun flew back to Washington, D.C., yesterday and was arrested on his arrival. Which also means that he'll once again need to update at least one section of his Facebook profile.

The FBI complaint against Harroun.

Anyhoo, Some New Entries to the 'Old' Dictionary

Updates to dictionaries take place regularly enough that it seems like someone is always grumbling over this word or that phrase being included in that most esteemed place we think of when we think of words—"friend with benefits" is in the OED, really? Well, yes. But sometimes the lexicographers themselves are surprised by what they find in the updates, too. Merriam-Webster's Kory Stamper writes today on the dictionary's blog, "That was my experience when I was looking through some of the new entries we've added to the New Unabridged and stumbled across anyhoo, an informal and humorous synonym of the sentence adverb anyhow." (She was not just surprised, she was thrilled: "I blinked, then cooed: I grew up using anyhoo, and finding it in the New Unabridged was like seeing a long-lost childhood friend on the subway.")

Stamper and her colleagues have been working on revisions to the New Unabridged for "years now"—the update, which is behind a paywall, went live in March, she tells me. In the future the edition will get regular updates a few times yearly, including not just new vocabulary but also "usage notes, some dates of first written usage, expanded example sentences, and we now allow subscribers the chance to actually see some of the raw data we use in writing definitions." If you are a dictionary nerd like I am, this may make you rather light-headed. 

Furthering that light-headedness, Stamper gave me a peek into some of the other new additions to the New Unabridged, the "most inclusive" of all of Merriam-Webster's dictionaries. Anyhoo's companions in the category of "informal and slang" are similarly evocative, from achy-breaky (adjective, informal: achingly sad) to angsty (adjective, informal: feeling, showing, or expressing anxiety, apprehension, or insecurity : marked by angst) to apeshit (adjective, vulgar slang: very excited or angry : WILD, CRAZY—usually used with go) and so on. If you've seen it on a blog or heard it from the mouth of a teen, a politician, or a Brooklyn hipster type, it's probably here: cougar, junk (for male genitalia), skeevy, smack, gastropub, super PAC, craft beer. Elsewhere, there's air rage, bucket list, game changer, robocall, mashup, alt-country, slider, crowdsourcing, cyberbullying, viral, helicopter parent, RSS, and above-the-fold (including a secondary definition: "located prominently near the top of the page in an electronic document (such as an e-mail or a Web page). There are many more, and then there's my personal favorite, arsey, categorized as a variety of English. What's arsey, you ask?

arsey. adjective

1Australian Slang : LUCKY
I just cannot believe Parramatta won and we lost. We were a 10-point better side, they scored two arsey tries and we had two disallowed, which you could see for sure were OK.—Geoff Johnson, quoted in Sydney Morning Herald, 2 Sept. 1991 

2 British Slang : maliciously spiteful, bad-tempered, or unreasonable When I told my girlfriend I was going for a drink with my flatmate, she got really arsey. —James Petherbridge, Daily Mirror (England), 11 Aug. 2001
He was just asking you a question and you have to come over all arsey.—Zadie Smith, White Teeth, 2000

Among the many fascinating tidbits one can glean from the New Unabridged update is that Terry McMillan was way out ahead of most of the rest of us with her use of supermom; a citation shows her as having used it back in 1992 in Waiting to Exhale.

But back to anyhoo! Stamper writes on her post, "As I read through the entry, my giddiness waxed back into surprise: anyhoo has been in written use since 1850. Why wasn't it entered into our unabridged dictionaries until now?" Fortunately, she herself answers that question: Anyhoo's first use was "in a representation of Irish speech ("The divil a bit do I care for the Quane; it's a small bit o' praise that I'd be afther givin' her, anyhoo." [William Balch, Ireland, as I saw It, 1850]) and it appeared sporadically in print for the next 100 years, usually in reported or fictional dialogue," she writes—until the '90s brought a spike in the use, as "its breezy informality became a boon and not a burden, and writers had a bit of an infatuation with anyhoo." That surge in use continued, and anyhoo appeared in such mainstream entities as The Lion King and Groundhog Day. Now it's found its rightful place in the New Unabridged, thanks to its "solid, sustained usage in publications like the Washington Post, the Dallas Morning News, and even the New York Times." 

Just as the words of today find their places in our dictionaries in the inevitable, necessary updates to the editions—whether people have a hissy fit [citation: Barbara Kingsolver, The Poisonwood Bible, 1998] about that or not—sometimes the words of times past again become the words of now. Language is fun like that.

Photo of the Merriam-Webster editorial floor circa 1955, during the production of Webster's Third.

What I Learned Hate-Reading the Internet

For a particular kind of Internet adventurer, this has been a wild and fruitful week. I'm speaking of the kind of person who takes perverse pleasure in seeking out the worst Internet comments they can find, typically of the political variety. I happen to be just such a person, and manically scrolling through the comments section on National Review Online and Fox Nation and, occasionally, less one-sided outlets has taken up a lot of my idle (and, yes, some working) time this week. Boy do people have a lot of awful things to say about gay marriage!

The seasoned terrible comment-hunter knows that usually the social issues tend to yield more grimly satisfying fruit. Sure a bunch of clowns typing on and on and on about Obummer's fiscal policies can be fun in its way. And there are some grandly xenophobic and jingoistic sentiments to revel in under articles about, say, the Middle East. But domestic social issues really get the good comment juices flowing. I spent hour after shameful hour seeking out the most egregious comments I could find when the whole Sandra Fluke thing was happening, skipping past the trollish claptrap about "slut pills" and whatnot and going straight to the semi-intellectual cases for why birth control should not be considered a fundamental part of health care. It's always the people with a glimmer of intelligence or information that boil the blood the most, because these are presumably fully functioning individuals arguing the worst things. And because social issues are so often about identity, commenters end up taking out whole groups of people with single blustering rhetorical swoops. It's maximum carnage, and can sometimes feel deliciously, maddeningly personal.

Which brings us to this week in gay marriage, a veritable font of infuriating comments. Oftentimes the posts themselves are great sources of wonderful outrage, but the comments are really where the good stuff lies, the unedited stuff, the raw material. I like NRO's comments the best because, as mentioned, they have at least some degree of complex reasoning contained within. They're the Cadillac of anti-gay blog comments, the stately, cardigan-ed bigot sitting in an armchair saying hateful things. (Yes, implying that gay people getting married is going to cause the collapse of American civilization is extremely hateful, sorry.) I've been voraciously reading all week, as I always do when some hot-button political topic flares up and everyone goes nuts. Only this week, it's been a little different. Over the past couple of days I've... I dunno, learned something?

No, no, I've not been converted. Rather, through sifting through comment after comment after comment, reading every argument under the sun about why gay couples should not enjoy the same governmental recognition as straight couples — it's harmful to children, it will ruin marriage as an institution, marriage is for sanctifying procreation only, etc. — I've come to realize two things. One is that I ultimately spend all my time reading this stuff because, yes, it's oddly entertaining, feeling that adrenalin rush of anger is a sad thrill, but also because I am genuinely curious about the other side of the argument. I like discovering its (admittedly rare) nuances and learning its tactics. Thus I've grown to stop seeking out the simple "LEVITICUS!!!" idiot commenters and now look for full sentences, paragraphs even, detailing the opposition. In doing so, my own opinions are clarified. And that's valuable. So while I'm a little bit embarrassed about how much time I've spent listening to Concerned Women for America's podcast over the past couple years, I don't think it's a pointless exercise to spend some time over on NRO or wherever else. It makes my arguments stronger, and deepens and sharpens my convictions.

The second realization is more germane to the political topic at hand. Reading through all those arguments about the children and the institution and this and the that, I gradually built up (in my head) detailed rebuttals to each one. I came up with examples of how marriage is not about procreation, not governmentally anyway. I made a mental list of the various forms the "institution" of marriage has taken over the 2,000-year span so often invoked on those pages. I was answering, silently, each argument on its merits. But then, eventually, I came to this second, crucial realization: These particular talking points ultimately aren't what the argument is about. Oh sure, people may have convinced themselves over the years that, why yes, this really is about how marriage is a procreative institution. But that's not really the root of it, it's not the heart of the matter. No, that's a far simpler, and darker, thing. The seed from which all this passion comes from is merely a feeling of superiority, and the chafing at having that feeling challenged.

Simply put, these people have long believed, because who was challenging them really, that their way was the way. How perfect, that they happened to be born into such a traditional life. The straight marrying kind. It's a solid and steady and communally supported lifestyle. And of course in order to feel even more bolstered in their own lives, they needed a contrasting example, a how not to be. The negative shores up the positive. And in this particular instance, the negative was, well, gay people. A strange and curious other, a practicer of repulsing things. (Straight sex ain't lookin' too good from the other side, just fyi guys.) How perfect! And how wonderful that broader society confirmed this for them. All that helpful shunning that, in opposing force, pushed them even further into the warm penguin huddle. Over time that sense of security curdles into entitlement. And so when, finally, that other says, "Hey wait a minute, I'd like to participate in this grand American experiment as fully as you guys," it's an abject challenge to their sense of having owned the world. Which is to say, if gay marriage is allowed, if it is legally if not immediately socially viewed as really no different from straight marriage, then that means that gay people are, gulp, equals. And if that's the case then who are they? It's something of an existential crisis, whether they're conscious of it or not. I've no doubt that as the years progress, society will figure out another other to exploit for these purposes, but for now we are witnessing the raging at the collapse of one of the greatest systems of ostracization ever built. And these people are very mad about it. And, yes, a little scared. 

So they can bellow on with their specific sociological reasons, and even their scripture, but the bare fact of their outrage will remain universal. Realizing this has changed the tenor of my, for lack of a less annoying phrase, hate-reading. It's not as fun anymore. I can't feel as prickled awake by these nasty bigots and jerks. No, that's been replaced with a sense of weary despair. Despair over the fact that all along this really didn't have much to do with us. Like so many things, maybe even most things, this was all ultimately about themselves. About the way they see themselves in the world, about the way they have tethered their sense of belonging and purpose to the rocks and roots they trust. They ossified that way, so now that those rocks and roots have started to move, it's painful. I understand that pain, because I've felt it too, in other ways. Changing is hard, adapting too. But we all gotta do it. Or we can break, I guess. But then, well, we're broken.

Anyway, that's what I think I learned on the Internet this week. It may seem simple, but it was important to me. Still, I'll probably forget all about it by the time the first comment is posted.