Atlantic Monthly Contributors's Blog, page 1116

BlackBerry Successfully Trolls Tech Press with This Super Awkward Music Video

Joke's on you, tech writers. BlackBerry totally trolled you all into writing about its new phone and operating system with this terribly awkward cover of Etta James's "At Last." Aside from the BlackBerry fan blogs, one of which called this video "a nice song," the rest of the blogger-sphere made fun of this easy bait. The mockery started out pretty tame with Business Insider using the words "weird" and "surreal delight." Later in the day, however, Gizmodo called it "staggeringly awkward" and BetaBeat followed up with the strongest declaration: "BlackBerry Should Be Banned from America for This Cover of ‘At Last,’ Which Is a Musical Travesty." And of course, who could blame them, because this thing is full of weird GIF-able moments of Alec Saunders, BlackBerry's vice president of developer relations. Like this:

And this:

And this fun head bob:

But, with a lot of time to kill between the BlackBerry 10 announcement a couple of months ago and the phone's U.S. debut sometime this month, BlackBerry successfully reminded the world that its phone still exists. And it knew you would, consider that happened last time it put out one of these covers. So, as far as their concerned: Mission accomplished.

March Madness, Mapped

While you're filling out your expertly analyzed bracket, you might want to take a look at how March Madness fandom is spread across the country with this map from Facebook (via Gizmodo). Michael Bailey of Facebook's Data Science team analyzed the way "likes" are spread through teams and conferences, across the country—in similar fashion to this Super Bowl map. 

Here, for instance, Facebook looks at the conference divide. Bailey points out in his analysis how the ACC fan base is spread across the country, despite pockets of dominance for other conferences. 

Facebook then divides up data by regions, No. 1 seeds, Cinderellas, and rivalries—see, for instance, how North Carolina seems to conquer more of the country than Duke: 

That said, Duke's dominant, looking at all the teams in the midwest region: 

Just as UNC does in the South: 

11 Years Later, an Arrest Has Been Made in Daniel Pearl's Death

In February 2002, Wall Street Journal corespondent Daniel Pearl was killed after spending a month in captivity with Pakistani terrorists. In March 2013, someone was finally arrested in connection with his death. ABC News reports Pakistani officials have arrested a suspect in connection with the American journalist's murder. Plenty of people were arrested for helping out with the kidnapping, but his murder has remained unresolved. Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, one of the 9/11 masterminds, claimed it was he who ordered Pearl kidnapped, and took credit for beheading him while under questioning at Guantanamo Bay. Mohammed has never been charged with the murder.

Indeed, the arrested suspect, Qari Abdul Hayee, was not the killer, Pakistani officials said, but they believe he was one of the people involved with the kidnapping and that he will have good information. A person with a remarkably similar name was included as a suspect in a 2011 Georgetown student investigation called the Daniel Pearl Project. 

Shortly after the September 11 attacks, Pearl was on his way to interview a Muslim fundamentalist leader in Pakistan when he was captured. Pearl was gruesomely beheaded, and later a (sometimes censored) video of his beheading was seen by most everyone on television and the Internet. Ed Koch, the recently departed former New York mayor, recently honored Pearl's legacy by using one of Pearl's quotes on his grave stone. 

Karl Rove's History of Bad Advice Is Haunting the GOP

Karl Rove was loathed and respected by liberals as an evil political genius for using anti-gay marriage amendments to turn out conservatives in 2004, particularly in Ohio. It seemed like a good idea at the time. But now Republicans have been stuck with an increasingly unpopular position for almost 10 years, something Rove has a habit of forcing them to do. Gay marriage is especially unpopular with young people — 81 percent of people under 30 support gay marriage, according to a Washington Post/ABC News poll released Monday. Fifty-eight percent of adults support gay marriage, up from 32 percent in 2004. Hillary Clinton, wife of the man who signed the Defense of Marriage Act into law, announced her support for gay marriage Monday. 

There is evidence Rove's anti-gay marriage campaign wasn't even that great an idea back in 2004. Former Bush aide Matthew Dowd denies that gay marriage actually boosted turnout in Ohio. And while Republicans blame gay marriage for young voters' dislike of the GOP, young voters started to move away from the party in 2004, and the movement only grew in 2006, as New York's Jonathan Chait points out.

But attacking gay marriage at least looked like good politics at the time, and now it certainly looks like it turned out to be a disaster in the long run. This is something of a pattern with Rove, who was mocked by many speakers at the Conservative Political Action Conference last week for failing to deliver in the 2012 election with his American Crossroads Super-PAC. Indeed, as the Republican party continues to re-evaluate itself this week beyond CPAC, Rove's role is looking increasingly dangerous when you compare his predictions to the facts. Take, for example, the Iraq war. But he had a crucial role in selling it to the public. We can blame him for the MISSION ACCOMPLISHED banner. On the occasion of the tenth anniversary of the invasion, Gallup finds that 53 percent of Americans think the Iraq war was a mistake. Rove was confident that the war on terror — as well as votes on warrantless wiretapping and "enhanced interrogation" — would help Republicans hold on to their congressional majority in 2006. He was wrong.

Even Rove's 2012 election night meltdown — in which he insisted Fox News' math nerds were wrong and Mitt Romney could win Ohio — was not without precedent. Historical record suggests Rove was unskewing polls long before Dean Chambers. Rove was in charge of political strategy for the 2006 elections. As late as October 24, he thought his strategy was working. In an interview with NPR, Rove denied Democrats would win a majority in Congress. NPR was skeptical, calling him "optimistic":

NPR: I'm looking at all the same polls that you are looking at.

ROVE: No, you are not. I'm looking at 68 polls a week for candidates for the US House and US Senate, and Governor and you may be looking at 4-5 public polls a week that talk attitudes nationally.

NPR: I don't want to have you to call races...

ROVE: I'm looking at all of these Robert and adding them up. I add up to a Republican Senate and Republican House. You may end up with a different math but you are entitled to your math and I'm entitled to THE math.

On election night, the math showed Democrats won 31 House seats and five Senate seats, taking the majority in both. Maybe Rove is not a genius who lost his touch; perhaps he was a mere turd blossom the entire time.

How Easy Will It Be to Steal the News from the Washington Post's Paywall?

Always a little late to the frontiers of digital journalism, The Washington Post has confirmed all the rumors of an inevitable "new" way to make money off its "savvy" readers: This summer, the paper's website will adopt a metered paywall system that's very similar to The New York Times — and, just like the Times, digitally savvy readers will probably find a way to access it for free.

The Post paywall, which gives casual readers access to as many as 20 free articles a month, doesn't have pricing numbers beyond that. It sounds like that part is still in the testing phase: "We're definitely engaging in research to come to the right price," Post publisher Katharine Weymouth told the Post's Steven Mufson. But according to an earlier report, the paper has tried out different costs, including $14.95 per month for unlimited online access without print delivery. That happens to be exactly what the Times charges for access to NYTimes.com and its phone apps, and that's working out pretty well for them, so it's pretty clear which paper of record is bearing the standards these days. 

What's less clear is just exactly how lenient the Post's paywall will become. "News consumers are savvy; they understand the high cost of a top-quality news gathering operation," Weymouth says. And everyone else is wondering if the Post is savvy enough to plug the holes in the Internet's big new news paywall. Heck, everyone else is doing it, so the Post will probably follow suit, right?  The Times cracked down last month on a URL workaround that was the Internet's unspoken key to free articles, making "some adjustments to optimize the gateway" that you can still kind of work around. The folks at The Wall Street Journal are something of paywall pioneers for a non-metered system with hand-picked articles that float outside the walled garden, but you could also Google any Journal headline as two-step path to freedom — until the Google trick mysteriously stopped working all the time of late, even if you typed the headline into Google News. In both cases, readers understood the high costs of a top-quality news gathering operation... and decided not to pay them. 

So how will the Post go about confronting a generation of newspaper readers partially accustomed to stealing the news? The biggest loophole so far appears to be the Post's deal to give free access to students, teachers, school administrators, members of the military, and government employees. That's a lot of D.C. residents, as Forbes's Jeff Bercovici notes. "More than 20% of District of Columbia residents work for the federal government, as do 12% of workers in Maryland and Virginia," he writes. And while the Post has doubled down on being a local paper, that's a lot of people, and it's not even counting how many college students are in the area — or how many college students with thin bank accounts might share their log-ins with their friends. And even with all those generous free subscriptions, questions regarding how to hack the paywall remain: Will someone build a plug-in? Will clearing a browser cache steal the news? How about the old question-mark trick that worked at the Times for so long? We'll have to wait until the summer and see how tight the Post's security is, but if you really don't want to pay the Post, there's usually always a way to contribute to the decline of print media.

The 'Game of Thrones'-'Princess Bride' Mashup Is Inconceivably Great

We realize there's only so much time one can spend in a day watching new trailers, viral video clips, and shaky cellphone footage of people arguing on live television. This is why every day The Atlantic Wire highlights the videos that truly earn your five minutes (or less) of attention. Today:

Winter is coming. And so is the next season of Game of Thrones. One surefire way to tell? The abundance of mashups by fans who are so consumed by their GoT love that they're creating anything and everything, including the inevitable Princess Bride-style video. As long as HBO keeps pumping out the (awesome) real trailers, the Internet will still bring the gold: 

Timberweek will never, ever stop: 

So basically, it's allergy season and someone let the cats in and, gosh, they're doing all this construction, so there's this dust in our eyes, and — yeah, okay, we admit it... we're crying. And as soon as you watch this video of a deaf woman hearing her son's voice for the first time, you probably will, too: 

And friends, this is a quokka. He is here to save you from your Mondays. Say thank you: 

The RNC Is Stuck in Kansas, Evermore

The Republican National Committee is hopeful it can figure out how to win national elections by following the examples of the 30 Republican governors, according to its new internal review of the 2012 elections, echoing Mitt Romney's advice to the Conservative Political Action Conference Friday. But a closer look at what state those 30 Republican governors govern, and when they got elected, complicates the picture. 

The first governor the RNC hailed is Kansas Gov. Sam Brownback, who signed a law to save $800 million over five years in Medicaid spending. The Kansas GOP tweeted excitedly about being highlighted as a national model. But the Kansas House of Representatives is 72 percent Republican. The Kansas Senate is 80 percent Republican. That might have something to do with the fact that Kansas looks a lot like the Republican Party. It's 78 percent white. It's a more rural state, but the rural population is shrinking as Latino immigration helps cities grow. According to 2012 exit polls, 39 percent of voters are conservative, 48 percent are moderate, and only 17 percent are liberal. Mitt Romney won with 60 percent of the vote, compared to 47 percent of the vote nationally. There was a big gender gap: 75 percent of white men voted for Romney, while 54 percent of white women did. The state has passed an anti-gay marriage constitutional amendment and has some of the most restrictive abortion laws in the country (photo of an anti-abortion rally in January, above).

In fact, as The National Review's Ramesh Ponnuru notes, each of those 30 governors "was either elected in 2009–10 or in a state Romney carried or both." The governors who won in 2009 are particularly interesting. New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie and Virginia Gov. Bob McDonnell were the beginning of the Tea Party wave. McDonnell was not invited to speak at CPAC after raising taxes in a transportation bill this year. Christie wasn't either, after criticizing the gun lobby, hugging President Obama after Hurricane Sandy, and blasting House Republicans for not passing a Sandy relief bill. 

The RNC also praises the governors of Georgia and Louisiana, states Romney won with 53 percent and 58 percent of the vote, respectively, for enacting conservative education reforms. Ten of the 30 GOP governors lead states in the old Confederacy. No exit polls were conducted in Georgia or Louisiana in 2012, but there were in nearby Mississippi. Does the GOP have a lot to learn from a state where 89 percent of the white population voted for Mitt Romney?

In less reliably red states, governors' conservative policy records are more mixed. Eight Republican governors have backed Obamacare's Medicaid expansion, though Florida's senate blocked it. Maine Gov. Paul LePage, the only Republican governor in New England, is wavering. Four of those were in states with large Latino populations. (Obamacare was very popular among Latinos.) Two more of the governors, Ohio's John Kasich and Michigan's Rick Snyder, lead blue states. In 2011, after Ohio voters overturned a law to curb union power, Kasich noted, "It's time to pause... The people have spoken clearly."

Vampire Weekend's New Songs Are Retro Fun

After a performance at SXSW, the sweater-wearing band Vampire Weekend has released two new studio tracks off their upcoming album, Modern Vampires in the City, and they're getting good early buzz — indeed, the retro-inflected tracks will be familiar to fans. 

They played the first, groovier song, "Diane Young," at SXSW this past weekend, where Rolling Stone reported it was well-received by the audience: 

There was a hint of anxious energy in the air as the band began playing; the audience fell quiet during the first chorus, which features tweaky pitch-shifted vocals from Koenig (manipulated in real time by Batmanglij). By the second time the chorus came around, there were whoops of approval rippling through the venue. When the song ended in a last burst of manic energy, the house responded with solid applause.

Fader calls it the "gnarly official single," while Stereogum describes it as "drum-driven and frantic and hyperactive that it defies genre designation, and it has Ezra Koenig trying out a sort of Elvis hiccup."  There's also a "Footloose"-y thing going on: 

Check out this totally 80s summer movie breakdown in @vampireweekend 'Diane Young'. @kennyloggins is smiling. vevo.ly/Zo7wUh

— Alt/Indie on VEVO (@AltIndieOnVEVO) March 18, 2013

(Amanda Dobbins at Vulture likens it to the Doug theme song.)

The second song is a far more mellow affair. Titled "Step," it comes along with a lyric video, which Stereogum rightly points out looks something like Woody Allen's Manhattan. 

The full album is due out in May, and you may remember that Vampire Weekend announced the title in the New York Times classifieds. 

This Is What St. Patrick's Day Really Looks Like

While most of the world is either face down or bleary-eyed by now, the rest of us are still stone cold sober and sitting straight up. Which is to say that some are celebrating St. Patrick's Day on Sunday and some are not. For the rest of us, this is what the holiday really looks like. 

We'll start off with the realest, most authentic St. Patrick's Day celebrators: the ones from Dublin, Ireland. These are real Irish people doing real Irish things -- like wearing the same hats we have stateside and the same novelty glasses. Oh well, look at that one guy's beard. It's magnificent:

This guy was spotted at a Boston Red Sox spring training game in Tampa, Florida, because of course he was. 

House Rep. Ed Markey wore an ugly green tie to avoid getting pinched at the annual St. Patrick's Day breakfast in South Boston, Massachusetts. No leprechauns present here:

To celebrate St. Patrick's Day in Romania, they play the goat. Well, it's actually a bagpipe covered in goat skin. Still playing a goat, though: 

Judging by this pretty picture from Buzzfeed's Ben Smith, it was a beautiful day for the St. Patrick's Day parade in Brooklyn, New York today:

St Patrick's day in Brooklyn twitter.com/BuzzFeedBen/st…

— Ben Smith (@BuzzFeedBen) March 17, 2013

Some dogs got in on the fun in Montreal, Quebec today: 

What's that Rage Against the Machine song - Dogs on Parade? At the MTL St. Patricks Day Parade. twitter.com/JeffMarek/stat…

— Jeff Marek (@JeffMarek) March 17, 2013

This dog in Berlin, Germany wasn't getting piched today, either. In fact, it might be the best-dressed person/thing we've seen all day: 

Prince William and Duchess Kate wore some shrubbery to celebrate on Sunday. You'll notice the guard is not wearing any green at all. He was pinched immediately after this picture was taken, one would hope: 

Meanwhile, someone dyed the water in the White House fountain green today:

Something tells me Biden got loose from the Secret Service before his trip to see the Pope.

 

Though we suspect this next picture of revellers celebrating in a New York bar a day early is what most people's St. Patrick's Day looked like. Or, it looked like this three or four times. But then by the fifth round Jonny said something offensive, so Alex went outside for a smoke, where he ended up getting into a scrap with four lads from down the way. So then you all got into a cab and settled on getting Chinese food, because egg rolls. 

Happy St. Patrick's Day, y'all. 

(All photos via the AP unless otherwise stated.)

Magic from Carell and Carrey Can't Make 'Oz' Disappear

Welcome to the Box Office Report, where Steve Carell's career was the only thing Burt Wonderstone ever made disappear. Poof! Just like that, it was gone. 

1. Oz: the Great and Powerful (Buena Vista): $42.2 million in 3,912 theaters [Week 2]

This is the new Hunger Games, folks. James Franco's Oz was the year's first movie to hit $100 million domestically, which it did in its first six days of release. Oz dominated again this weekend by bringing in just over half what it earned on opening weekend. Oz has now taken in roughly $281 million worldwide for no apparent reason other than shininess? Think about your life, world. Think about your choices.

But the real news this weekend is how embarrassing everything else did...

2. The Call (Sony): $17.1 million in 2,507 theaters

...except for Halle Berry in The Call! Which, what?! This first week return is a big surprise considering the budget was only $13 million and Barry hasn't had a hit since the Box Office Report was still in high school. (Seriously, her