Atlantic Monthly Contributors's Blog, page 1120

Steve Carell Is No Will Ferrell , and That's OK

The Incredible Burt Wonderstone opens today with middling to bad reviews, but even though the movie is off to an iffy start, its star Steve Carell may have a lot to look forward to this year—maybe even an Oscar bid. The problem with his first major release of 2013 is that he's just not Will Ferrell.

One of the complaints about Wonderstone—in which Carell, Steve Buscemi, Jim Carey play struggling magicians—is that it seems like the role should have gone to Ferrell, a comic actor so broad he can make the most ridiculous characters carry an entire movie. Lou Lumenick at the New York Post writes: "Steve Carell is fatally miscast as an arrogant, flamboyant third-rate magician in 'The Incredible Burt Wonderstone,' which by all rights should have been a second-rate Will Ferrell vehicle." Ty Burr at The Boston Globe writes that Wonderstone is a "is a lazy, underwritten imitation Will Ferrell movie." That's not to say that means Carell is bad. Stephen Holden at the New York Times explains that "Because Mr. Carell doesn’t go in for the kind of all-out caricature that Mr. Ferrell embraces with a manic glee, 'The Incredible Burt Wonderstone' has an underlying soulfulness that cuts against its farcical aspirations." That said, Holden adds that the movie then "lacks a shark’s bite."  

Carell entered our filmgoing consciousness as the guy who got his chest waxed in inglorious fashion in Judd Apatow breakout The 40-Year-Old Virgin, but he's always had a bit of a serious actor lurking inside—one that he sometimes eschews for the broad humor of something like Wonderstone. The year after Virgin he appeared as a suicidal Proust scholar in the dark comedy Little Miss Sunshine, which went on to garner a bunch of Oscar nominations. 

And the Oscars may be where Carell is heading this year. He's appearing in two movies that could be contenders, and one where he makes a dramatic turn that could place him in the running for a prize himself. The first was, like Sunshine, got a vote of confidence Sundance. Carell reunites with Sunshine costar Toni Collette, playing her boyfriend, in The Way, Way Back from the Oscar-winning screenwriters of The Descendants. While the reviews weren't all raves, the movie sold for a bunch of money to Fox Searchlight. 

A more likely Oscar vehicle for Carell is Foxcatcher, a movie that appeared on many (very) early Oscar prediction lists and features Carell as John du Pont, the eccentric and schizophrenic supporter of USA wrestling who ends up murdering David Schultz, an Olympic champion. The film is directed by Bennett Miller, known for Moneyball and Capote. 

Then, of course, Carell has the Anchorman sequel, where he returns as daffy weatherman Brick, alongside who else but Ferrell. The problem is while Ferrell's Ron Burgundy somehow manages to be a character so ludicrous he can hold our attention for a feature film, someone like Brick can't. Carell is great in those wacky characters in small doses, but is best when he's given roles that allow him to give his characters conscience and depth. He can do that in something like The 40-Year-Old Virgin, and we'll see if he succeeds in something dark like Foxcatcher. 

So forget Burt Wonderstone, Carell may actually be making mostly the right choices this year. 

Five Best Friday Columns

Peggy Noonan at The Wall Street Journal on the new Pope "Everything about Cardinal Jorge Mario Bergoglio's election was a surprise," writes Peggy Noonan. "His age, the name he took, his mien as he was presented to the world. He was plainly dressed, a simple white cassock, no regalia, no finery." Does such a (relative) lack of pomp and circumstance signal change for the Church? After weighing "his embrace of the church's doctrines and his characterological tenderness toward the poor," Noonan sees Bergoglio — now Pope Francis — as uniquely situated to address a religious hierarchy in crisis. "Pope Francis already seems, in small ways rich in symbolism, to be moving the Vatican away from arrogance."

Rob Portman in The Columbus Dispatch on marriage equality Republican Ohio Senator Rob Portman, who made headlines last year for appearing on several shortlists for Mitt Romney's running mate, comes out in favor of gay marriage: "If two people are prepared to make a lifetime commitment to love and care for each other ... the government shouldn’t deny them the opportunity to get married," he writes. It's a stunning reversal; in years past he voted for a constitutional amendment that would ban gay marriage. His son, he says, convinced him otherwise: "Knowing that my son is gay prompted me to consider the issue from another perspective: that of a dad who wants all three of his kids to lead happy, meaningful lives with the people they love."

Charles C.W. Cooke at the National Review on Al Gore's evangelism To Charles C.W. Cooke, Al Gore's frequent declaration that the Internet will save us — along with our government and our cities — requires more skepticism that it usually receives. Observing the former presidential candidate shop his wares at South by Southwest, Cooke wonders: "Will the Information Age really lead to an Informed Age? In truth, most pertinent political information is already online, but, rather than having flung open the doors of the Library of Alexandria to a grateful populace, the primary consequence has been a rise in cheap sensationalism." But Cooke reserves most of his skepticism for the messenger — Gore himself — who remains "easily mockable ... [and] unaccustomed to being challenged."

Ana Marie Cox in The Guardian on the GOP's youth movement The opening day of CPAC bore a noticeable theme: a movement needs young leaders to survive. In her consideration of Marco Rubio and Rand Paul's performance on Thursday morning, Ana Marie Cox finds little to celebrate, though. The young (and soft-spoken) Rubio, she writes, "has become a rising star partly because he does not threaten to dislodge any of the dwindling 'red giants' already lodged in the Republican firmament." Paul, on the other hand — a decade Rubio's senior — is at least aware of where the party is going, if it is going anywhere: "[Rand] smartly positioned himself as a grown-up who understands that the next generation of voters mostly likely are."

Jonathan Alter at Bloomberg View on the 47-percent filmmaker Now that we know the identity of Scott Prouty, the bar-tender who captured presidential candidate Mitt Romney's infamous "47 pecent" comments, we have to decide where he falls in history. Jonathan Alter hesitates to declare anything certain, however: "We'll never know for sure whether the president would have been re-elected without the footage, which crystallized perceptions of Romney as callous and unconcerned about almost half of the people he sought to lead." But he acknowledges that Prouty's story is crucial to understanding the "makers-vs-takers" theme that pervaded the 2012 race. "He's a humble guy and isn’t looking to cash in. He now takes his rightful place as an important footnote in U.S. history," Alter concludes.

Samsung's Galaxy S IV Won't Kill the iPhone with All These Broken Extras

The Samsung Galaxy S IV can do a lot of things Apple's iPhone 5 cannot — and a lot of things it doesn't need to do at all. The new phone has a grand total of 35 software features, some of which don't work all that well, others of which are gimmicky, and a handful which are actually useful. At last night's (sexist) event, I had a chance to play around with the Galaxy S IV, and Samsung has officially overextended itself in the add-on department: Nobody needs their cellphone camera to be this loaded; it may be 2013, but it's still just a camera. And everyone's talking about the motion-sensing capabilities, but there's only one eye-controlled feature; the rest of the tap-free "solutions" are all spread out, and some of them don't even really work.

None of which is to say that the phone doesn't run very well in its most essential functionality — it's fast, it's thin, it's light, and the Internet runs smoothly and quickly. It's just that a lot of the other things, which were built in, on, and around to lure away iPhone owners, turn out to be half-baked... and kind of annoying. Here's a comprehensive list of everything that's just a little too much:

The Broken

Camera Stuff: When you tap over to the Galaxy S IV's camera functionality, you're greeted with a lot of photo-taking options. It's like the days when everyone got a Canon Powershot camera for the holidays, which they don't anymore for a reason. Some of the camera featurettes make sense — "Night," for example, actually makes your darker photos look. But then there's one called "Beauty Face," which promises — guarantees! — to make people look more beautiful, with face-slimming camera tricks. I tried that out on a woman testing the phone across from me, and she looks this beautiful in person, too:

Motion Sensors: Theoretically, one of the coolest parts of this "iPhone killer" is that it has a lot of that next-generation motion-sensing technology. (As we learned last night, women might find it especially useful while in the kitchen, where they belong, apparently.) However, the technology isn't quite precise enough. There is a hover feature called Air View for reading texts without touching the screen, but it takes a very specific touch:

A lot of the motion stuff, like Air Gesture, which allows phone swiping — without phone touching — takes some practice before you can get it to work successfully. But, perhaps it's a learned touch, like iPhone typing upon its launch....

Language Translation: The Galaxy S IV has an S Translator feature that's very useful in theory, set up to run with nine different languages. In Thursday's night's very loud room, with a lot of people clogging the WiFi, it did not work at all. Phone Arena has a video of that exact problem. The translator couldn't even take the English word "hello" and turn it into Spanish. Some might chalk that up to a situational issue, but in moments of desperate translation — in a crowded square in Spain, say — can a person count on silence and incredible WiFi or 4G LTE? 

The Useless

More Camera Stuff: Some of those camera featurettess work just fine, but it's hard to imagine situations in which anyone would actually, you know, want to use them. Dual Shot, for example, allows simultaneous use of front- and rear-facing angles... at the same time. It puts the person's face in that postage stamp on the top right in the picture below, or you can choose fish-eye, a heart, and other decals like that....

I imagine people will use this feature much like the MacBook Photo Booth filters. Which is to say, for about five minutes, ever. Same goes for Cinema Photo — it animates photos, kind of like a GIF thing — and Sound Shot, which puts sound on top of photos. Drama Shot could be borderline fun, allowing someone to take a bunch of pictures and putting them together to show someone in motion. But, again, it's the kind of thing you might use once.

Motion Sensors, Now with Sound: Samsung Adapt Sound adjusts the volume to a personalized level, which sounds scary and kind of silly. 

The Useful 

Yet More Camera Stuff: The simultaneous camera comes in handy for dual-video calling, which adds another person to video chat and could be great for family catch-up and business purposes. As for the camera-editing options: Eraser takes multiple shots of a situation and, with a tap, removes a potential photo-ruining aspect of a pic — and removes it pretty cleanly. The camera also has high dynamic range, panorama, and a 360-degree option, all of which actually help enhance a photo and which average photo users can get a lot out of.

Motion Sensors... for Your Eyes: Unlike the other motion controls, Eye Control Video Pause works very well, actually topping a video and being pretty futuristic in a dynamic way. Adapt Display dims the screen if it senses a lot of text, making it easier on the eyes. 

S Health: It was hard to test this out in such a short period of time. But this health monitoring thing sounds promising, for those brave enough to use it. 

Sharing: Samsung has a "Group Play" category that lets up to six people share music, pictures, documents, and play games. Everyone likes to share a lot of stuff — it's the overwhelming amount of other stuff that might not make iPhone users share in the love.

North Korea Test-Fires Missiles and Fails to Provoke Much of Anybody

At a time of heightened awareness—and with U.S. and South Korean militaries in the middle of war games—North Korea has apparently decided that now would be the perfect time to start testing missiles. Good thing no one's taking them that seriously.

South Korean military sources say the North launched several short-range missiles into their East Sea (or the Sea of Japan) on Friday, less than a week after declaring that their armistice with the South is over. Just a day earlier they the North conducted live-fire artillery drills near the Yellow Sea border with the South.

While the launch is not an actual attack, there was always the possibility that it could have been mistaken for one, or at least the preparation stage of one. After all, bigger wars have started over a lot less. Especially when of the parties has been shouting all week about "retaliatory strikes" and "flames of justice." (That's why you need to pick up the phone when the other side calls.) 

Fortunately, the South has so far taken the incident for what it is—a show of bravado—and isn't taking the bait. But it's not going to make it any easier to bring everyone back from the edge.

Obama Has a Friend in Rising Gas Prices

New government data suggests that spiking gas prices are making everything else more expensive — data that could help the president on Friday as he continues to make the case for expanded investment in alternative fuel sources.

The Bureau of Labor Statistics Consumer Price Index update, released Friday morning, indicates that prices went up an average of 0.7 percent in February. The spike is the highest in months.

And the cause is clear. The BLS indicates that gas prices, up 9.1 percent accounts for "almost three-fourths of the seasonally adjusted all items increase." Or, to put it more explicitly:

The shape of that highly volatile gasoline line (and the energy line, since gasoline is included in those prices) mirrors the shape of the overall price index very closely. Which makes sense: higher gas prices mean higher shipping costs and higher delivery costs, among other things. Prices rose about 50 cents a gallon nationally between the end of January and the beginning of March.

During his State of the Union address, President Obama outlined a plan to "shift our cars and trucks off oil for good." Let's take the advice of business and military leaders, he said, "and free our families and businesses from the painful spikes in gas prices we've put up with for far too long."

Later today, the president will outline his strategy for doing that. In a speech at Illinois's Argonne National Laboratory, Obama is expected to outline an "energy security trust fund," which, according to Scientific American, would allocate revenue from offshore drilling leases to fund research into, among other things, "boost automobile efficiency, enhance battery technology and expand the use of biofuels." Argonne was likely selected as the site of the announcement because of the facility's work on next-generation battery systems.

The White House has encouraged similar research before. As Reuters notes:

Between 2009 and 2011, the U.S. Department of Energy extended nearly $9 billion in loans to automakers to support cleaner vehicle technologies. Those included a $5.9 billion loan to Ford Motor Company to upgrade facilities and raise the fuel efficiency of its cars.

The new program's aim would be "shifting our cars and trucks off oil," a White House document said, while also saying that the United States would continue to rely on "responsibly produced oil and natural gas."

There's one key problem for the president's plan: It requires Congressional approval. The New York Times outlines the politics:

The idea enjoys some bipartisan and business support, but is likely to encounter strong resistance from Congressional Republicans, who will portray it as a tax on energy producers. The White House says the money will come from growth in drilling revenue from leases on public lands and waters over the next decade and is not a new tax.

Should Congress approve the effort, there's some irony involved. Expanded offshore drilling (and, therefore, expanded domestic production) won't help lower gasoline prices. But the revenue generated from doing so could, over the long run, help soften the blow to consumers from the prices we pay by reducing the need to use gasoline at all.

Hearst Is Not OK with Sexting Strippers

Today in gossip: Don't get caught sexting at Hearst or they'll let you go, Anna Kendrick is single now, and Taylor Swift did not sleep with Ed Sheeran.

A high-ranking executive at Hearst, president of Hearst Entertainment and Syndication Scott Sassa, has been relieved of duty after he got involved in some sort of sexting thing with a stripper. Yeah, apparently you can lose your job for sexting? It seems that Sassa got involved with this stripper, sending her dirty messages and whatnot, and then she used those to try to blackmail him. When Sassa didn't pay up, the stripper's boyfriend sent the messages to the top brass at Hearst and Sassa was given a severance package and told to scram. Which seems unfair, doesn't it? What does some guy sexting a stripper have to do with his job? It's not like he works at the Heritage Foundation. We're talking about a media company! Who cares if someone's sending dirty text messages to a stripper? Is he still doing his job? Then don't fire him. I mean, I suppose there's PR embarrassment or whatever to consider, but I don't really think that anyone would have cared that much if the stripper had gone to some media outlet and said, "Here are some illicit text messages from a guy who works at Hearst." It's all a little silly. Silliest of all is the Page Six source who says, "William Randolph Hearst must be rolling over in his grave." Haha. Yes, because he was such a good, upstanding dude. History, huh? [Page Six]

I didn't know that actress Anna Kendrick and director Edgar Wright (Shaun of the Dead) were dating, but apparently they were and have split up. After four years! Am I the only one who didn't know this? Oh well. The point is, they're over and Anna Kendrick is sending jokey tweets about dating and stuff, so everyone appears to be fine. I just wish she would tell us next time. [Us Weekly]

Bill and Hillary Clinton are still flitting about Manhattan, making the scene. On Tuesday night they were spotted at a performance of Holland Taylor's new one-woman Broadway show Ann, about the life of former Texas governor Ann Richards. Apparently Bill is featured as something of a virtual character at one point. Which was probably fun for him. Also in the audience that night were Gabby Giffords and her astronaut husband, as well as Meryl Streep. Streep went backstage after the show and gushed to Taylor about the play, saying "Will you write something for me?" Taylor of course said yes and began writing her into an episode of Two and a Half Men. Clinton was also backstage, I guess, and he told her that everything in the play was on the up-and-up. So, a big night for Holland Taylor. Good for her. She's come a long way since she was the crusty dean at California University on Saved by the Bell: The College Years. A long, long way. [Page Six]

British singer and possible leprechaun Ed Sheeran says he and Taylor Swift are NOT doin' it or did not do it or are not going to do it, despite rumors to the contrary. See, he was recently spotted leaving Swift's hotel room in the wee hours, but it's not what you think. I mean, I don't know about you, but I'm thinking they were drinking hot chocolate and Swift was reading aloud from a book about puffy cotton candy clouds and eventually they ate Pixie Sticks and giggled. But Sheeran says that's not so, in fact "we passed the guitar back and forth and played songs to each other." Ah. OK. I see. I just thought that... Never mind. Oh well. It doesn't mean they've never held mugs of Ovaltine with both hands and talked about rabbits, but they just weren't doing it that night. Good for them, I guess. Playing their music. Boring. [Huffington Post]

Here is a photo of actress Jennie Garth (Lies of the Heart: The Story of Laurie Kellogg) putting in her own hair extensions with pliers. She has help, she's at a salon of some kind, but she is putting in a few of her own in one of the photos. Which is fine. She's a hands-on, DYI kind of a gal. It's just interesting I guess. I dunno. Slow gossip day. Jennie Garth. Why not? [Us Weekly]

China Forces Coke to Stop Using GPS

China's longstanding effort to solidify claims to various disputed areas has prompted a focus on an unexpected threat: Coca-Cola. The concern is probably overblown, though, given how much worse spying pays than selling soda.

Officials in the southern province of Yunnan accused employees of the soda company of using illegal geolocation devices as they made deliveries in the region. The Associated Press reports that Coke uses generally available location technology in its trucks, but employee use of hand-held devices appears to have triggered the February complaint. But, as the Wall Street Journal suggests, China's rules around use of GPS technology are confusing.

The rules for conducting research and collecting data for business in China often are unclear and have caused problems for foreign companies. A Chinese court in 2010 sentenced American geologist Xue Feng to eight years in prison for trying to buy data about China's oil industry, including the coordinates of wells. The data were believed to have been commercially available, Mr. Xue's defense team said. But the court convicted him on charges of attempting to obtain and traffic in state secrets, raising questions on the definition of secret information.

The AP reports that the authorities that monitor surveying identified 40 cases of illegal surveying between 2006 and 2011. Most apparently occurred in the northwestern part of the country, where China disputes ownership of various boundaries and regions with India, Pakistan, and Bhutan.

Such boundaries have increasingly become a point of pride in the country, which earlier this year unveiled a new map claiming several disputed regions as Chinese, and, last November, did something similar with the map on its passports. The AP notes that China recently updated its surveying laws to provide fines and jail times to those who create maps that don't reflect the government's territorial claims. Partly in an effort to maintain control over how geolocation services operate in the country — and partly for national security reasons — China created its own GPS satellite network, BeiDou, that went into operation late last year.

It's in Coke's economic interests to resolve the current dispute quickly. In 2010, the company controlled 17 percent of the country's soda market, targeting $100 billion in revenue by 2020. Last year, that percentage had dipped to 16.6 — but still represented more than three times that of rival Pepsi. Those numbers provide perhaps Coke's best defense should anyone worry that the company is conducting surveying-based espionage of any sort: Spying will never be as lucrative as selling sugar water.

The Truth About Matt Lauer's 'Today' Show Problem Is Internal Revolt

Matt Lauer is the Voldemort of NBC News — no one dares say his name, even though performance meetings about the Today show's ratings swoon are all about him. But just as Hogwarts waited until its total demise to deal with Voldemort, it seems the gang at NBC and its morning-show moneymaker won't be getting rid of Lauer any time soon. The latest details to surface from the Today show set come from The New York Times's Brian Stelter, whose sources at NBC tell him that everyone knows Lauer is the problem. Here's the scoop on those performance reviews:

The employees were reassured that Today viewers didn’t want their show to turn into Good Morning America, the ABC rival that has become Americans’ No. 1 choice in the mornings. But then they were told this: “What matters most is the anchor connection to the audience; what we need to work on is the connection.” As the word “connection” was repeated, some people in the room started to chuckle because of a name that went unspoken: Matt Lauer.

“What they meant was Matt. But no one would say it,” said a senior staff member who, like the others, spoke on condition of anonymity.

Lauer is apparently he who must not be named. That narrative from people who actually work at the Today show — that staffers are well aware of Lauer's fading likability, that Ann Curry wasn't the problem after all, and that nobody wants to tell him, so they're telling the press — counters what we've been hearing of late. Namely, the executives, cushy anonymous sources, and Lauer himself, who all told the Daily Beast's Howard Kurtz earlier this week that Lauer is the "best person who's ever done this" and that "Lauer repeatedly tried to convince his bosses to slow things down and give Curry more time before she was pushed into a reduced role." Essentially, Kurtz's "exclusive" was just NBC's latest ploy into rehabbing their fading star's image, even as he faces silent revolt on his own show.

Stelter's report, unlike Kurtz's, doesn't seem to be NBC spin operating under the patina of a news story. Stelter points out some brutal facts about Lauer's stagnant popularity — that NBC is trying to figure out if Today's ratings are better when Lauer is on vacation, and that one of his rivals has a better Q-score, the ratings which tell executives which hosts audiences like best: 

For the first time his counterpart on “Good Morning America,” George Stephanopoulos, has a higher score. For Mr. Lauer “the drop started happening in the beginning of 2012, and it’s slowly eroded since then,” said Henry Schafer of Marketing Evaluations, the company that surveys thousands of viewers to come up with the scores. NBC executives said its focus groups found otherwise.

Somewhere, Stephanopoulos is stroking a (small) white cat with a brandy snifter, while looking at a 42-inch blowup of his Q-score. But back to Lauer: It's clear that he, no matter what NBC does and no matter how many times it falls on its sword (again and again) for its $25 million man, can't shake the reality that morning-show audiences think he was a jerk to Ann Curry, and think he's a jerk now. Savannah Guthrie's effect on the show doesn't seem to have moved the needle either way, but it would seem like seriously reviewing Lauer's popularity might be the logical thing to do in light of such a ratings dive — that's what NBC executives did with Curry. Still, NBC's giving Lauer the benefit of the doubt.  

"We are aware of all the ridiculous rumors and gossip," Alex Wallace, the star young NBC News executive recently put in charge of Today told Stelter. "We would like Matt Lauer to be in the chair as long as he would like to be. We hope that's for many years to come."

Five Best Thursday Columns

Daniel W. Drezner at Foreign Policy on Lena Dunham's foreign policy "The true TV connoisseur," declares Daniel W. Drezner, "appreciates that the most insightful television show about world politics airing right now is, obviously, Girls." Drezner takes the HBO sitcom's underlying structure (young things making their way in post-aughts Brooklyn) and its various plots (like Marnie losing her job) and uses them to illustrate the global balance of power. For example: "Hannah Horvath, a struggling young writer ... clearly represents the United States in all her fading hegemony." A wider view holds, too: "The central journey in Girls is how immature people fumble their way toward maturity," Drezner writes. "The parallels to world politics here are surprisingly strong — after all, sovereign states are a relatively recent phenomenon in human history, so national polities also possess some immaturity."

Josh Barro at Bloomberg View on the problem with CPAC The Conservative Political Action Conference — which commences today — exists to unite and organize the conservative movement. But, Josh Barro writes, it's become something of a joke. "CPAC is not as important as the news media often makes it out to be. Its attendees are largely college Republicans and grumpy retirees: the sort of people with the time and inclination to spend a couple of weekdays listening to stump speeches at a conference hotel outside Washington," he observes. Citing one panel he served on a few years ago — "easily the dumbest, most poorly organized panel discussion I've ever been involved in" — Barro admits that CPAC can focus media attention, however briefly. "If the things you plan to do at CPAC won’t be televised, you can afford to skip it."

Richard Kim at The Nation on Graham Hill's asceticism On March 9, The New York Times published a curious op-ed by Internet millionaire Graham Hill on living with less, which was almost immediately scorned for equating simplicity — or at least a lack of clutter — with virtue. Richard Kim assesses the flaws of Hill's argument, which amounts to the "gospel that Americans are spending increasingly untenable amounts of money on stuff and this is what’s making us (as households and as a nation) both bankrupt and unhappy." Instead, Kim writes, "the incomes of most Americans haven’t soared like Hill's; they've stagnated. And within those depressingly static budget lines, most Americans don’t spend more and more of their money on stuff; they can’t afford to. Quite the opposite, they have to spend it on school and doctor’s visits."

Floyd Abrams and Yochai Benkler in The New York Times on Obama's whistleblower policy The prosecution of Bradley Manning — the Army private who furnished WikiLeaks with thousands of classified documents, including the infamous "Collateral Murder" footage, and who may face a lifetime in prison — sets a "chilling precedent" for government whistleblowers, write Floyd Abrams and Yochai Benkler, who take to task the prosecution's theory that Manning "aided the enemy" by publicizing documents that could "be read by anyone with an Internet connection" — including al Qaeda operatives. "You don't have to think that WikiLeaks is the future of media, or Private Manning a paragon of heroic whistle-blowing, to understand the threat," the pair argue, adding, "Anyone who holds freedom of the press dear should shudder at the threat that the prosecution’s theory presents to journalists, their sources and the public that relies on them."

Douglas Rushkoff in The Wall Street Journal on our relationship with computers We like to think of computers in the same way as pets — things we train and control to improve our lives. Taking stock of today's work and life habits, Douglas Rushkoff comes to the opposite conclusion: "Instead of teaching our technologies to conform to our own innate rhythms, we strive to become more compatible with our machines' timeless nature." In other words, computers are not becoming more human; humans are become more like computers. "We want all access, all the time, to everything—and to match this intensity and availability ourselves: citizens of the virtual city that never sleeps." He doesn't advocate a clean break from technology, though, and even advocates technology which monitors, and helps exploit, the rise and fall and certain brain chemicals (like dopamine).  "While digital technology can serve to disconnect us from the cycles that have traditionally orchestrated our activities, it can also serve to bring us back into sync."

Michelle Obama's Bangs Debut on the Cover of Vogue

Michelle Obama covering Vogue for the second time is one of those events that so instantly and obviously fascinates inquiring eyes of both the political and fashion worlds that it begs for comparison. Just as we did with her official White House portraits, let's examine at what's changed in four years for the first lady as she once again appears on the cover of the "fashion bible." For starters, we told you she was having trouble leaning in:

2013

Photographer: Annie Leibovitz
Dress: Reed Krakoff, which according to the Washington Post is "from her own closet." 
Designer history with Obama: Obama wore Krakoff during the swearing-in ceremony. 
Pose: Stately. Straightforward. Robin Givhan at the Post writes that it's "more open, more assertive stance." 
Smile: Relaxed. 
Arms/Shoulders: Present.
Bangs: Present.
Accompanying story written by: Jonathan Van Meter 
Story leads with... Michelle and Barack posing for Leibovitz, while an iPod plays the Black Eyed Peas song "Where is the Love?" 

2009

Photographer: Annie Leibovitz
Dress: Jason Wu 
Designer history with Obama: Wu designed her gown for the inauguration both times around. 
Pose: Inviting. Comfortable. 
Smile: Slightly more tense. 
Arms/Shoulders: Present 
Bangs: Not Present
Accompanying story written by: André Leon Talley 
Story leads with... A declaration—"From envisioning a more inclusive White House to embracing fearless fashion, Michelle Obama is poised to become the most transformative First Lady in history"—and Michelle saying telling Talley about "our new house."