Atlantic Monthly Contributors's Blog, page 850

Harvard Student Charged for Bomb Threats That Cancelled Exams

Federal prosecutors have a Harvard student over yesterday's bomb threats that cancelled the semester's first morning of exams. 

The FBI delivered a criminal complaint Tuesday charging Eldo Kim, a 20-year-old Harvard student from Cambridge. Four Harvard buildings shut down Monday and a morning's worth of final exams were cancelled after officials received a series of bomb threats. Kim allegedly "emailed several bomb threats to offices associated with Harvard," according to WBZ's Peter Wilson. His first court appearance is set for Wednesday. 

Here is Kim's student ID page. He works as a research assistant on campus, writes for the Harvard International Review, and dances with the Harvard Breakers. "In his free time, he enjoys playing pool, trying new restaurants, watching terrible cult films, and playing with his Mini Schnauzer puppy," it reads. 

       

The American Delegation to the Sochi Olympics Includes Two LGBT Athletes

AP

President Obama, Vice President Joe Biden, and the First Lady Michelle Obama won't be a part of the U.S. delegation to the Winter Olympics in Sochi next year. But in a possible rebuke to Russia's restrictive anti-gay "propaganda" laws, the U.S. will send two members of the American LGBT community: Presidential Medal of Freedom recipient and tennis legend Billie Jean King will be at the opening ceremony, while women's ice hockey bronze and silver medalist Caitlin Cahow will attend the closing ceremony. 

Former Secretary of Homeland Security Janet A. Napolitano will lead the U.S.'s delegation to the opening ceremony on February 7, 2014, according to a statement from the White House announcing next year's delegation. The highest-ranking current federal official attending that ceremony will be Rob Nabors, deputy chief of staff for policy. Deputy Secretary of State William J. Burns will lead a delegation to the closing ceremony on February 23, 2014.

By comparison, Michelle Obama led the American delegation to the 2012 Olympics in London. Vice President Joe Biden attended the 2010 Winter Games in Vancouver. Figure skating gold medalist Brian Boitano will also attend the opening ceremony, while speed skating gold medalists Bonnie Blair and Eric Heiden will attend the closing ceremony. Ambassador to Russia Michael A. McFaul will attend both ceremonies. 

As it turns out, the U.S. isn't the only country declining to send its leaders to the Russian ceremony. Both French President Francois Hollande and German President Joachim Gauck have previously said they're not going. 

       

Drug Company Will Stop Paying Doctors for Endorsements

AP

Pharmaceutical giant GlaxoSmithKline announced on Monday that it will stop paying doctors to promote its drugs, and that it will stop tying sales representatives' compensation to the number of prescriptions a doctor writes. The practices have long been seen as a conflict of interest in some circles, and some believe that it can lead to ill-suited prescriptions. "The company will no longer pay health care professionals to speak on its behalf," reports The New York Times, "about its products or the diseases they treat 'to audiences who can prescribe or influence prescribing.'"

While Glaxo is the first to announce an end to the program, other companies are expected to follow suit, since disclosure of paid endorsements from doctors is now required under the Affordable Care Act. Between 2009 and 2012, Glaxo spent $240 million on support from medical professionals. In 2012, they also paid a $3 billion fine stemming from allegations that they had marketed medications for unapproved uses.

The company denied that the policy change was related to an ongoing bribery investigation in China, and said that it plans to have it phased out entirely by 2016. One doctor also pointed out to the Times that Glaxo will continue providing “unsolicited, independent educational grants” to teach doctors about their drugs.

       

These Are the 2014 Rock and Roll Hall of Fame Inductees

The Big Man finally gets his due. (AP)

The newest inductees into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame include Nirvana, Kiss, and The E Street Band, among others. The other choices include Linda Ronstadt, Cat Stevens (now Yusuf Islam), Peter Gabriel, and Hall and Oates. Also being inducted are Rolling Stones manager Andrew Loog Oldham and Beatles manager Brian Epstein.

The honorees run the spectrum. This was Nirvana's first year of eligibility, while bands like Kiss had awaited being chosen for more than a decade. In a fan poll of more than 1.4 million votes, the Gene Simmons-fronted act garnered 17.2 percent of the vote. Nirvana came in second.

Alongside Kiss getting their due is The E Street Band, who were not included when Bruce Springsteen—a rock titan regarded by some at The Wire as quote-unquote "fine"—was inducted in 1999. Aside from members of the E Street Band, Linda Ronstadt is the only female inductee.

Daryl Hall told Rolling Stone:

I didn't think it would happen as long as the people who were in power stayed in power. I've always been sort of on the other side of the fence with the old guard and the powers-that-be. So it was a bit of a surprise to me.

The inductees will be honored in a ceremony at the Barclays Center on April 10.

Among the nominees not chosen are The Replacements, Link Wray, and The Zombies, which is quite frankly straight-up nonsense.

       

Scott Brown Is Moving to New Hampshire

Scott Brown is moving to New Hampshire, maybe to run for Senate, or maybe because he's a big fan of Funspot and is great at Roller Bowler. (AP)

Former Massachusetts Senator Scott Brown is moving to New Hampshire for unspecified reasons, but, haha come on, it's pretty clear that he's going to run for Senate again. According to his employer, law firm Nixon Peabody LLP, Brown has already found a buyer for his house in Wrentham.

Though Brown is moving northward, he'll continue to work out of his Mass. office, since he's not licensed to practice law in New Hampshire. He currently owns a vacation home there.

While Brown did not comment to Bloomberg News, he is scheduled to make an appearance at a Republican party holiday function in the state this week, in addition to a slew of ones already made last fall. Brown's political action committee won clearance to spend money in the state as well.

Brown is probably going to take on Democratic Senator Jeanne Shaheen, who was elected in 2008 and was governor of the state before that. One super PAC (not Brown's) have already begun running anti-Shaheen ads in which she echoed President Obama's "you can keep your insurance plan" promise. The Super PAC's president told Politico that he would like to see Brown enter the race.

 

       

School Decides That Being Named After a KKK Grand Wizard Is Not Good

A statue of KKK Grand Wizard Nathan Forrest in Memphis, Tennn. The odds are pretty good that Forrest was a big, ol' racist. (AP)

A school board in Jacksonville, Fla. has voted unanimously to
    

The EPA's Climate Change Expert Pretended To Be a CIA Agent to Get Out of Work

This man is not a CIA agent, no matter what he tells you. (SCREENSHOT / C-SPAN)

John C. Beale, once the Environmental Protection Agency's highest-paid employee, went to great lengths to avoid doing his job as a senior policy advisor. On Wednesday, he'll find out how much time he'll have to serve in jail for it, after pleading guilty to defrauding the government out of almost $900,000 in salary and benefits for the last decade.

NBC News has a pretty good round-up of Beale's transgressions, including:

Not going to work. For months at a time, totaling two and a half years. He explained his absence by claiming to be "engaged in intelligence work for the CIA, either at agency headquarters or in Pakistan." In reality, he was "home riding bikes, doing housework and reading books, or at a vacation house on Cape Cod," making him about as much of a CIA agent as Claire Danes. Fake retiring. Though he had a retirement party in September 2011 and stopped working, he collected a paycheck until he retired for real (upon finding out he was finally under investigation) last April. Being a good son. He billed the government $57,000 for flights to California to visit his parents. It's nice that he cares about them, but, you know, he's supposed to pay for that stuff himself. Flying first class and staying at really nice hotels for years, charging twice the government per diem maximum, to a tune of $266,190. He stayed at a $1,066 per night hotel in London for four nights and told investigators, when confronted with the cost, "even I am outraged by this." Um. Claiming to have malaria from his service in Vietnam (which got him a special disabled parking space that somehow cost the EPA $8,000 over three years, the Washington Post adds). He didn't have malaria and didn't serve in Vietnam. That probably goes without saying at this point.

While Beale's actions are a testament to one man's greed, laziness and self-delusion, they also show the utters failings of the system that allowed him to get away with this for so long -- at the tax payer's expense. The EPA's assistant inspector general Patrick Sullivan, who ran the Beale investigation, told NBC News: "There's a certain culture here at the EPA where the mission is the most important thing. They don’t think like criminal investigators. They tend to be very trusting and accepting."

They sure are. Beale's claims that he was a CIA agent date back to 1994. No one bothered to check to see if they were true, no matter how fantastic they seemed or how much work they caused him to miss.

In 2010, the EPA was warned that Beale's salary exceeded legal limits and told to stop paying him bonuses. That, apparently, was ignored, as Beale's bonuses continued until February of this year. He was also given bonuses for over 20 years more than he was supposed to, due to some kind of administrative error.

EPA administrator Gina McCarthy knew something was up in March 2012 when she noticed that Beale was still collecting a paycheck despite having "retired" the previous September. But when she contacted the EPA's general counsel about the matter, it was referred to the wrong office, delaying the investigation for months, the Washington Post says.

That vacation home in Cape Cod? Beale used to co-own it with his BFF and boss Robert Brenner, who recommended that Beale receive all those bonuses. Brenner, incidentally, was recently questioned over an $8,000 discount on a Mercedes he received that was arranged by a lobbyist. He retired in 2011, around the same time as Beale pretended to. According to Politico, Beale has been staying in Brenner's guest room while awaiting sentence. Brenner claims to have no knowledge that Beale was up to anything untoward. He refused to be interviewed by the EPA's investigators.

Beale faces 30 to 37 months in prison. He will collect a nice pension for the rest of his life.

Anyway, whatever, I can't finish this post because I have to go on a secret mission for the CIA now.

 

       

Beyoncé's 'BEYONCÉ' Is the Fastest-Selling Album in iTunes History (All Hail the Queen)

AP

Beyoncé Knowles Carter, a.k.a. the Carmen Sandiego of Pop, added another record to her collection today: her secret surprise album was the fastest-selling in iTunes' history.

Granted, the iTunes store's history only goes back to 2003, but still.

Billboard says it's also "all but guaranteed" to debut at No. 1 on its chart, expected to sell around 600,000 copies in America by December 15 -- "a remarkable figure for an album with less than four days of availability."

That also means all five of Beyoncé's albums have debuted on the top of Billboard's charts.

New York Times says that "at least 14 million people in the United States were exposed to Beyoncé’s new songs over the radio by Sunday night," because you don't just listen to a Beyoncé song; you are exposed to it, like a work of art, or a radioactive substance.

Of course, the big story was how word of the release spread across social media (or "broke the Internet," as the not-at-all-prone-to-exaggeration-Variety put it). Twitter's data team went and made a heat map of Beyoncé-related tweets as news of her album spread across the world:

 

Worldwide, "BEYONCÉ" has sold almost 830,000 copies.

 

       

Shia LaBeouf's Short Film Looks a Whole Lot Like a Daniel Clowes Comic

AP

Shia LaBeouf's directorial debut, HowardCantour.com, had premiered online today. The short film, which LaBeouf also "wrote" (more on that in a minute), takes on film critics (specifically Internet film critics). It's not very nice to them, but Internet film critics, wanting to show that they're totally in on the joke, were quick to praise LaBeouf's work:

LaBeouf offers a pleasantly entertaining take on the inward struggles of a veteran film critic

-- Indiewire

For having a runtime of less than fifteen minutes, Howardcantour.com offers an impressive display of filmmaking talent from LaBeouf

-- Under the Gun Review

Melancholic in its splendor

-- Film School Rejects

LaBeouf has written an incredibly clever script

-- Short of the Week

Hot Short Film

-- Deadline Hollywood

Shameless theft!

-- Eric Reynolds, longtime editor of Daniel Clowes

Wait, what? Yes, BuzzFeed's Jordan Zakarin noticed that HowardCantour.com is remarkably similar to Daniel Clowes' 2007 comic "Justin M. Damiano." (To see part of Clowes' comic, head to BuzzFeed, where it has been reprinted with permission)

LaBeouf, who's done some fairly blatant (an unapologetic) plagiarism in the past, supposedly wrote the film, telling Short of the Week:

In trying to come to terms with my feelings about critics, I needed to understand them. As I tried to empathize with the sort of man who might earn a living taking potshots at me and the people I’ve worked with, a small script developed.

The film has several direct quotes from Clowes' comic. Also the plot is the same. It even looks the same. But Clowes isn't credited anywhere in the film, and seemed quite surprised to find out that something like this was out there, telling BuzzFeed:

I was shocked, to say the least, when I saw that he took the script and even many of the visuals from a very personal story I did 6 or 7 years ago and passed it off as his own work. I actually can’t imagine what was going through his mind.

Want to see LaBeouf's film for yourself? Well, you can't. It's now password protected. (UPDATE: BuzzFeed's article is now hosting the film.) You can still, however, read Norman Mailer's son John Buffalo Mailer's overwrought essay ("GENERATION HASHTAG?" Really?) about the film:

For many [critics], 'Great' appears to be the closest thing to something they've never seen before.

Maybe that's true of critics. For Shia LaBeouf, I suspect, it's the opposite.

Update, 2:05 a.m.: LaBeouf has offered up an apology of sorts on his Twitter account:

Copying isn't particularly creative work. Being inspired by someone else's idea to produce something new and different IS creative work.

— Shia LaBeouf (@thecampaignbook) December 17, 2013

In my excitement and naiveté as an amateur filmmaker, I got lost in the creative process and neglected to follow proper accreditation

— Shia LaBeouf (@thecampaignbook) December 17, 2013

Im embarrassed that I failed to credit @danielclowes for his original graphic novella Justin M. Damiano, which served as my inspiration

— Shia LaBeouf (@thecampaignbook) December 17, 2013

I was truly moved by his piece of work & I knew that it would make a poignant & relevant short. I apologize to all who assumed I wrote it.

— Shia LaBeouf (@thecampaignbook) December 17, 2013

I deeply regret the manner in which these events have unfolded and want @danielclowes to know that I have a great respect for his work

— Shia LaBeouf (@thecampaignbook) December 17, 2013

About an hour later, LaBeouf just went with:

I fucked up.

— Shia LaBeouf (@thecampaignbook) December 17, 2013

 

       

The Black List Screenplays That Will Soon Be Actual Movies

blcklst.com

The Black List, an annual collection of Hollywood's favorite unproduced screenplays, as voted by 250 industry executives, came out today, but just because they aren't yet in production doesn't mean some of them aren't on their way to a theater near you. 

While there are some screenplays on the list from new writers that no one had heard of before today, there are other screenplays that are well on their way to being made. And the Black List being a raw popularity contest, these scripts already have built-in constituencies. "As long as they haven't gone into production in this calendar year, they're eligible to be included in the list," Black List founder Franklin Leonard explained in an email. For instance, in 2005, the year the Black List began, Aaron Sorkin's Charlie Wilson's War was on the list. It was released in 2007.

Here are some of the Black List screenplays that have already made some big moves toward the big screen. 

American Sniper: This screenplay by Jason Dean Hall, based on the story of Navy SEAL Chris Kyle, at one point had Steven Spielberg attached to direct. Though that fell through, it still has Bradley Cooper on board as a star, and Clint Eastwood was going to take up the helm. 

Pan: Jason Fuchs' take on J.M. Barrie's tale, already has a release date set by Warner Bros in summer 2015. Joe Wright is directing. 

The End of the Tour: Just last week it was announced—with some controversy—that Jason Segel would be playing David Foster Wallace in an adaptation of this screenplay by Pulitzer Prize winner Donald Margulies. Jesse Eisenberg and director James Ponsoldt are also on board. 

Section 6: Aaron Berg's story of MI6 was one of the screenplays on the Black List that got the most mentions, it also created a "studio frenzy" back in October, according to Borys Kit of The Hollywood Reporter. Ultimately Universal won the bidding war. 

Capsule: This sci-fi story by Ian Shorr about a man who receives messages from his future self has 20th Century Fox backing it and Matthias Hoene directing. 

The Politician: Theodore Bressman and Matthew Bass apparently based their idea for this screenplay off a premise from Seth Rogen and Evan Goldberg. Sony is making this movie about a governor on the run. 

Nostalgic biopics: Some other Black List screenplays that are working their way to the screen already include: A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood, a Mr. Rogers biopic;  andThe Boy and His Tiger, a Bill Watterson biopic that has been bought by Warner Bros. with Leonardo DiCaprio producing.