Atlantic Monthly Contributors's Blog, page 949

When Twerking Goes Terribly, Horribly Wrong

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:

Twerking can go wrong. How wrong? Very wrong:

Australians are charming people. And now we've finally figured out what they've been saying all this time: 

Smoky eyes (and make-up tutorials) should be left to the pros or, you know, drag queens:

And, finally, below is a monkey eating soup with a spoon. Have a good weekend.

       

New Digital Archive Contains Ninety Volumes of Tolstoy

Just a few days after the announcement that Dr. Seuss's oeuvre will make its e-book debut, another canonical author—this one also bearded—is moving into the 21st century full force. The entire completed works of Leo Tolstoy, author of Anna Karenina and War and Peace, have been posted online and are available to all—free of charge.

That's 90 volumes and tens of thousands of pages in Tolstoy's native Russian—no beach read, as any literary minded college kid can tell you. Nevertheless, the collection of all of Count Leo's works in a single digital archive does represent a triumph of sorts. The archive came about thanks to the efforts of the late novelist's descendants, the Russian news network RIA Novosti reports:

The Tolstoy.ru website will feature the 90-volume edition that was scanned and proofread three times by more than 3,000 volunteers from 49 countries, Tolstaya said.

All of his novels, short stories, fairy tales, essays and personal letters will be available online for free and be downloadable in PDF, FB2 and EPUB formats, recognized by most e-book readers and computers, she said.

Of course, that list includes some texts and letters that would be quite difficult to hunt down in print editions. It also includes Tolstoy's most famous novels, War and Peace and Anna Karenina, which in many editions amount to more than 2,000 pages combined. You won't have trouble finding those at pretty much any bookstore anywhere. But as the college semester picks up, isn't it nice to find them online without a $19.99 price tag?

That's assuming, again, that you read Russian—a major roadblock for some potential users of the archive.

But if you're not in college, it could be even better news. Yesterday, on the subject of the Kindle Single, we discussed how the advent of digital reading devices has and has not changed what people are reading:

[Salon's Laura] Miller pointed to friends of hers who are indeed reading more fiction thanks to technological shifts, but they weren't lapping up short selections from, say, the Antioch Review. They were instead sinking into long classics like Middlemarch, "because for the first time they can carry around a 900-page tome in their shirt pocket." That's a tremendous convenience for those of us who read during our daily commute.

Anna Karenina regards 19th-century technological shifts with suspicion at best and moral despair at worst. But modern developments like this one only make it easier to read Tolstoy's lengthiest works while waiting for the F train. 

       

The Minority Person's Guide to Texas

You are cautioned against messing with Texas, but Texas has few qualms about messing with you. Particularly if you're a woman or a person of color or a married gay man or woman. So we've created this handy map for those less-empowered residents of the state. As of September 2014, you'll want to keep it with you.

Helpful information for: Women

When Texas Gov. Rick Perry signed into law the state's restrictive new abortion laws last July, he set in motion a plan that, by this time next year, might mean that the state only has six facilities in which a woman can get an abortion.

If you happen to live in Houston, you're in luck: two of the six are right in your city. If you happen to live in El Paso, however, you might want to check out New Mexico.

Use the map below to see where you can have the procedure performed!

Helpful information for: Gay members of the military

Earlier this week, the state's military branches, like the Texas National Guard, announced that they would not process benefits paperwork for married gay members of the military. Even though the Department of Defense mandates equal protection for members of the armed forces, Texas points to its constitutional ban on gay marriage and shakes its head no.

But don't worry! If you are a gay, married member of the military in Texas, you can still get your paperwork processed! You just need to head to one of the various federal military installations around the state and fill out the documents there. Don't forget to ask for the proper leave from your superior officer before that long drive.

Use the map below to see where your marriage is still considered a marriage!

Helpful information for: Latinos

Latino residents of the state of Texas are far more likely than non-Latinos to be unduly encumbered by the state's new voter ID law, which went into effect with the Supreme Court's rejection of the Voting Rights Act. But you don't have to take our word for the fact that the law disproportionately targets Latinos: the state says so itself.

In order to vote in the state next year, residents will need a state-issued ID. If you don't already have one, you don't have any choice but to head down to one of the state's 200-plus authorized drivers license centers and pick one up. They're on the map below. Be sure to bring all the documents you need with you. Good luck!

Use the map below to see where you can pick up your ID!

If you'd like all the data on one map, here you go. Data from: RHRealityCheck, Texas Department of Public Safety, Wikipedia.

       

Unemployment Drops Slightly Because People Stopped Looking for Work

The August jobs report from the Bureau of Labor Statistics shows that the unemployment rate went down a little in the last month — it sits at 7.3 percent. The report reads that 169,000 jobs were added in August, but when you account for revisions from the June and July, only 104,000 net jobs were added. That's not very good.

As The Washington Post's Neil Irwin points out, the fact that the unemployment rate went down is due to people dropping out of the labor force. So the percentage does not indicate that more people are working, necessarily. Economist Justin Wolfers says the best number to look at is the three-month average of jobs added:

Best measure of the underlying pace of jobs growth is the 3-month average, which is +148k. That's BARELY enough to keep unemployment falling

— Justin Wolfers (@justinwolfers) September 6, 2013

And Irwin notes that the average is falling — the six-month average is 160,000, and the last 12-month average is 184,000. According to the report, there are currently 11.3 million people unemployed in the U.S.

The sectors that added the most jobs were retail and healthcare. Retail added 44,000 in jobs in August, most of them in clothing stores. Healthcare jobs came primarily from ambulatory care services. You can read the full report here. 

Photo by wavebreakmedia via Shutterstock. 

       

Vatican Denies Pope Francis Called a Gay Frenchman

Christophe Trutino is one of three things: an elaborate troll, one very lucky dude, or the victim of an elaborate hoax. The gay Frenchman says he wrote Pope Francis about his struggle with sexuality and religion, and said he received a phone call from  Francis telling him being gay "doesn’t matter." After first keeping mum, the Vatican is now denying it ever happened.

Trutino told his local paper, La Dépêche du Midi (translated by The Local) about the alleged phone call, which supposedly took place last week:

"He said 'Christopher? It's Pope Francis'. I was unsettled, of course. I asked, " Really? " He replied : "Yes."

"I received the letter that you sent me. You need to remain courageous and continue to believe and pray and stay good,” the Pope told him during the nine-minute conversation in Spanish."

Trutino's alleged pep talk with Pope Francis, if real, would signify progress for gay rights. And it would represent a serious change in tone (if not yet official Catholic Church policy) from the way Pope Benedict talked about gays.

Francis's call, if it really happened, would not be entirely surprising. He has, after all, extended an olive branch to homosexuals. "If a person is gay and seeks God and has good will, who am I to judge?" Francis said during his trip to Brazil in July, in a widely-parsed and much-celebrated statement.

But does a pope really just call you up out of the blue? Well, sometimes. The Local explains that Pope Francis did "call a woman who had been raped by an Argentinian policeman and had written to the Pontiff asking for help"; also, an Italian teen. Moreover, the Vatican initially did not confirm or deny that the phone call to Trutino took place. 

But now that the story is spreading, the Vatican is saying no. “The only time the Pope has called France was to speak to Cardinal Barbarin. I absolutely deny this information," Vatican spokesman Father Lombardi told Le Figaro. Adding, "There is always the risk that people [pretend to be] the Pope by phone."

       

Facebook Users Still Don't Like Being Used For Ads

Facebook just can't seem to catch a break. All it wants to do is collect its users's likeness and personal data and use those things to sell advertisements, but every time it tries to do so, it gets slapped with a class action lawsuit—like the one settled last week—or a legal complaint like the one filed with the FTC on Wednesday. Both of the complaints have to do with the site's Sponsored Stories functionality that uses friends' 'likes' to endorse products, but whereas the 2011 lawsuit addressed Facebook implementing the functionality without notifying users, the most recent complaint focuses on how the updated privacy policy addresses Sponsored Stories.

A number of consumer privacy groups allege that Facebook's new privacy policy violates the company's 2011 settlement with the FTC by changing the policy to opt-out, rather than opt-in:

The old language gives users the explicit right to control how their names, faces and other information are used for advertising and other commercial purposes. The company’s new policy says consumers are automatically giving Facebook the right to use their information unless they explicitly revoke permission  — and the company made that harder to do by removing the direct link to the control used to adjust that permission.

One of the major sticking points in the revised policy deals with minors. The policy terms state that, "you represent that at least one of your parents or legal guardians has also agreed to the terms of this section (and the use of your name, profile picture, content, and information) on your behalf." In other words, Facebook is letting kids sign for their parents, which seems dicey, to say the least.

A spokeswoman for Facebook told The New York Times, "We have not changed our ads practices or policies — we only made things clearer for people who use our service."

The full complaint can be read here.

       

Nikki Finke Wants Out

Back at the beginning of the summer, rumors swirled that Hollywood scoopster extraordinaire Nikki Finke had been fired by her boss, Jay Penske, who purchased her popular blog, Deadline, back in 2009. Finke denied the allegations at the time, attributing them to petty industry rivalry, and it seems that she was never actually terminated. But according to a new interview in The Wall Street Journal, the relationship between Finke and Penske has indeed soured, and now Finke wants to make a break for it.

Back in 2011, Penske also purchased Variety, restructuring their publishing strategy, but failing to integrate the property with Deadline in any way, leaving two direct competitors squabbling under the same roof. As reported by Ben Fritz in The Wall Street Journal, "After Mr. Penske purchased Variety last year, Deadline founder and editor Nikki Finke became unhappy that he didn't give her a role at the older and more famous competitor. She is now seeking to buy back control of her website, she says, or if that isn't possible, start a new one."

Although Penske's reps said that fully intended to enforce Finke's contract through 2016, they also said that a sale of the website was not out of the question, although they had yet to receive any offers. Should Finke be unable to wrest Deadline back, however, she has plans for another web property, although she claims it will serve a different purpose than that of either Variety or Deadline.

Although Finke is known for her acidic writing style (the initial rumors of her firing claimed her aggressive attitude as the main justification), Finke's brief comments to the Journal were relatively placid. "I have confidence that no matter what happens, Jay and I can reach an amicable solution to all of this," she said.

       

The RoboCop Trailer Is Here, All In One Piece

There is a lot to like in the first trailer for the Robocop remake, although the character now has a slightly less interesting origin story. Gone is Peter Weller getting shot to pieces and in its places is Joel Kinnaman and a boring, old car bomb.

The action looks pretty good, and the titular hero has been given a decent 21st-century makeover—more Cupertino gloss and Tron-like than it is Detroit steel. The cast list is pretty great too, with turns from Gary Oldman as the slightly mad scientist who creates RoboCop (who is, if you forgot, a robotic cop) and Michael Keaton as some sort of menacing corporate head honcho. But the real star of the trailer is Samuel L. Jackson, or more precisely, whatever crawled up and died on Jackson's head.

The 2014 update will feature drones far more heavily than the original, since the drone has become our most potent shorthand for "ethically dubious, emotionally distancing technology."

       

Iran Warns of Reprisal For U.S. Action In Syria

United States officials told The Wall Street Journal on Thursday that it had intercepted correspondence between Iran and Shiite militias in Iraq, indicating that both groups were planning responses should the U.S. take military action in Syria. The fear of Iraqi militia attacking the American embassy or other interests in Baghdad is just one of the various locations of threats to American interests. Officials are also wary of a showdown with Iranian watercraft in the Persian Gulf, as well as the potential for Hezbollah to attack the embassy in Beirut.

The escalating tensions against Syria have provoked responses throughout the region, including threatened retaliation against Israel should the United States take action and causing a substantial spike in terrorist activity in Iraq:

Israel has so far been the focus of concerns about retaliation from Iran and its Lebanese militant ally Hezbollah. The commander-in-chief of Iran's elite Revolutionary Guard Corps said last week that an attack on Syria would lead to the "destruction of Israel."

The State Department issued a new alert on Thursday warning against nonessential travel to Iraq and citing terrorist activity "at levels unseen since 2008." Earlier this year, an alert said that violence against Americans had decreased. That reassurance was dropped from the most recent alert.

The New York Times has run a report on the pro-Assad Shiites in Iraq that nicely complements the Journal's, providing insight into how the Syria situation closely echoes past US action in the Middle East and why that will most likely spurn anti-American sentiment. The possibility of air strikes in Syria recall less of Operation Shock & Awe, and more of the types of action that took place in the latter half of the Clinton administration.

The sort of limited strikes against Mr. Assad that President Obama has proposed remind many Iraqis not of the 2003 invasion but of the intermittent strikes against Saddam Hussein’s government in the late 1990s. Many Iraqis remember those strikes, undertaken by the Clinton administration, as having little effect on Mr. Hussein’s brutality and only adding to the misery of the population.

“In Iraq, we lived the experience of the international sanctions and the disciplining of the former dictatorial regime by missile strikes, from time to time, against the facilities and infrastructure of the Iraqi state,” wrote Fakri Karim, editor of the newspaper Al Mada, this week.

Those strikes, he said, resulted in only “more misery and impoverishment, and the disintegration of the social fabric.” He added, “What the regime won was more indulging in the humiliation of citizens, and the starving and flattening of their aspirations.”

Adding to the daisy chain of consequences The Wall Street Journal's report is the possibility of military action against turkey and Jordan, who U.S. officials believe are not adequately defended. Jordan is also concerned that military action will cause an overwhelming influx of refugees.

       

Brazil's Strategy To Evade The NSA Involves Buying a New Satellite

Brazil will buy a new satellite and build its own fiber-optic cable to try and avoid the bulk collection of their country's communications by the NSA. The country learned from stories sourced to Edward Snowden's NSA leaks that U.S. intelligence was collecting the emails, phone calls, and texts of its citizens in bulk, including those of its president Dilma Rousseff. 

The country's plans also include directing its officials to use secure email platforms, uh, might not sound as secure from the NSA as once believed. Except the platform being pushed the hardest on government employes is the open-source-based Expresso, which could make it at least harder for the NSA to access. The new email security is also the least expensive of Brazil's new plans. According to Reuters, the country will drop $600 million to $650 million for a new satellite to relay much of the government's communications, including those of its military. The satellite will be built in France. Currently, they're using a privately-owned satellite that provides the country with little control over its security. And plans to expand fiber-optic connections to nearby countries for international communications are similarly expensive. 

Even with the new plans in place, Brazil's legislators aren't particularly optimistic on their chances to totally avoid NSA surveillance  Brazilian Senator Ricardo Ferraco, who headed up a parliamentary inquiry into NSA spying, put it this way to Reuters: 

"But let's not kid ourselves. However much we do, it will never be enough to stop U.S. electronic surveillance, because today's technology is boundless." 

But new technology and equipment isn't the only Brazilian response to the NSA revelations. President Rousseff is by all accounts furious about the extent of American interception in Brazilian communications. This week, she cancelled a trip by an advance team of aides to Washington D.C., who were supposed to start preparations for the president's planned trip to the U.S. in October. According to the AP, Rousseff and President Obama met today at the G20 summit, though the details of their conversation aren't out there. Rousseff is considered to be a bit more friendly to the U.S. than her predecessor, and the late October full state dinner was supposed to honor the increasing good will between the two countries. Now, Rousseff is deciding whether she'll cancel.