Helen H. Moore's Blog, page 917
December 20, 2015
If “Sisters” is a chick flick, so is the new “Star Wars”: Stop believing there are movies men won’t get
Two people meet at a bar and have a one-night stand. Due to unforeseen complications, they decide to go their separate ways until they meet again a few months later. They have an instant connection and feel themselves falling for each other. There’s one problem: She still has a boyfriend. She later breaks up with her beau. The man and the woman then go on a romantic trip together to see where their attraction is headed. They decide to be in a relationship. They talk about life, love, and their desires and goals. Dudes out there, that sounds like the plot of a pretty gross chick flick, right? Like something you would never ever watch? This one might interest you instead: Two very different siblings have fallen on hard times. One is recently divorced, while the other just can’t get it together or hold down a job. After their parents decide to sell their childhood home, they decide to have one last rager to commemorate all the wild parties they threw together in high school. They invite all their friends—who proceed to drink, do lots of drugs, and trash the house. It all turns out OK in the end because it’s a movie, and they all got to learn valuable life lessons while having a totally rad time. That’s a lot better! You would definitely watch this movie, which could star Will Ferrell, Mark Wahlberg, Channing Tatum, Vince Vaughn, or any number of bro-approved actors. Jonah Hill and Seth Rogen would be hilarious in this. It would be the frat comedy event of the year. If the plot sounds a bit like “Neighbors,” “The Hangover,” or any other movie where the male cast parties so hard that they engage in major property damage, it actually describes “Sisters,” the new Tina Fey-Amy Poehler comedy that bravely opened opposite “The Force Awakens.” Meanwhile, the first synopsis is for “Master of None,” the acclaimed Netflix comedy starring Aziz Ansari (“Parks and Rec”). Ansari’s show roughly apes the basic plot of any modern rom-com: Two people meet, but obstacles stand in the way of their being together. They will resolve the situation by finding out that it wasn’t nearly as complicated as we all thought and conquer the film’s contrivances. But what makes “Master of None” a great example of the genre is that it inverts the expected formula. In a traditional romantic comedy, the chief engine of tension is the barriers that keep the lovers apart, usually a series of misunderstandings that will be later sorted out (see: “Bridget Jones’ Diary,” half of the subplots in “Love Actually”). But “Master of None” illustrates that commitment itself is the complicated part—like the little fights that turn into major, relationship-defining issues and the life goals that may drive us in different directions. Rom coms cheat us by not telling us what happens after the credits roll (sure, they get together, but how do they stay together?), and “Master of None” finally shows us what’s behind the curtain. “Master of None” joins a number of shows that are rethinking the romantic comedy on television (including Hulu’s “The Mindy Project” and Amazon’s “Catastrophe”), but I’ve never once heard the show described as a rom-com or likened to a “chick flick.” Meanwhile, “Sisters” has been branded with the pejorative term, even though the film has little to do with the nebulous, hazily-defined genre. That labeling is reminiscent of recent movies like “Jupiter Ascending,” the Channing Tatum-Mila Kunis space opera dismissed as a “sci-fi chick flick,” and “The Hunger Games,” which a 2012 post from Crushable called a “chick flick in disguise.” If movies as wide-ranging as “Pitch Perfect,” “Wild,” and even “August: Osage County”—the 2013 adaptation of Tracy Letts’ Pulitzer Prize-winning play—have been categorized as “chick flicks,” what does that term even mean, anyway? The phrase dates back to 1988, coined in New Jersey’s Bergen County Record as a way to describe exploitation films like the Roger Ebert-penned “Beyond the Valley of the Dolls” and "Black Mama, White Mama,” a seminal entry in the “women in prison” genre. The following year would prove a pivotal year for female-driven entertainment: Nora Ephron’s “When Harry Met Sally…” defined the modern romantic comedy, a genre that would be dominated in the 1990s by Julia Roberts. The A-lister became a household name following 1989’s “Steel Magnolias,” which MTV’s Tess Barker explains was “one of the first movies to be dubbed a ‘chick flick.’” The term would come to describe a range of movies that used to be called “women’s films”: Applied to “All About Eve” or “Now Voyager,” these movies often had predominantly female casts and women in a majority of the lead roles; in George Cukor’s “The Women,” not a single man appears on screen the entire film. But the current “chick flick” designation is less based on films that take women’s stories seriously than movies it's assumed men don’t want to see. Ephron’s own “Sleepless in Seattle” hit the nail on the head in a scene where Meg Ryan and Rosie O’Donnell watch “An Affair to Remember.” O’Donnell asserts, “Men never get this movie.” If Dr. Pepper famously marketed its 10-calorie diet soda as “not for women,” calling something a “chick flick” means men beware. What’s depressing about this calculus is that it works: The audience for “Bridesmaids” was two-thirds women, while 74 percent of “Pitch Perfect” ticket buyers were female. These viewership ratios are true across nearly all movies marketed to men, even though women account for a majority (52 percent) of moviegoers, and dude-centric tentpoles like “Furious 7” boast audiences that are evenly split along gender lines. There’s a reason that women don’t have a problem seeing “guy movies.” As Meryl Streep famously argued, men might have a difficult time relating to female protagonists, but women have been forced to identify with men all their lives. When they watch “Mission Impossible” or “Back to the Future,” women see the movie unfold from the male lead’s POV. “You know, you're not aware of it but you're following the action of the film through the body of the protagonist,” the actress told NPR’s Terry Gross. “You know, you feel what he feels when he jumps, when he leaps, when he wins, when he loses.” This is because women already realize that there’s little that separates “chick flicks” from every other movie. As the Guardian’s Jenny Colgan points out, classic guy flicks like the “Terminator” look pretty familiar to female audiences: “ A man sends himself through an impossible loop in time to find the woman he loves and father a very special baby.” Huh, that sounds like a chick flick, now doesn’t it? And what are male-driven franchises like “Transformers” or “Fast and Furious” if not romances: Instead of falling for another person, these movies are about our love of cars and ultraviolence. And the connection between bromances—like “I Love You Man” and “Superbad”—and rom-coms is so explicit that it’s even on the label. Colgan argued that the answer is to ban the term “chick flick,” but I don’t think that addresses the lingering question: Why is appealing to women a bad thing? In a society where femininity itself is so heavily stigmatized, we shouldn’t run from the female audience. Instead, let’s take the term “chick flick” back by recognizing that every movie is a “chick flick”—from “Sisters” to “The Force Awakens.” After all, “Sisters” might seem like female counterprogramming—positioned in contrast to J.J. Abrams’ franchise relaunch—but it’s no more feminine than the story of a young woman who goes on a journey to realize her destiny and help save the galaxy in the process. Sure, “Sisters” might be a “chick flick,” but as “Master of None” and “The Force Awakens” prove, lots of other things you like are pretty girly, too.Two people meet at a bar and have a one-night stand. Due to unforeseen complications, they decide to go their separate ways until they meet again a few months later. They have an instant connection and feel themselves falling for each other. There’s one problem: She still has a boyfriend. She later breaks up with her beau. The man and the woman then go on a romantic trip together to see where their attraction is headed. They decide to be in a relationship. They talk about life, love, and their desires and goals. Dudes out there, that sounds like the plot of a pretty gross chick flick, right? Like something you would never ever watch? This one might interest you instead: Two very different siblings have fallen on hard times. One is recently divorced, while the other just can’t get it together or hold down a job. After their parents decide to sell their childhood home, they decide to have one last rager to commemorate all the wild parties they threw together in high school. They invite all their friends—who proceed to drink, do lots of drugs, and trash the house. It all turns out OK in the end because it’s a movie, and they all got to learn valuable life lessons while having a totally rad time. That’s a lot better! You would definitely watch this movie, which could star Will Ferrell, Mark Wahlberg, Channing Tatum, Vince Vaughn, or any number of bro-approved actors. Jonah Hill and Seth Rogen would be hilarious in this. It would be the frat comedy event of the year. If the plot sounds a bit like “Neighbors,” “The Hangover,” or any other movie where the male cast parties so hard that they engage in major property damage, it actually describes “Sisters,” the new Tina Fey-Amy Poehler comedy that bravely opened opposite “The Force Awakens.” Meanwhile, the first synopsis is for “Master of None,” the acclaimed Netflix comedy starring Aziz Ansari (“Parks and Rec”). Ansari’s show roughly apes the basic plot of any modern rom-com: Two people meet, but obstacles stand in the way of their being together. They will resolve the situation by finding out that it wasn’t nearly as complicated as we all thought and conquer the film’s contrivances. But what makes “Master of None” a great example of the genre is that it inverts the expected formula. In a traditional romantic comedy, the chief engine of tension is the barriers that keep the lovers apart, usually a series of misunderstandings that will be later sorted out (see: “Bridget Jones’ Diary,” half of the subplots in “Love Actually”). But “Master of None” illustrates that commitment itself is the complicated part—like the little fights that turn into major, relationship-defining issues and the life goals that may drive us in different directions. Rom coms cheat us by not telling us what happens after the credits roll (sure, they get together, but how do they stay together?), and “Master of None” finally shows us what’s behind the curtain. “Master of None” joins a number of shows that are rethinking the romantic comedy on television (including Hulu’s “The Mindy Project” and Amazon’s “Catastrophe”), but I’ve never once heard the show described as a rom-com or likened to a “chick flick.” Meanwhile, “Sisters” has been branded with the pejorative term, even though the film has little to do with the nebulous, hazily-defined genre. That labeling is reminiscent of recent movies like “Jupiter Ascending,” the Channing Tatum-Mila Kunis space opera dismissed as a “sci-fi chick flick,” and “The Hunger Games,” which a 2012 post from Crushable called a “chick flick in disguise.” If movies as wide-ranging as “Pitch Perfect,” “Wild,” and even “August: Osage County”—the 2013 adaptation of Tracy Letts’ Pulitzer Prize-winning play—have been categorized as “chick flicks,” what does that term even mean, anyway? The phrase dates back to 1988, coined in New Jersey’s Bergen County Record as a way to describe exploitation films like the Roger Ebert-penned “Beyond the Valley of the Dolls” and "Black Mama, White Mama,” a seminal entry in the “women in prison” genre. The following year would prove a pivotal year for female-driven entertainment: Nora Ephron’s “When Harry Met Sally…” defined the modern romantic comedy, a genre that would be dominated in the 1990s by Julia Roberts. The A-lister became a household name following 1989’s “Steel Magnolias,” which MTV’s Tess Barker explains was “one of the first movies to be dubbed a ‘chick flick.’” The term would come to describe a range of movies that used to be called “women’s films”: Applied to “All About Eve” or “Now Voyager,” these movies often had predominantly female casts and women in a majority of the lead roles; in George Cukor’s “The Women,” not a single man appears on screen the entire film. But the current “chick flick” designation is less based on films that take women’s stories seriously than movies it's assumed men don’t want to see. Ephron’s own “Sleepless in Seattle” hit the nail on the head in a scene where Meg Ryan and Rosie O’Donnell watch “An Affair to Remember.” O’Donnell asserts, “Men never get this movie.” If Dr. Pepper famously marketed its 10-calorie diet soda as “not for women,” calling something a “chick flick” means men beware. What’s depressing about this calculus is that it works: The audience for “Bridesmaids” was two-thirds women, while 74 percent of “Pitch Perfect” ticket buyers were female. These viewership ratios are true across nearly all movies marketed to men, even though women account for a majority (52 percent) of moviegoers, and dude-centric tentpoles like “Furious 7” boast audiences that are evenly split along gender lines. There’s a reason that women don’t have a problem seeing “guy movies.” As Meryl Streep famously argued, men might have a difficult time relating to female protagonists, but women have been forced to identify with men all their lives. When they watch “Mission Impossible” or “Back to the Future,” women see the movie unfold from the male lead’s POV. “You know, you're not aware of it but you're following the action of the film through the body of the protagonist,” the actress told NPR’s Terry Gross. “You know, you feel what he feels when he jumps, when he leaps, when he wins, when he loses.” This is because women already realize that there’s little that separates “chick flicks” from every other movie. As the Guardian’s Jenny Colgan points out, classic guy flicks like the “Terminator” look pretty familiar to female audiences: “ A man sends himself through an impossible loop in time to find the woman he loves and father a very special baby.” Huh, that sounds like a chick flick, now doesn’t it? And what are male-driven franchises like “Transformers” or “Fast and Furious” if not romances: Instead of falling for another person, these movies are about our love of cars and ultraviolence. And the connection between bromances—like “I Love You Man” and “Superbad”—and rom-coms is so explicit that it’s even on the label. Colgan argued that the answer is to ban the term “chick flick,” but I don’t think that addresses the lingering question: Why is appealing to women a bad thing? In a society where femininity itself is so heavily stigmatized, we shouldn’t run from the female audience. Instead, let’s take the term “chick flick” back by recognizing that every movie is a “chick flick”—from “Sisters” to “The Force Awakens.” After all, “Sisters” might seem like female counterprogramming—positioned in contrast to J.J. Abrams’ franchise relaunch—but it’s no more feminine than the story of a young woman who goes on a journey to realize her destiny and help save the galaxy in the process. Sure, “Sisters” might be a “chick flick,” but as “Master of None” and “The Force Awakens” prove, lots of other things you like are pretty girly, too.
Hillary Clinton just slimed Bernie Sanders with a discredited Rupert Murdoch attack on single-payer health care
While debating Bernie Sanders last night in New Hampshire, Hillary Clinton made an egregiously dishonest claim. During the candidates’ discussion on college education, Clinton stated that Senator Sanders’ proposals would cost trillions of dollars, saying, “Free college, a single payer system for health, and it's been estimated we’re looking at 18 to $20 trillion, about a 40 percent [dent] in the federal budget.” This is flat wrong. The $18 trillion price tag comes from an article published in the Wall Street Journal. Authored by Laura Meckler, the piece attributes the vast majority— $15 trillion— of this exorbitant amount to Bernie Sanders’ plan to expand Medicare and guarantee care for all sick or injured Americans. Meckler writes that, “… a similar proposal [to expand Medicaid] in Congress… would require $15 trillion in federal spending over 10 years on top of existing federal health spending, according to an analysis of the plan by Gerald Friedman, an economist at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst.” Only problem? Gerald Friedman himself disagrees. He wrote a response article, published in The Huffington Post, entitled, “An Open Letter to the Wall Street Journal on Its Bernie Sanders Hit Piece,” in which he clarified that, “...by spending these vast sums, we would, as a country, save nearly $5 trillion over ten years in reduced administrative waste, lower pharmaceutical and device prices, and by lowering the rate of medical inflation. He continued:
“These financial savings would be felt by businesses and by state and local governments who would no longer be paying for health insurance for their employees; and by retirees and working Americans who would no longer have to pay for their health insurance or for co-payments and deductibles. Beyond these financial savings, HR 676 would also save thousands of lives a year by expanding access to health care for the uninsured and the underinsured. “The economic benefits from Senator Sanders’ proposal would be even greater than these static estimates suggest because a single-payer plan would create dynamic gains by freeing American businesses to compete without the burden of an inefficient and wasteful health insurance system. As with Senator Sanders' other proposals, the economic boom created by HR 676, including the productivity boost coming from a more efficient health care system and a healthier population, would raise economic output and provide billions of dollars in additional tax revenues to over-set some of the additional federal spending.”Sanders’ health care plan would reduce waste, cut drug prices, slow inflation, save money, and create an economic boom, increasing economic output and tax revenue by billions of dollars— all while saving lives and increasing Americans’ standard of living. There was absolutely no reason for the Journal to ever claim otherwise. In the cited research paper, Friedman clearly writes, “Health care financing in the U.S. is regressive, weighing heaviest on the poor, the working class, and the sick. With the progressive financing plan outlined for HR 676 (below), 95% of all U.S. households would save money.” Hillary Clinton spreading the idea that a single-payer health care system would bankrupt America is keeping U.S. citizens sick, injured, and broke. Right now, we have a failing health care system, and a single-payer system that would be both cheaper and provide care to every single woman, man, and child, is desperately needed. Americans spend more than twice as much on health care as other countries of our wealth, yet the bodies of our citizens are far more broken and ill. We have higher infant mortality, higher rates of obesity, higher number of chronic diseases— we even die younger than people of other nations. And we are going into debt over our lack of good, affordable care— more than any other reason, U.S. citizens are forced into bankruptcy over their medical bills. Sanders’ plan would change this corrupt system, ensuring health care for all under a more efficient and cost-effective system. As The Washington Post notes, “...you can’t say [Sanders’ single-payer proposal] represents some kind of profligate, free-spending idea that would cost us all terrible amounts of money.” In fact, it is quite the opposite— every single-payer health care system in the world is cheaper than the current American health care system. It is time we catch up to the rest of the world, whose societies live healthier and less bankrupt lives.While debating Bernie Sanders last night in New Hampshire, Hillary Clinton made an egregiously dishonest claim. During the candidates’ discussion on college education, Clinton stated that Senator Sanders’ proposals would cost trillions of dollars, saying, “Free college, a single payer system for health, and it's been estimated we’re looking at 18 to $20 trillion, about a 40 percent [dent] in the federal budget.” This is flat wrong. The $18 trillion price tag comes from an article published in the Wall Street Journal. Authored by Laura Meckler, the piece attributes the vast majority— $15 trillion— of this exorbitant amount to Bernie Sanders’ plan to expand Medicare and guarantee care for all sick or injured Americans. Meckler writes that, “… a similar proposal [to expand Medicaid] in Congress… would require $15 trillion in federal spending over 10 years on top of existing federal health spending, according to an analysis of the plan by Gerald Friedman, an economist at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst.” Only problem? Gerald Friedman himself disagrees. He wrote a response article, published in The Huffington Post, entitled, “An Open Letter to the Wall Street Journal on Its Bernie Sanders Hit Piece,” in which he clarified that, “...by spending these vast sums, we would, as a country, save nearly $5 trillion over ten years in reduced administrative waste, lower pharmaceutical and device prices, and by lowering the rate of medical inflation. He continued:
“These financial savings would be felt by businesses and by state and local governments who would no longer be paying for health insurance for their employees; and by retirees and working Americans who would no longer have to pay for their health insurance or for co-payments and deductibles. Beyond these financial savings, HR 676 would also save thousands of lives a year by expanding access to health care for the uninsured and the underinsured. “The economic benefits from Senator Sanders’ proposal would be even greater than these static estimates suggest because a single-payer plan would create dynamic gains by freeing American businesses to compete without the burden of an inefficient and wasteful health insurance system. As with Senator Sanders' other proposals, the economic boom created by HR 676, including the productivity boost coming from a more efficient health care system and a healthier population, would raise economic output and provide billions of dollars in additional tax revenues to over-set some of the additional federal spending.”Sanders’ health care plan would reduce waste, cut drug prices, slow inflation, save money, and create an economic boom, increasing economic output and tax revenue by billions of dollars— all while saving lives and increasing Americans’ standard of living. There was absolutely no reason for the Journal to ever claim otherwise. In the cited research paper, Friedman clearly writes, “Health care financing in the U.S. is regressive, weighing heaviest on the poor, the working class, and the sick. With the progressive financing plan outlined for HR 676 (below), 95% of all U.S. households would save money.” Hillary Clinton spreading the idea that a single-payer health care system would bankrupt America is keeping U.S. citizens sick, injured, and broke. Right now, we have a failing health care system, and a single-payer system that would be both cheaper and provide care to every single woman, man, and child, is desperately needed. Americans spend more than twice as much on health care as other countries of our wealth, yet the bodies of our citizens are far more broken and ill. We have higher infant mortality, higher rates of obesity, higher number of chronic diseases— we even die younger than people of other nations. And we are going into debt over our lack of good, affordable care— more than any other reason, U.S. citizens are forced into bankruptcy over their medical bills. Sanders’ plan would change this corrupt system, ensuring health care for all under a more efficient and cost-effective system. As The Washington Post notes, “...you can’t say [Sanders’ single-payer proposal] represents some kind of profligate, free-spending idea that would cost us all terrible amounts of money.” In fact, it is quite the opposite— every single-payer health care system in the world is cheaper than the current American health care system. It is time we catch up to the rest of the world, whose societies live healthier and less bankrupt lives.While debating Bernie Sanders last night in New Hampshire, Hillary Clinton made an egregiously dishonest claim. During the candidates’ discussion on college education, Clinton stated that Senator Sanders’ proposals would cost trillions of dollars, saying, “Free college, a single payer system for health, and it's been estimated we’re looking at 18 to $20 trillion, about a 40 percent [dent] in the federal budget.” This is flat wrong. The $18 trillion price tag comes from an article published in the Wall Street Journal. Authored by Laura Meckler, the piece attributes the vast majority— $15 trillion— of this exorbitant amount to Bernie Sanders’ plan to expand Medicare and guarantee care for all sick or injured Americans. Meckler writes that, “… a similar proposal [to expand Medicaid] in Congress… would require $15 trillion in federal spending over 10 years on top of existing federal health spending, according to an analysis of the plan by Gerald Friedman, an economist at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst.” Only problem? Gerald Friedman himself disagrees. He wrote a response article, published in The Huffington Post, entitled, “An Open Letter to the Wall Street Journal on Its Bernie Sanders Hit Piece,” in which he clarified that, “...by spending these vast sums, we would, as a country, save nearly $5 trillion over ten years in reduced administrative waste, lower pharmaceutical and device prices, and by lowering the rate of medical inflation. He continued:
“These financial savings would be felt by businesses and by state and local governments who would no longer be paying for health insurance for their employees; and by retirees and working Americans who would no longer have to pay for their health insurance or for co-payments and deductibles. Beyond these financial savings, HR 676 would also save thousands of lives a year by expanding access to health care for the uninsured and the underinsured. “The economic benefits from Senator Sanders’ proposal would be even greater than these static estimates suggest because a single-payer plan would create dynamic gains by freeing American businesses to compete without the burden of an inefficient and wasteful health insurance system. As with Senator Sanders' other proposals, the economic boom created by HR 676, including the productivity boost coming from a more efficient health care system and a healthier population, would raise economic output and provide billions of dollars in additional tax revenues to over-set some of the additional federal spending.”Sanders’ health care plan would reduce waste, cut drug prices, slow inflation, save money, and create an economic boom, increasing economic output and tax revenue by billions of dollars— all while saving lives and increasing Americans’ standard of living. There was absolutely no reason for the Journal to ever claim otherwise. In the cited research paper, Friedman clearly writes, “Health care financing in the U.S. is regressive, weighing heaviest on the poor, the working class, and the sick. With the progressive financing plan outlined for HR 676 (below), 95% of all U.S. households would save money.” Hillary Clinton spreading the idea that a single-payer health care system would bankrupt America is keeping U.S. citizens sick, injured, and broke. Right now, we have a failing health care system, and a single-payer system that would be both cheaper and provide care to every single woman, man, and child, is desperately needed. Americans spend more than twice as much on health care as other countries of our wealth, yet the bodies of our citizens are far more broken and ill. We have higher infant mortality, higher rates of obesity, higher number of chronic diseases— we even die younger than people of other nations. And we are going into debt over our lack of good, affordable care— more than any other reason, U.S. citizens are forced into bankruptcy over their medical bills. Sanders’ plan would change this corrupt system, ensuring health care for all under a more efficient and cost-effective system. As The Washington Post notes, “...you can’t say [Sanders’ single-payer proposal] represents some kind of profligate, free-spending idea that would cost us all terrible amounts of money.” In fact, it is quite the opposite— every single-payer health care system in the world is cheaper than the current American health care system. It is time we catch up to the rest of the world, whose societies live healthier and less bankrupt lives.While debating Bernie Sanders last night in New Hampshire, Hillary Clinton made an egregiously dishonest claim. During the candidates’ discussion on college education, Clinton stated that Senator Sanders’ proposals would cost trillions of dollars, saying, “Free college, a single payer system for health, and it's been estimated we’re looking at 18 to $20 trillion, about a 40 percent [dent] in the federal budget.” This is flat wrong. The $18 trillion price tag comes from an article published in the Wall Street Journal. Authored by Laura Meckler, the piece attributes the vast majority— $15 trillion— of this exorbitant amount to Bernie Sanders’ plan to expand Medicare and guarantee care for all sick or injured Americans. Meckler writes that, “… a similar proposal [to expand Medicaid] in Congress… would require $15 trillion in federal spending over 10 years on top of existing federal health spending, according to an analysis of the plan by Gerald Friedman, an economist at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst.” Only problem? Gerald Friedman himself disagrees. He wrote a response article, published in The Huffington Post, entitled, “An Open Letter to the Wall Street Journal on Its Bernie Sanders Hit Piece,” in which he clarified that, “...by spending these vast sums, we would, as a country, save nearly $5 trillion over ten years in reduced administrative waste, lower pharmaceutical and device prices, and by lowering the rate of medical inflation. He continued:
“These financial savings would be felt by businesses and by state and local governments who would no longer be paying for health insurance for their employees; and by retirees and working Americans who would no longer have to pay for their health insurance or for co-payments and deductibles. Beyond these financial savings, HR 676 would also save thousands of lives a year by expanding access to health care for the uninsured and the underinsured. “The economic benefits from Senator Sanders’ proposal would be even greater than these static estimates suggest because a single-payer plan would create dynamic gains by freeing American businesses to compete without the burden of an inefficient and wasteful health insurance system. As with Senator Sanders' other proposals, the economic boom created by HR 676, including the productivity boost coming from a more efficient health care system and a healthier population, would raise economic output and provide billions of dollars in additional tax revenues to over-set some of the additional federal spending.”Sanders’ health care plan would reduce waste, cut drug prices, slow inflation, save money, and create an economic boom, increasing economic output and tax revenue by billions of dollars— all while saving lives and increasing Americans’ standard of living. There was absolutely no reason for the Journal to ever claim otherwise. In the cited research paper, Friedman clearly writes, “Health care financing in the U.S. is regressive, weighing heaviest on the poor, the working class, and the sick. With the progressive financing plan outlined for HR 676 (below), 95% of all U.S. households would save money.” Hillary Clinton spreading the idea that a single-payer health care system would bankrupt America is keeping U.S. citizens sick, injured, and broke. Right now, we have a failing health care system, and a single-payer system that would be both cheaper and provide care to every single woman, man, and child, is desperately needed. Americans spend more than twice as much on health care as other countries of our wealth, yet the bodies of our citizens are far more broken and ill. We have higher infant mortality, higher rates of obesity, higher number of chronic diseases— we even die younger than people of other nations. And we are going into debt over our lack of good, affordable care— more than any other reason, U.S. citizens are forced into bankruptcy over their medical bills. Sanders’ plan would change this corrupt system, ensuring health care for all under a more efficient and cost-effective system. As The Washington Post notes, “...you can’t say [Sanders’ single-payer proposal] represents some kind of profligate, free-spending idea that would cost us all terrible amounts of money.” In fact, it is quite the opposite— every single-payer health care system in the world is cheaper than the current American health care system. It is time we catch up to the rest of the world, whose societies live healthier and less bankrupt lives.
Here’s what you need to know about last night’s Democratic debate
Hanging over every second of Saturday night's Democratic presidential debate was one persistent question: Why, exactly, was it being held on the Saturday night before Christmas? Whether to protect Hillary Clinton—a very capable debater who certainly does not need protecting—or for some other obscure reason, the Democratic Party has decided to hide their candidates as much as possible from the voters. (The next debate is on the Sunday before Martin Luther King Day.) Apart from the annoyance of having to tune in on a Saturday, it's a baffling ceding of ground to Republicans, whose ever-escalating racism has been given a gigantic public platform. Possibly Clinton doesn't mind. She's got her eyes squarely focused on the general election, not the primary. She sailed through the debate mostly unruffled; she was loose and supremely confident, as befits a campaign that she is bound to win. Bernie Sanders is not a real threat to her, which meant that she could comfortably run well to his right. Her hawkishness is deeply ingrained in her—we recently learned that she talks to the same foreign policy people that Marco Rubio and Ted Cruz do—so it was no surprise that she objected when Sanders wondered aloud if she was too eager to intervene in other countries. "If the United States does not lead, there is not another leader!" she said forcefully. "There is a vacuum." Her defense of the disastrous invasion of Libya was muddled and unconvincing, but it's not an issue that's going to cause her any trouble. Clinton also, rather shamefully, protected her right flank by casting Sanders' call for single payer health care as a budget-busting middle class tax hike. Only the experience of every industrialized country in the world contradicts this narrative. It's an extremely well-known fact that single payer is vastly cheaper than the American system. But Clinton clearly thinks it's more important to say that she won't raise middle class taxes than to tell the truth about this issue. (Her definition of what constitutes the middle class, by the way, is a strange one.) Sanders pointed out that, on that basis, Clinton wouldn't support Social Security, Medicare or even the $1.38/week increase to the payroll tax that a bill in the Senate would require to fund paid family leave. Sanders has become more fluent on foreign policy, though the relative conventionality of some of his views—such as his extended mash note to Jordan's King Abdullah—shines through on these occasions. And his framing of Donald Trump's popularity as a divide-and-rule subduing of the working class was about as concise a summation of his general outlook as you're likely to get. Sanders is never anything less than himself on these occasions. You know what you're going to see, and he delivers. He's leading in New Hampshire and clearly has no appetite for a scorched-earth fight with Clinton; this campaign has probably already exceeded his wildest fantasies about what he could accomplish. Martin O'Malley was also on the stage. He tried desperately, desperately hard to cut through. He bellowed and insulted his rivals, he had 12 ready-made personal anecdotes, and none of it worked. In a different world—one where, say, Bernie Sanders wasn't occupying all of the anti-Clinton space—O'Malley might have a chance. But Sanders is, so O'Malley doesn't. He also has the unctuous, oily air of a used-car salesman you just know is trying to fleece you. His high point probably came during the fleeting period when the debate resumed but Clinton hadn't returned to the stage. For a brief, shining second, O'Malley found himself in the top two. Then Clinton came back, and the dream was dead. Back to Maryland, Governor! There was also the matter of what didn't make it to the table at the debate. Yet again, climate change was left out of the conversation. So were topics like reproductive rights and immigration—both key issues for the Democratic base. Race and policing was confined to one question about the widely debunked "Ferguson Effect." Instead, we seem trapped in a blunt, two-track version of politics right now: "foreign policy and national security"—meaning ISIS, ISIS and more ISIS—the economy, and virtually nothing else. Since whoever is the next president will have to deal with many more problems than just those two, it would be nice to hear what the candidates have to say about them. Note: the debate aired on ABC News; I also work for Fusion, which is co-owned by ABC.Hanging over every second of Saturday night's Democratic presidential debate was one persistent question: Why, exactly, was it being held on the Saturday night before Christmas? Whether to protect Hillary Clinton—a very capable debater who certainly does not need protecting—or for some other obscure reason, the Democratic Party has decided to hide their candidates as much as possible from the voters. (The next debate is on the Sunday before Martin Luther King Day.) Apart from the annoyance of having to tune in on a Saturday, it's a baffling ceding of ground to Republicans, whose ever-escalating racism has been given a gigantic public platform. Possibly Clinton doesn't mind. She's got her eyes squarely focused on the general election, not the primary. She sailed through the debate mostly unruffled; she was loose and supremely confident, as befits a campaign that she is bound to win. Bernie Sanders is not a real threat to her, which meant that she could comfortably run well to his right. Her hawkishness is deeply ingrained in her—we recently learned that she talks to the same foreign policy people that Marco Rubio and Ted Cruz do—so it was no surprise that she objected when Sanders wondered aloud if she was too eager to intervene in other countries. "If the United States does not lead, there is not another leader!" she said forcefully. "There is a vacuum." Her defense of the disastrous invasion of Libya was muddled and unconvincing, but it's not an issue that's going to cause her any trouble. Clinton also, rather shamefully, protected her right flank by casting Sanders' call for single payer health care as a budget-busting middle class tax hike. Only the experience of every industrialized country in the world contradicts this narrative. It's an extremely well-known fact that single payer is vastly cheaper than the American system. But Clinton clearly thinks it's more important to say that she won't raise middle class taxes than to tell the truth about this issue. (Her definition of what constitutes the middle class, by the way, is a strange one.) Sanders pointed out that, on that basis, Clinton wouldn't support Social Security, Medicare or even the $1.38/week increase to the payroll tax that a bill in the Senate would require to fund paid family leave. Sanders has become more fluent on foreign policy, though the relative conventionality of some of his views—such as his extended mash note to Jordan's King Abdullah—shines through on these occasions. And his framing of Donald Trump's popularity as a divide-and-rule subduing of the working class was about as concise a summation of his general outlook as you're likely to get. Sanders is never anything less than himself on these occasions. You know what you're going to see, and he delivers. He's leading in New Hampshire and clearly has no appetite for a scorched-earth fight with Clinton; this campaign has probably already exceeded his wildest fantasies about what he could accomplish. Martin O'Malley was also on the stage. He tried desperately, desperately hard to cut through. He bellowed and insulted his rivals, he had 12 ready-made personal anecdotes, and none of it worked. In a different world—one where, say, Bernie Sanders wasn't occupying all of the anti-Clinton space—O'Malley might have a chance. But Sanders is, so O'Malley doesn't. He also has the unctuous, oily air of a used-car salesman you just know is trying to fleece you. His high point probably came during the fleeting period when the debate resumed but Clinton hadn't returned to the stage. For a brief, shining second, O'Malley found himself in the top two. Then Clinton came back, and the dream was dead. Back to Maryland, Governor! There was also the matter of what didn't make it to the table at the debate. Yet again, climate change was left out of the conversation. So were topics like reproductive rights and immigration—both key issues for the Democratic base. Race and policing was confined to one question about the widely debunked "Ferguson Effect." Instead, we seem trapped in a blunt, two-track version of politics right now: "foreign policy and national security"—meaning ISIS, ISIS and more ISIS—the economy, and virtually nothing else. Since whoever is the next president will have to deal with many more problems than just those two, it would be nice to hear what the candidates have to say about them. Note: the debate aired on ABC News; I also work for Fusion, which is co-owned by ABC.
There is no bromance between Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin
KYIV, Ukraine — A day after Russian President Vladimir Putin praised Donald Trump as a “very outstanding man, unquestionably talented,” the Republican presidential candidate seemed pleased. “When people call you brilliant it's always good, especially when the person heads up Russia,” Trump said on MSNBC Friday morning. He also applauded Putin as “a leader, unlike, you know, what we have in this country.”
But not so fast: The Donald might want to curb his excitement about Putin’s flattering words.
Russia’s leader is much more calculating than he lets on, experts say, and is probably not as enamored with Trump as it seems.
Matthew Rojansky, director of the Kennan Institute think tank in Washington, DC, believes Putin is really just signaling to the American leadership that he’s paying close attention to the 2016 US election race.
“This is Putin’s way of using the Trump opportunity to send messages to the current president and other potential candidates,” Rojansky told GlobalPost. He added that Putin knows that the billionaire tycoon is the only candidate who hasn’t criticized Russia for its meddling in Ukraine and Syria.
But what if Trump actually becomes president, and the two outsize men meet as diplomatic partners?
As far as most Russians are concerned, they’d appreciate an American leader who isn’t too critical of the Kremlin. President Barack Obama's administration has criticized the government and hit Russia with economic sanctions since it annexed Crimea from Ukraine last year. But Trump complains America’s gotten overly involved. He even once said Crimea is “Europe’s problem.”
But some Russian commentators are more wary of the rich real estate mogul.
A recent column in a prominent nationalist journal pointed to Trump’s campaign slogan — “Make America Great Again!” — and argued the billionaire would become a shrewd defender of American interests.
“In a word, revanchism,” it said.
However, Rojansky says that in case Trump were elected, Putin might apply his well-honed skill of reading his partners and exploiting their weaknesses. That would mean massaging The Donald’s ego by playing nice and living up to the tycoon’s claims that he’d work well with Putin to patch things up.
“He’s going to allow Trump to do that, and in the process of that he’s going to get a lot of what he wants,” Rojansky said. “Which is probably, at a minimum, coming back into the normal fold of international leaders and not having to pay a very big price for Ukraine and Crimea.”
KYIV, Ukraine — A day after Russian President Vladimir Putin praised Donald Trump as a “very outstanding man, unquestionably talented,” the Republican presidential candidate seemed pleased. “When people call you brilliant it's always good, especially when the person heads up Russia,” Trump said on MSNBC Friday morning. He also applauded Putin as “a leader, unlike, you know, what we have in this country.”
But not so fast: The Donald might want to curb his excitement about Putin’s flattering words.
Russia’s leader is much more calculating than he lets on, experts say, and is probably not as enamored with Trump as it seems.
Matthew Rojansky, director of the Kennan Institute think tank in Washington, DC, believes Putin is really just signaling to the American leadership that he’s paying close attention to the 2016 US election race.
“This is Putin’s way of using the Trump opportunity to send messages to the current president and other potential candidates,” Rojansky told GlobalPost. He added that Putin knows that the billionaire tycoon is the only candidate who hasn’t criticized Russia for its meddling in Ukraine and Syria.
But what if Trump actually becomes president, and the two outsize men meet as diplomatic partners?
As far as most Russians are concerned, they’d appreciate an American leader who isn’t too critical of the Kremlin. President Barack Obama's administration has criticized the government and hit Russia with economic sanctions since it annexed Crimea from Ukraine last year. But Trump complains America’s gotten overly involved. He even once said Crimea is “Europe’s problem.”
But some Russian commentators are more wary of the rich real estate mogul.
A recent column in a prominent nationalist journal pointed to Trump’s campaign slogan — “Make America Great Again!” — and argued the billionaire would become a shrewd defender of American interests.
“In a word, revanchism,” it said.
However, Rojansky says that in case Trump were elected, Putin might apply his well-honed skill of reading his partners and exploiting their weaknesses. That would mean massaging The Donald’s ego by playing nice and living up to the tycoon’s claims that he’d work well with Putin to patch things up.
“He’s going to allow Trump to do that, and in the process of that he’s going to get a lot of what he wants,” Rojansky said. “Which is probably, at a minimum, coming back into the normal fold of international leaders and not having to pay a very big price for Ukraine and Crimea.”
KYIV, Ukraine — A day after Russian President Vladimir Putin praised Donald Trump as a “very outstanding man, unquestionably talented,” the Republican presidential candidate seemed pleased. “When people call you brilliant it's always good, especially when the person heads up Russia,” Trump said on MSNBC Friday morning. He also applauded Putin as “a leader, unlike, you know, what we have in this country.”
But not so fast: The Donald might want to curb his excitement about Putin’s flattering words.
Russia’s leader is much more calculating than he lets on, experts say, and is probably not as enamored with Trump as it seems.
Matthew Rojansky, director of the Kennan Institute think tank in Washington, DC, believes Putin is really just signaling to the American leadership that he’s paying close attention to the 2016 US election race.
“This is Putin’s way of using the Trump opportunity to send messages to the current president and other potential candidates,” Rojansky told GlobalPost. He added that Putin knows that the billionaire tycoon is the only candidate who hasn’t criticized Russia for its meddling in Ukraine and Syria.
But what if Trump actually becomes president, and the two outsize men meet as diplomatic partners?
As far as most Russians are concerned, they’d appreciate an American leader who isn’t too critical of the Kremlin. President Barack Obama's administration has criticized the government and hit Russia with economic sanctions since it annexed Crimea from Ukraine last year. But Trump complains America’s gotten overly involved. He even once said Crimea is “Europe’s problem.”
But some Russian commentators are more wary of the rich real estate mogul.
A recent column in a prominent nationalist journal pointed to Trump’s campaign slogan — “Make America Great Again!” — and argued the billionaire would become a shrewd defender of American interests.
“In a word, revanchism,” it said.
However, Rojansky says that in case Trump were elected, Putin might apply his well-honed skill of reading his partners and exploiting their weaknesses. That would mean massaging The Donald’s ego by playing nice and living up to the tycoon’s claims that he’d work well with Putin to patch things up.
“He’s going to allow Trump to do that, and in the process of that he’s going to get a lot of what he wants,” Rojansky said. “Which is probably, at a minimum, coming back into the normal fold of international leaders and not having to pay a very big price for Ukraine and Crimea.”
KYIV, Ukraine — A day after Russian President Vladimir Putin praised Donald Trump as a “very outstanding man, unquestionably talented,” the Republican presidential candidate seemed pleased. “When people call you brilliant it's always good, especially when the person heads up Russia,” Trump said on MSNBC Friday morning. He also applauded Putin as “a leader, unlike, you know, what we have in this country.”
But not so fast: The Donald might want to curb his excitement about Putin’s flattering words.
Russia’s leader is much more calculating than he lets on, experts say, and is probably not as enamored with Trump as it seems.
Matthew Rojansky, director of the Kennan Institute think tank in Washington, DC, believes Putin is really just signaling to the American leadership that he’s paying close attention to the 2016 US election race.
“This is Putin’s way of using the Trump opportunity to send messages to the current president and other potential candidates,” Rojansky told GlobalPost. He added that Putin knows that the billionaire tycoon is the only candidate who hasn’t criticized Russia for its meddling in Ukraine and Syria.
But what if Trump actually becomes president, and the two outsize men meet as diplomatic partners?
As far as most Russians are concerned, they’d appreciate an American leader who isn’t too critical of the Kremlin. President Barack Obama's administration has criticized the government and hit Russia with economic sanctions since it annexed Crimea from Ukraine last year. But Trump complains America’s gotten overly involved. He even once said Crimea is “Europe’s problem.”
But some Russian commentators are more wary of the rich real estate mogul.
A recent column in a prominent nationalist journal pointed to Trump’s campaign slogan — “Make America Great Again!” — and argued the billionaire would become a shrewd defender of American interests.
“In a word, revanchism,” it said.
However, Rojansky says that in case Trump were elected, Putin might apply his well-honed skill of reading his partners and exploiting their weaknesses. That would mean massaging The Donald’s ego by playing nice and living up to the tycoon’s claims that he’d work well with Putin to patch things up.
“He’s going to allow Trump to do that, and in the process of that he’s going to get a lot of what he wants,” Rojansky said. “Which is probably, at a minimum, coming back into the normal fold of international leaders and not having to pay a very big price for Ukraine and Crimea.”
Is this how World War III begins? Religion, end times, terror and the frightening new Middle East tinderbox
Has World War III begun? Some world leaders and journalists seem to think so. For example, Jordan’s King Abdullah recently said at a news conference that “we are facing a Third World War against humanity,” and that we must “act fast to tackle the response to interconnected threats.” Similarly, Roger Cohen at the New York Times wrote a poignant article in which he draws a number of parallels between the Syrian war and the beginning of World War I. And last September, Pope Francis visited a military cemetery in Italy and warned that “perhaps one can speak of a third war, one fought piecemeal, with crimes, massacres, destruction.” The idea that World War III has started isn’t crazy — although neither is it obviously true. The fact is that the Syrian conflict is an international tangle of competing interests and strange alliances. Russia and Iran, for example, both support the Bashar al-Assad regime in Syria. Meanwhile, the U.S. supports the Kurds and Syrian rebels fighting against al-Assad’s forces. The U.S. is also leading a coalition of over 60 countries, and France recently started its own coalition to fight the Islamic State, as did Russia. Making matters even more complicated, Turkey is fighting against the Kurds, and the Syrian rebels are receiving additional help from Jordan, Turkey and the Gulf states. These are just the state actors — there’s also a number of nonstate entities engaged in this conflict. For example, the Lebanese terrorist organization Hezbollah is on the side of Syria, Russia, and Iran, while the al-Qaeda affiliate Jabhat al-Nusra is fighting to topple Assad’s regime and replace it with an Islamic government. There have also been numerous Shia militia roaming around Iraq since the 2003 U.S.-led preemptive invasion, including the Mahdi Army and the Promised Day Brigade. According to the former director of the CIA, David Petraeus, such militias constitute an even greater longterm threat to the region than the Islamic State. And then, of course, pretty much everyone is at war with the Islamic State, which has grown into the largest and best-funded terrorist organization in human history. It now controls a huge area of real estate in Iraq and Syria (on which some 5 million people live), and has affiliates in countries like Pakistan, Afghanistan, Libya, and Nigeria. This juggernaut of terrorism has also attracted foreign fighters from countries as geographically distant as Denmark, Ireland, Australia, and the US. While its initial aim, after rising to prominence in 2014, was to establish a strong caliphate in Iraq and Syria, it recently expanded its strategy by bombing a Russian commercial plane over the Sinai Peninsula and perpetrating the Paris attacks that left 130 people dead. So, this is clearly an international war — and a messy one at that. But it’s not the first conflict of the sort since World War II. The Cold War involved countries from around the globe, divided into the Eastern and Western blocs, and the Korean War can be seen as a proxy war between the U.S. and China, backed by the UN and Soviet Union, respectively. Furthermore, the Second Congo War, which is sometimes dubbed the African World War, involved nine African nations and roughly twenty different militias. Our global village has witnessed multiple international confrontations in the seven decades since 1945. The Syrian war is just another in this series. But there is something that makes the Syrian war unique. Whereas many of the conflicts after World War I were driven by differences in political and economic ideologies — think fascism, communism, and liberal democracy — the war in Syria involves several actors that appear to hold genuinely apocalyptic worldviews. The Islamic State is perhaps the most obvious example. As the U.S. General Martin Dempsey noted during a 2014 press conference, the Islamic State is motivated by “an apocalyptic, end-of-days strategic vision” according to which its current leader, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, is the eighth of 12 caliphs in total before the world ends. It also believes that a grand battle — essentially Armageddon — between the Muslims and “Romans,” i.e., the Western forces, will soon occur in the small Syrian town of Dabiq. This is why the Islamic State “fought ferociously” for control of Dabiq in 2014, despite its military insignificance, and it’s why the Islamic State named its online propaganda magazine Dabiq. Each issue of this magazine opens with the quote: “The spark has been lit here in Iraq, and its heat will continue to intensify — by Allah’s permission — until it burns the crusader armies in Dabiq.” For the Islamic State, the Syrian war is one stage in an apocalyptic narrative that’s unfolding before our very eyes. The reason such beliefs matter is that movements driven by “active apocalyptic” worldviews aren’t “rational actors” in the normal sense of the term. The Islamic State, for example, wants the world to declare war against it. According to a prophetic hadith, it’s expecting a total of 80 countries to descent upon its territories — roughly 20 more than the number of countries in the U.S.-led coalition. Furthermore, the conviction that “This is the war [Muhammad] promised — it is the Grand Battle,” as a Sunni fighter told Reuters in 2014, can produce a sense of moral urgency that true believers can use to justify virtually any act of barbarism or violence, no matter how catastrophic. Consequently, apocalyptic movements like the Islamic State can be far more brutal than state or nonstate actors motivated by the ideologies behind World War II, the Cold War, and other conflicts. The Islamic State wants not just a fight, but a fight to the death. So, the biggest worry about the Syrian war isn’t that it’s World War III in the making, but that involves an apocalyptic component that raises the stakes considerably. The possibility of a catastrophe is perhaps much greater today than in past wars. In fact, the Islamic State has secretly explored the possibility of weaponizing the bubonic plague, as well as infecting its own members with Ebola and then flying them around the world. It’s also fantasized about purchasing a nuclear bomb from Pakistan, transporting it to South America, and sneaking it through “porous borders” into the U.S.” While this scenario may sound “far-fetched,” the Islamic State notes in a Dabiq article that it’s “infinitely more possible today than it was just one year ago.” If such a device were to be detonated in New York City or Los Angeles and the U.S. were to respond by “bomb[ing] the sh*t out of them,” to quote a presidential candidate still trying to figure out the difference between the Quds Force and the Kurds, the result would probably only reinforce Islamic extremism in the region. As Graeme Wood correctly observes in an interview with the atheist Sam Harris, more bombs in Syria and Iraq would only confirm a “clash of civilizations” narrative, thereby leading “a particular type” of Muslim who’s “already inclined to believe that the West is at war with Islam” to adopt even more radical beliefs. The war between “civilizations” would thus escalate even further. What’s the solution to the Syrian conflict — or World War III, if you’d prefer to call it that? There isn’t a good one. The U.S.-led preemptive invasion of Iraq started this mess by destabilizing the region and leading a whole generation of Sunnis and Shi’ites to believe that the end is nigh. And now we’re reaping the consequences of this foreign policy blunder, with no end in sight.
After Roe: It’s hard to believe now, but the abortion debate wasn’t always so toxic. What happened?
Mary Ziegler teaches law at Florida State University, where she holds the Stearns Weaver Miller chair in the College of Law. Her book, "After Roe: The Lost History of the Abortion Debate," traces the evolution of American political dynamics surrounding abortion. In this conversation with Valerie Tarico she discusses how the debate became so polarized, why some abortion foes will not be satisfied until abortion is criminalized, and how advocates for women and healthy families might find common cause with others. I see abortion as a social good—like the guardrails right before someone’s life goes off a cliff. As a mom of two daughters, I sure want the rails there. But my dream is for my daughters and all young people to become parents when they feel ready so they can fulfill the promise of their lives and form families of their choosing and stack the odds in favor of their kids. The intense emotional energy around abortion, both pro and con, makes it really hard to have this broader conversation about chosen lives and flourishing families—about young women and men pursuing their dreams or about healthy, cherished children raised by parents who aren’t stretched to the breaking point. So I desperately want to understand whether there is some way through this impasse. People would be surprised by how much less toxic gender politics were in the 1970s than they are now. Given how much abortion opponents seem to have fixated on the overruling of Roe, I expected the conflict in the decade after the decision to be particularly bitter, but it wasn’t that way. What it means to be “pro-life” or “pro-choice” isn’t as static as it seems. Some people on both sides were doing surprising and productive things back then to make abortion less necessary. Even today, when we talk about how polarized things are, we’re talking about the movement leadership. But there are people on both sides who can’t join either movement because neither fits what they believe. Many of those active in the 1970s would have been shocked at how dysfunctional things have become at this point. How did we get to this point—with inflammatory rhetoric inciting violence against abortion providers and a wholesale assault on services that empower women to manage their fertility? We have Congress trying to defund everything Planned Parenthood does except abortion, trying to defund the very services that make abortion less necessary. It’s to the point that I sometimes call Cruz, Huckabee and the others “champions of unplanned parenthood.” People blame the Roe v. Wade decision, but the broad cultural wars against women weren’t an inevitable result of what the Court decided in 1973. In fact, the polarization took a while to develop, and it had more to do with money and politics than the ideology of people in either movement. For much of the 1970s, pro-life groups were trying to get politicians to adopt a platform that opposed abortion, but instead both parties tried to appeal to people on either side of the issue. In the 1970s, it was possible to be a conservative Republican and support abortion access. It was possible to be in support of robust anti-discrimination laws for women but oppose abortion. If you look at Biden or Gephardt, for example, there were lots of ways public figures tried to navigate this politically. Ronald Reagan signed an abortion access measure in California. George Bush was at least nominally pro-choice. But in 1976, the Republicans recognized the potential of abortion to mobilize swing votes. By the 1980s, positions crystalized. What happened was a political party realignment. Why a political realignment? How did opposition to abortion get bundled together with opposition to worker rights and opposition to government services and opposition to gun control? They don’t seem to go together very well. Abortion opponents wanted Roe v. Wade overturned. For a long time, they had fought for a constitutional amendment that would outlaw all abortions, but that obviously hadn’t worked. By the 1980s, it was pretty clear that the only way they were going to get anywhere was to change the Court, which meant they needed to change presidential elections. Marriage of the pro-life movement and Republican Party was not inevitable and has always been troubled, meaning that there are people in the movement who are naturally conservative and people who are not. Some hold their noses when they vote Republican, hoping for judges and laws that they like. An “Obamacare simulation” at Washington University dropped the abortion rate to 75 percent below the national average by making top-tier contraceptives available free of charge. Why can’t we at least agree on reducing unwanted pregnancy and making abortion less necessary? We could have done things to make abortion less necessary. There was a moment in time when that was politically possible. In the 1970s there was a big fight – should we be for the Pregnancy Discrimination Act, the Equal Rights Amendment, or better access to contraception? Some in the pro-life movement made this argument: They were trying to ban abortion, but they recognized that women would still seek it out if they didn’t have alternatives. Politically, they can’t easily make that argument anymore because that would jeopardize the Republicans’ ability to stack the Supreme Court. But some people still feel that way. All Our Lives is one group that supports services and choices, except for abortion. OK, so instead of Obamacare, let’s just talk about improvements in contraceptive technologies. In Washington state, the annual number of abortions has dropped from around 30,000 to around 18,000 without any increase in restrictions or decrease in access. The primary factor seems to be increased use of IUDs and contraceptive implants -- also, Plan B (aka “the morning after pill”). And science suggests that all of the long-acting contraceptives and emergency contraceptives operate by preventing conception itself, rather than by booting out an embryo. Why aren’t pro-lifers lobbying loudly on behalf of better birth control? The idea of IUDs as abortifacient is like an article of faith — not something people are willing to rethink. Also, a meaningful group in the pro-life movement is actually anti-contraception as well as antiabortion. For the most part this is not overt, because it’s not politically expedient. Those in power in the movement today are more likely to be conservative on every issue. Some are anti-sex unless it’s procreative. This strand was there from the beginning, but it just wasn’t universal. Now, a lot of the power players are people who operate naturally within the worldview of the Republican Party. But they don’t represent the whole movement. You keep saying that not everyone who opposes abortion is socially conservative to an extreme. The pro-life movement is big and messy and divided. That’s likely to be true of any social movement, and there is no exception here. Starting in the 1970s and running through 2010, sociologists have studied those who were active in the antiabortion movement. A few patterns emerge from these studies. The movement was disproportionately Catholic and female in its early years, but that’s much less true now. Still, Catholics are disproportionately represented, and movement members more likely to be white, married and college-educated than the population as a whole. Ziad Munson’s 2010 research found that antiabortion activists often identify as Republicans, but their worldview maps pretty poorly onto the standard conservative platform. More of them were opposed to the death penalty than you would expect, for example. As a historian, I try to get at what people thought was motivating them. Whether or not individual objections to abortion harken back to religious influences, activists believe they have secular moral reasons. Some express ethical objections. Some people see the fetus at any moment in time as a child. Some people are just grossed out by abortion—motivated by disgust. Often they are people who found images of abortion disturbing without thinking through how the images had been edited. Not all of them are driven by opposition to female equality or sex or birth control. So is there any room for common ground here? Right now we’re stuck with terrifying rhetoric from politicians and constant threats against abortion providers that erupt into unpredictable violence. In some places, the only providers are people like Willie Parker or Warren Hern, who are so committed to abortion care as a calling that they are willing to risk their lives. As clinics close, poor women who can’t afford to travel are being forced to bear children they don’t want and can’t afford. Last summer I wrote a piece titled “Why I’m Pro-Abortion not Just Pro-Choice” and it went viral. Amelia Bonow’s spontaneous hashtag #ShoutYourAbortion erupted into an international Twitter storm. In other words, as the right ramps up, people on the left are ramping up too. Based on the past, what would you say about how we might get beyond the current impasse? The common ground would lie in reducing the need for abortion, and in promoting the wellbeing of women and families. You would find some people in the movement that you can talk to and some that you can’t. In 2015, the Supreme Court decided a case about whether federal civil rights law ever requires employers to accommodate women who need work modifications during pregnancy. The case involved Peggy Young, a woman who worked at United Parcel Service and sought the same accommodations the company already provided for people injured on the job. We associate the fight against pregnancy discrimination with feminists, but below the radar pro-life groups submitted amicus briefs arguing for more accommodations when Young’s case went before the Supreme Court. The Republican Party is generally against anti-discrimination protections, so if you want to prevent or reduce abortion that way, but are aligned with the party, your political allies would say that’s inappropriate. Even so, there is still some willingness to push for those things. The interest in women’s health, some of that is sincere. Some of the people using that argument would actually like to give women access to sex education or neonatal care. Also, there are antiabortion groups trying to lobby for equal pay because people recognize that sometimes a woman feels like she can’t afford another child. Paid family leave might be another issue. If you are pro-life, you don’t want people to feel coerced to have an abortion. Many in the movement recognize that poor women don’t really have a choice to raise a child and often feel financial pressure to have an abortion. There might be common ground there. It seems like our insanity about abortion is making it impossible even to have sane conversations about family planning regarding how well-timed childbearing helps families to flourish. Even that conversation has become toxic. Any advice here? There are no easy answers because differences on the abortion issue are real, profound and unchanging. I don’t think there was common ground on abortion even before Roe. But a good starting point is to remember that not everyone who identifies as antiabortion is the same. The polarization of abortion politics doesn’t capture what most Americans actually think, even those who oppose safe, legal abortion. When you start to recognize the diversity in the movement, fault lines appear, and you can at least begin a real conversation about how to make things better for parents and their kids.
We have gun violence all wrong: Mass shootings only tell a fraction of the story
According to articles this week across the Internet, there has been an average of one mass shooting every day in the United States: 355 so far this year. It’s a jarring statistic, and one that has gone viral in the wake of this week’s massacre in San Bernardino, California. But there are two problems with the number: It doesn’t actually provide a clear estimate of how often the country has seen shooting rampages like the one in San Bernardino. And it obscures the broader reality of gun violence in America. Counting “mass shootings” is notoriously complicated and contested, since there is no standard definition of what they are. Is it best to count shootings that injure or kill a certain number of people? Or should the definition focus more narrowly on attacks in which the motivation of the shooter “appears to be indiscriminate killing”? Mother Jones, which has been tracking mass shootings since 2012, has counted just four mass shootings this year, and a total of 73 since 1982, as Mother Jones editor Mark Follman has noted in The New York Times. In 2014, the FBI released its own count of “active shooter” incidents, focusing on events where law enforcement and citizens may have the chance to intervene and change the outcome of the ongoing shooting. It tallied a total of 160 of these events from 2000 to 2013–including high-profile shootings at Virginia Tech, Fort Hood, and Sandy Hook Elementary School– with an average of 11 per year. The “355 mass shootings this year” that has been rocketing around the Internet comes from a crowdsourced Reddit initiative that gathers media reports of shootings in which four or more people were shot. The Reddit count includes many incidents that Mother Jones, the FBI, and others leave out: for instance, a home robbery, a drive-by shooting, and a gang fight. The Reddit project’s organizers suggest this broader approach does a better job of capturing the burden of gun violence–including the suffering and costs of treating people who are shot and survive. “The most obscene incidents of gun violence usually do not make the mainstream news at all,” the project’s introduction says, citing a nightclub shooting in Tennessee in which 18 people were shot and only one person killed. “We believe the media does a disservice to mass shooting victims by virtually ignoring them unless large numbers are killed.” Yet bundling together all incidents in which four people or more people are shot doesn’t capture the bigger picture. As ProPublica detailed last week, gun murder in America is largely a story of race and geography. Half of all gun murder victims are black men. The gun murder rate for black Americans is dramatically higher than it is for white Americans. And the burden of violence tends to be concentrated in certain neighborhoods of certain cities. Reddit’s Mass Shooting Tracker does not include any breakdown by race. In response to questions about the group’s numbers, one project organizer, GhostofAlyeska, wrote, “Our intent is not to analyze the causes or cures for gun violence, but simply to expose the available data. We're volunteers working from a reddit community, nothing more.” The Reddit project cites 462 people killed under its broad definition of mass shootings. The number of gun homicides of black men killed in 2013, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention: 5,798. Baltimore alone has seen a total of 316 total homicides so far this year–the vast majority of them shooting deaths of black victims, according to the Baltimore Sun’s homicide map. The city’s homicide rate is now at a record high. The Reddit tracker captures eight of those deaths. San Bernardino has two entries in this year’s Mass Shooting Tracker: yesterday’s attack, and a nightclub shooting reportedly linked to gang violence. The area has long struggled with poverty, gangs, and homicide. “My son was shot to death with an AK–47. My nephew was murdered and his body was burned and buried,” San Bernardino resident Marisa Hernandez told Vice News on Wednesday. "This type of mass shootings happens everyday here to our kids and nobody stops it, nobody does anything.”
According to articles this week across the Internet, there has been an average of one mass shooting every day in the United States: 355 so far this year. It’s a jarring statistic, and one that has gone viral in the wake of this week’s massacre in San Bernardino, California. But there are two problems with the number: It doesn’t actually provide a clear estimate of how often the country has seen shooting rampages like the one in San Bernardino. And it obscures the broader reality of gun violence in America. Counting “mass shootings” is notoriously complicated and contested, since there is no standard definition of what they are. Is it best to count shootings that injure or kill a certain number of people? Or should the definition focus more narrowly on attacks in which the motivation of the shooter “appears to be indiscriminate killing”? Mother Jones, which has been tracking mass shootings since 2012, has counted just four mass shootings this year, and a total of 73 since 1982, as Mother Jones editor Mark Follman has noted in The New York Times. In 2014, the FBI released its own count of “active shooter” incidents, focusing on events where law enforcement and citizens may have the chance to intervene and change the outcome of the ongoing shooting. It tallied a total of 160 of these events from 2000 to 2013–including high-profile shootings at Virginia Tech, Fort Hood, and Sandy Hook Elementary School– with an average of 11 per year. The “355 mass shootings this year” that has been rocketing around the Internet comes from a crowdsourced Reddit initiative that gathers media reports of shootings in which four or more people were shot. The Reddit count includes many incidents that Mother Jones, the FBI, and others leave out: for instance, a home robbery, a drive-by shooting, and a gang fight. The Reddit project’s organizers suggest this broader approach does a better job of capturing the burden of gun violence–including the suffering and costs of treating people who are shot and survive. “The most obscene incidents of gun violence usually do not make the mainstream news at all,” the project’s introduction says, citing a nightclub shooting in Tennessee in which 18 people were shot and only one person killed. “We believe the media does a disservice to mass shooting victims by virtually ignoring them unless large numbers are killed.” Yet bundling together all incidents in which four people or more people are shot doesn’t capture the bigger picture. As ProPublica detailed last week, gun murder in America is largely a story of race and geography. Half of all gun murder victims are black men. The gun murder rate for black Americans is dramatically higher than it is for white Americans. And the burden of violence tends to be concentrated in certain neighborhoods of certain cities. Reddit’s Mass Shooting Tracker does not include any breakdown by race. In response to questions about the group’s numbers, one project organizer, GhostofAlyeska, wrote, “Our intent is not to analyze the causes or cures for gun violence, but simply to expose the available data. We're volunteers working from a reddit community, nothing more.” The Reddit project cites 462 people killed under its broad definition of mass shootings. The number of gun homicides of black men killed in 2013, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention: 5,798. Baltimore alone has seen a total of 316 total homicides so far this year–the vast majority of them shooting deaths of black victims, according to the Baltimore Sun’s homicide map. The city’s homicide rate is now at a record high. The Reddit tracker captures eight of those deaths. San Bernardino has two entries in this year’s Mass Shooting Tracker: yesterday’s attack, and a nightclub shooting reportedly linked to gang violence. The area has long struggled with poverty, gangs, and homicide. “My son was shot to death with an AK–47. My nephew was murdered and his body was burned and buried,” San Bernardino resident Marisa Hernandez told Vice News on Wednesday. "This type of mass shootings happens everyday here to our kids and nobody stops it, nobody does anything.”
December 19, 2015
Hello Barbie’s war on imagination: The childhood-destroying gift you don’t want to give your kid
Every single morning before breakfast, my five-year-old daughter and I play with Bagel Bear and Walter the Alligator, two dilapidated stuffed animals that have been in our family since she was a baby. During a lifetime of play, these threadbare toys have served as imaginary siblings, students, library patrons, restaurant guests, archeologists, criminal masterminds and astronauts. It is an exhausting way to start my morning, and thanks to the wonders of the Internet Age, I don’t have to do it anymore. For seventy dollars, I could buy my daughter a Hello Barbie this holiday. This Internet-connected doll will chat with her like an imaginary friend, tell her stories, play games with her, and even monitor her conversations. My stomach hurts when I think about some computer-stuffed doll replacing my role in her imaginary games. Every morning, I follow in my daughter’s wake during these epic play sessions, carried back to the imaginary places I used to visit as a kid. But these toys are truly the future. Toy and app makers have created thousands of digital doodads to replace imaginary friends and real-life play with parents. From virtual reality goggles to talking dolls to solitary apps, digital toys threaten to destroy make-believe play traditionally shared between caregivers and kids. These artificial companions offer a seductive promise for adults: they handle all the hard work of talking, reading and playing with our kids. Parents must refuse to outsource imaginary play before these toys rule the market; we must decide right now to never accept a hollow simulation of the fundamental make-believe activities that parents and kids share. You can see Hello Barbie in action in this video recorded at the toy’s release earlier this year. A perky sales attendant explains the digital charms of this new doll: “As you can see, Hello Barbie really brings out Barbie’s personality. It’ll help deepen the relationship that girls have with Barbie. And then, over time, through the questions and answers and the imaginative play, she’ll really become the child’s best of best friends.” Kids turn on Hello Barbie with a belt-buckle power switch. The doll has a microphone and speaker hidden underneath a fake gemstone necklace. Just like the voice-activated personal assistant apps on your smartphone, kids need to press and hold down the shiny buckle to launch the voice recognition function. The doll converses with your child, tailoring answers to the kid’s responses. Hello Barbie even learns about your child through conversation, a lo-fi HAL 3000 from "2001: A Space Odyssey" channeling a perky and dopey teenager. Mattel published a 216-page document collecting Hello Barbie’s entire interactive script. Here’s the literal script that Hello Barbie would follow if I let her take control of my daughter’s morning playtime: “I'd love to learn more about you. Oh, I know! Let's make a game of it. The game's called Family Town! We're gonna pretend all of your family members run different shops in a make-believe town! I'll be a visitor and you'll show me around! So ... what's the name of your family's town? I think I'm gonna like it here! Okay, so every member of your family gets their own shop. One per person! I'll visit each shop, and you'll tell me who runs it! Got it?” This kind of casual conversation triggered warning bells among activists. The Campaign for a Commercial-Free Childhood (CCFC) suggested that Mattel should shut down production of Hello Barbie altogether. In the group’s statement, Georgetown University law professor Angela Campbell worried about a digital toy probing a kid’s imagination: “In Mattel's demo, Barbie asks many questions that would elicit a great deal of information about a child, her interests and her family. This information could be of great value to advertisers and be used to market unfairly to children.” Internet privacy experts and tech reporters blasted Hello Barbie’s vulnerable connection to the Internet, illustrating how creative hackers could infiltrate a family’s world through the device. These are valid concerns, but I am most worried about how this doll hacks straight into daughter’s imagination — it could easily kill her family of imaginary friends. Conversations, eye contact and human voice are absolutely crucial for a child’s developing brain. Dr. Dana Suskind showed how human interaction and pretend play influence childhood development in her eye-opening new book, "Thirty Million Words: Building a Child's Brain." “The basis of language, of words, is to connect humans to other humans,” she wrote. “A baby’s brain is a result of that evolutionary history. It does not learn language passively, but only in an environment of social responsiveness and social interaction.” Since the 1970s, child development experts have proven over and over again that a child’s brain grows through human interaction — a fundamental part of human experience that cannot be replicated by a computer. Human-led conversations, reading sessions and pretend play are as important as vitamins and a healthy diet for children’s brains. Psychologists Dorothy G. Singer and Jerome L. Singer spent many years studying the art of play and imaginary friends. In "The House of Make-Believe Children’s Play and the Developing Imagination," they summarized decades of research into imaginary friends and pretend play: “The evidence that a child has an imaginary playmate seems to be an especially powerful predictor of the likelihood that a child will play happily in nursery school, will be cooperative with friends and adults, and may use somewhat more extensive language, while also being somewhat less likely to watch a good deal of television,” they concluded. Psychologist Eileen Kennedy-Moore listed more benefits of imaginary friends: “compared to those who don’t create them, children with imaginary companions (either invisible friends or personified objects) tend to be less shy, engage in more laughing and smiling with peers, and do better at tasks involving imagining how someone else might think.” Knowing all the benefits of imaginary friends and interactive pretend play, why would any parent use digital alternatives to imaginary playtime? Maybe because apps have become such a major part of our lives, including a flood of “interactive” digital content for kids. Only a bare fraction of these digital offerings actually encourage kids to use the app with parents — sacrificing the crucial human interaction that growing brains require. The Joan Ganz Cooney Center released a report last week called “Getting a Read on the App Stores : A Market Scan and Analysis of Children’s Literacy Apps,” sifting through a representative sample of the thousands of apps for kids. “We found only two in our sample of 170 downloaded apps that were designed with explicit co-use functions,” they wrote. Devices alone will never stimulate imaginary play. But they can help! A tablet or a smartphone is like an airplane, capable of performing amazing feats of creativity and imagination. Sadly, most kids only use these machines to drive lazy circles on the ground. We must work hard to nurture kids' imaginary worlds in the 21st century. Instead of solitary experiences with Internet-connected dolls or apps, parents can use creative apps alongside kids. I recommend parents start with The Electric Company Party Game or Sesame Street Family Play app. Instead of letting kids play passively on a smartphone, these apps suggest games that adults and kids can play together in real life. No essay or activist group will be able to stop Internet-connected dolls. These toys are inevitable. Smartphones and tablets already work like Internet-connected dolls for adults, collecting our imaginary thoughts on Facebook and selling our data every time we interact. It is unavoidable that children’s toys will reflect adults’ awful Internet habits. How do you replace a parent who spends too much answering work emails? How do you replace a parent who spends too much time checking Facebook? With a chatty Internet-connected toy. Dr. Suskind warns us in her book that we take this step at our peril: “Digital devices do not Take Turns; they take absolute concentration. Their part of the interaction is set; nothing can alter it. Even answering ‘questions’ correctly only means a child is following orders, not giving and taking.” Classic science fiction is brimming with examples of kids raised by robots or artificial intelligences. It’s like Ray Bradbury’s “The Veldt,” a famous short story set in a world where computer screens and AI do all the teaching while parents enjoy apparently boundless leisure time. "Maybe I don't have enough to do. Maybe I have time to think too much,” complains one parent in Bradbury’s story, a science fiction prediction that seems ludicrous in the 21st century. We have lots of fancy devices aimed at making shopping, driving and child-raising easier, but nobody ever complains that they have too much leisure time — our devices fill every spare moment. We radically changed our adult lives without taking time to reflect on the consequences. Our kids have already learned our bad habits. Many years ago, I offhandedly pretended my coffee cup could talk to distract my daughter during an emotional toddler breakdown. We now speak to “Coffee Man” every single day. She imagines that Coffee Man follows us everywhere, teaching him every new skill she learned and teasing him when he couldn’t compete with her life progress. I would never replace the lovely time my daughter spends talking to Coffee Man with some digital script regurgitated by an Internet-connected doll. My daughter will have the rest of her life to learn the joys of talking computers. But according to child development research, I only have one more year left to enjoy my daughter’s “peak” of imaginary play. I refuse to sacrifice this precious time, or hobble my daughter’s ability to believe in talking coffee cups. That’s why we should all say Goodbye Barbie. Every single morning before breakfast, my five-year-old daughter and I play with Bagel Bear and Walter the Alligator, two dilapidated stuffed animals that have been in our family since she was a baby. During a lifetime of play, these threadbare toys have served as imaginary siblings, students, library patrons, restaurant guests, archeologists, criminal masterminds and astronauts. It is an exhausting way to start my morning, and thanks to the wonders of the Internet Age, I don’t have to do it anymore. For seventy dollars, I could buy my daughter a Hello Barbie this holiday. This Internet-connected doll will chat with her like an imaginary friend, tell her stories, play games with her, and even monitor her conversations. My stomach hurts when I think about some computer-stuffed doll replacing my role in her imaginary games. Every morning, I follow in my daughter’s wake during these epic play sessions, carried back to the imaginary places I used to visit as a kid. But these toys are truly the future. Toy and app makers have created thousands of digital doodads to replace imaginary friends and real-life play with parents. From virtual reality goggles to talking dolls to solitary apps, digital toys threaten to destroy make-believe play traditionally shared between caregivers and kids. These artificial companions offer a seductive promise for adults: they handle all the hard work of talking, reading and playing with our kids. Parents must refuse to outsource imaginary play before these toys rule the market; we must decide right now to never accept a hollow simulation of the fundamental make-believe activities that parents and kids share. You can see Hello Barbie in action in this video recorded at the toy’s release earlier this year. A perky sales attendant explains the digital charms of this new doll: “As you can see, Hello Barbie really brings out Barbie’s personality. It’ll help deepen the relationship that girls have with Barbie. And then, over time, through the questions and answers and the imaginative play, she’ll really become the child’s best of best friends.” Kids turn on Hello Barbie with a belt-buckle power switch. The doll has a microphone and speaker hidden underneath a fake gemstone necklace. Just like the voice-activated personal assistant apps on your smartphone, kids need to press and hold down the shiny buckle to launch the voice recognition function. The doll converses with your child, tailoring answers to the kid’s responses. Hello Barbie even learns about your child through conversation, a lo-fi HAL 3000 from "2001: A Space Odyssey" channeling a perky and dopey teenager. Mattel published a 216-page document collecting Hello Barbie’s entire interactive script. Here’s the literal script that Hello Barbie would follow if I let her take control of my daughter’s morning playtime: “I'd love to learn more about you. Oh, I know! Let's make a game of it. The game's called Family Town! We're gonna pretend all of your family members run different shops in a make-believe town! I'll be a visitor and you'll show me around! So ... what's the name of your family's town? I think I'm gonna like it here! Okay, so every member of your family gets their own shop. One per person! I'll visit each shop, and you'll tell me who runs it! Got it?” This kind of casual conversation triggered warning bells among activists. The Campaign for a Commercial-Free Childhood (CCFC) suggested that Mattel should shut down production of Hello Barbie altogether. In the group’s statement, Georgetown University law professor Angela Campbell worried about a digital toy probing a kid’s imagination: “In Mattel's demo, Barbie asks many questions that would elicit a great deal of information about a child, her interests and her family. This information could be of great value to advertisers and be used to market unfairly to children.” Internet privacy experts and tech reporters blasted Hello Barbie’s vulnerable connection to the Internet, illustrating how creative hackers could infiltrate a family’s world through the device. These are valid concerns, but I am most worried about how this doll hacks straight into daughter’s imagination — it could easily kill her family of imaginary friends. Conversations, eye contact and human voice are absolutely crucial for a child’s developing brain. Dr. Dana Suskind showed how human interaction and pretend play influence childhood development in her eye-opening new book, "Thirty Million Words: Building a Child's Brain." “The basis of language, of words, is to connect humans to other humans,” she wrote. “A baby’s brain is a result of that evolutionary history. It does not learn language passively, but only in an environment of social responsiveness and social interaction.” Since the 1970s, child development experts have proven over and over again that a child’s brain grows through human interaction — a fundamental part of human experience that cannot be replicated by a computer. Human-led conversations, reading sessions and pretend play are as important as vitamins and a healthy diet for children’s brains. Psychologists Dorothy G. Singer and Jerome L. Singer spent many years studying the art of play and imaginary friends. In "The House of Make-Believe Children’s Play and the Developing Imagination," they summarized decades of research into imaginary friends and pretend play: “The evidence that a child has an imaginary playmate seems to be an especially powerful predictor of the likelihood that a child will play happily in nursery school, will be cooperative with friends and adults, and may use somewhat more extensive language, while also being somewhat less likely to watch a good deal of television,” they concluded. Psychologist Eileen Kennedy-Moore listed more benefits of imaginary friends: “compared to those who don’t create them, children with imaginary companions (either invisible friends or personified objects) tend to be less shy, engage in more laughing and smiling with peers, and do better at tasks involving imagining how someone else might think.” Knowing all the benefits of imaginary friends and interactive pretend play, why would any parent use digital alternatives to imaginary playtime? Maybe because apps have become such a major part of our lives, including a flood of “interactive” digital content for kids. Only a bare fraction of these digital offerings actually encourage kids to use the app with parents — sacrificing the crucial human interaction that growing brains require. The Joan Ganz Cooney Center released a report last week called “Getting a Read on the App Stores : A Market Scan and Analysis of Children’s Literacy Apps,” sifting through a representative sample of the thousands of apps for kids. “We found only two in our sample of 170 downloaded apps that were designed with explicit co-use functions,” they wrote. Devices alone will never stimulate imaginary play. But they can help! A tablet or a smartphone is like an airplane, capable of performing amazing feats of creativity and imagination. Sadly, most kids only use these machines to drive lazy circles on the ground. We must work hard to nurture kids' imaginary worlds in the 21st century. Instead of solitary experiences with Internet-connected dolls or apps, parents can use creative apps alongside kids. I recommend parents start with The Electric Company Party Game or Sesame Street Family Play app. Instead of letting kids play passively on a smartphone, these apps suggest games that adults and kids can play together in real life. No essay or activist group will be able to stop Internet-connected dolls. These toys are inevitable. Smartphones and tablets already work like Internet-connected dolls for adults, collecting our imaginary thoughts on Facebook and selling our data every time we interact. It is unavoidable that children’s toys will reflect adults’ awful Internet habits. How do you replace a parent who spends too much answering work emails? How do you replace a parent who spends too much time checking Facebook? With a chatty Internet-connected toy. Dr. Suskind warns us in her book that we take this step at our peril: “Digital devices do not Take Turns; they take absolute concentration. Their part of the interaction is set; nothing can alter it. Even answering ‘questions’ correctly only means a child is following orders, not giving and taking.” Classic science fiction is brimming with examples of kids raised by robots or artificial intelligences. It’s like Ray Bradbury’s “The Veldt,” a famous short story set in a world where computer screens and AI do all the teaching while parents enjoy apparently boundless leisure time. "Maybe I don't have enough to do. Maybe I have time to think too much,” complains one parent in Bradbury’s story, a science fiction prediction that seems ludicrous in the 21st century. We have lots of fancy devices aimed at making shopping, driving and child-raising easier, but nobody ever complains that they have too much leisure time — our devices fill every spare moment. We radically changed our adult lives without taking time to reflect on the consequences. Our kids have already learned our bad habits. Many years ago, I offhandedly pretended my coffee cup could talk to distract my daughter during an emotional toddler breakdown. We now speak to “Coffee Man” every single day. She imagines that Coffee Man follows us everywhere, teaching him every new skill she learned and teasing him when he couldn’t compete with her life progress. I would never replace the lovely time my daughter spends talking to Coffee Man with some digital script regurgitated by an Internet-connected doll. My daughter will have the rest of her life to learn the joys of talking computers. But according to child development research, I only have one more year left to enjoy my daughter’s “peak” of imaginary play. I refuse to sacrifice this precious time, or hobble my daughter’s ability to believe in talking coffee cups. That’s why we should all say Goodbye Barbie.
“This is why people are panicking here”: Björk takes on an “extreme right-wing redneck government” to preserve Iceland’s open spaces
Björk has always been known for her groundbreaking visual art and music, as well as her embrace of technology as a means to facilitate communication and spark innovation. For example, her "Biophilia" project grew into an educational program and series of workshops whose aim is to foment creativity and inspire students to use technology to embrace music, science and nature. However, Björk also has a long track record of environmental activism, in particular where it relates to her home country, Iceland. To raise awareness of (and funds for) these causes, she's historically turned to music — from the release of the Thom Yorke-featuring 2008 song "Náttúra" to a 2014 benefit concert featuring herself, as well as Patti Smith and Of Monsters And Men. This year, however, she's taken to more direct spoken activism, due to the urgency associated with potential construction that would threaten the livelihood of the Highlands, an idyllic Icelandic region known for its untouched beauty. In a nutshell, proposals exist to build roads and power plants in the Highlands, in addition to placing high-voltage power lines across the area. (Separate — but just as worrisome — are discussions going on between the U.K. and Iceland that would involve constructing an undersea power cable, so the former can harness some of the latter's energy.) The solution is to create a national park within the Highlands, which would protect it from harm. Björk and her environmental collaborators have launched a Facebook page, "Gætum Garðsins - Protect The Park," to share news and information about activities associated with the Highlands movement, while there's also a petition at heartoficeland.org people can sign in solidarity. As the recent 2015 United Nationals Climate Change Conference drew to a close, Salon spoke with Björk from Iceland, where she shared what cultural and governmental forces led to the Highlands' potential destruction, why she's diving full-force into this activism now and what people can do to help. It seems like things are at a particularly crucial tipping point now. Where is this urgency coming from? Well, there's been a group of people, including myself, that have been working on the same topic for more or less the last 15 years. We've done a lot of different campaigns, and [we've] tried to change the angle every few years. To cut a really long story short, Iceland was a colony for 600 years, and we didn't get industrialized. Then we got independence after World War II, and in 70 years, there have been certain rednecks that want to catch [Iceland] up with the westernized nations and do what took them 300 years to do, to industrialize. Do it in the fast-forward, 50 years program. Fortunately, the majority of Icelanders have been against it. They want to keep Iceland as-is. What we want now, more and more, is to just enjoy the fact that we are the biggest untouched area in Europe right now and to stay that way. And move into [adopting] clean technologies that collaborate in nature, than to industrialize, build dams — the old model, aluminum smelters, heavy industries. You know, like the right-wing rednecks want to do here. The last two years, we have been more straightforward in saying we want to change the Highlands into a national park. We've tried to find a business model for a national park and to execute it. There was a new government which came to power two and a half years ago. They want to do things really quickly and privatize everything. The Icelandic early spruces were owned by the public, have always been owned by the public. And they want to privatize it and make maximum money out of it for very, very few people in the shortest time possible. Right now, there's in the system about 50 projects, different ones — like dams or aluminum smelters — [that] in the next 5 to 10 years could be executed if we don't stop them. And the first step of this is the electric cable across the Highlands. Because once that electric's cable there, you need to justify it, and then you need to build more, dam more things to get more electricity. And this whole domino effect kicks off — and before you know it, there are no more Highlands. What do the Highlands represent to the people of Iceland — and to you personally? Lots. They mean a lot. Right now, more than 80 percent of Icelanders agree with me, that they should stay untouched. I'm not just voicing my own personal opinion, but I'm more like a spokesperson for the majority of Icelanders — especially since this new government came into place, in the last two and a half years, where there's a very small minority of the rich that want to make money out of this. We feel it's not fair. Sounds very familiar to what goes on in America, sadly. Yeah, right? Well, if the population isn't supporting this, why are their wishes being ignored? Is it just because of the structure of the government? Is it because of the economic pressures due to the economic collapse from a few years ago? Is it something more? It's a long story — I'll try to give you the short version. The pros and cons of Iceland — and which I actually personally think is the best thing about it — is how few people live here. It's only 330,000 people. And Iceland is the size of New York state, so there's a lot of space here. The good thing is that if something happens … like, when I was a teenager and punk arrived to Iceland, literally a third of the nation started a punk band or something. It was ridiculous. It's so simple — there's no infrastructure here, so if something's happening, the whole country takes part in it. The downside [is] … for example, when the bank crash happened, because there was no infrastructure, the banksters, which we call them [Laughs], literally took over the island. The whole economy of the island collapsed. But then, the good thing is, we managed to take them to court, and we put into jail not only bank people, but also politicians. What I'm trying to tell you, clumsily, is that it's a small country. It's very extreme. After the bank crash, there was a very extreme, left-wing government that took power. For the first time, they put in practice environmentally protective laws, which we had never had. We never had them like you guys had — you had your national parks, like, 150 years ago or something. We never had that. It literally was just up for grabs. It's been a cross-political thing for decades here, trying to make a national environmental protection law. And two and a half years ago, a very extreme, right-wing, redneck government came into power, and they basically did one law where they nullified all the environmental protection laws in one day — decades of work. That's when everything to go downhill very quickly. This is why people are panicking here. It's really, truly could be the end of the Highlands if we don't act now. As I've read, they are such a tourist spot and are so beautiful. It's unbelievable people wouldn't want to protect that. It's so sad. I kind of, against my will, have learned some strange money lingo [Laughs] because sometimes it's the only thing that actually works. That's what we've been saying — now, Iceland makes more money from tourists than fisheries and [other] industries combined. Tourists come here because of the untouched nature, so basically what the politicians are doing are they are shooting themselves in the foot. It's strange, this old system, this industrialized, patriarchal system, is really like an old dinosaur that refuses to die. I actually think the only thing that will stop it is when they realize that they will actually make more money by protecting the Highlands and moving to more green, high-tech options and collaborate with nature. I actually think it's just around the corner. But it's really like the last dinosaur roar. [Laughs] I just hope it's not too late. We really need to react now. This is the moment — we need to go into the 21st century and open our eyes and appreciate all the opportunities we have, which are enormous. What can be done? Obviously, you're speaking out, and a lot of
musicians have signed an open letter speaking out about climate change
. What else can be done? All these nations have to drop their ego and collaborate. This fight between the westernized countries pointing their big finger at China and India is kind of ridiculous, after they've done 300 years of the biggest heavy polluting. [Laughs.] I just think everybody needs to drop all that and work together and move as quickly as possible and not be afraid of change. Change is an opportunity. And if we go in harmony with the times, and with the 21st century, with nature, and with all the new green tech that's being invented now, there actually comes a more profitable future — not only on a spiritual level and emotional level but also on a more financial level. It's time to withhold the old model. It's such a struggle, and it's working against everything. You're working on new music at the moment. Is any of this work you're doing also informing and influencing what you're working on creatively? I don't know yet, because I'm just beginning. I think the album that [was] affected [by] it most was [2011's] "Biophilia." In the summer of 2008, I dropped all my work and just worked on environmental issues for five months in Iceland. I was actually [working] with other environmentalists with huge projects, where we were trying to put attention on small seed companies just to show all the other hundreds [of] options, what to do here in Iceland in job creation other than just aluminum smelters or big industries. Little did we know that the middle of this work we were doing, the first time I was working with economists and people like that, the bank crash happened. I found myself in the heat of a very, very peculiar thing. And to a certain degree, "Biophilia," my project, came out of that — just this energy to be totally a nonprofit thing that you can make everything out of nothing. It's more about the imagination and thinking outside the box and being 21st century rather than making big budgets to do everything and continuing the conveyor belt and repeating what you did before. And also just the whole philosophy in the lyrics and "Biophilia," which took me three years to make, was really inspired and influenced by this. But I think it's too early to say with my next project — I'll have to see. I will continue to be active — I have been [for the] last 15 years, and I will definitely continue to be so. The good thing about music is, it's just its own creature, and it goes wherever it wants to. You can't really control it — you just write a bunch of songs, and you sit down and you listen to them and go, "Oh! Okay. This is what you are." We'll see. For people who aren't in Iceland, what can they do to help? We have a Facebook page, where people can go and there's a petition we are running. If you like [the Facebook page], we are going to [in the] next weeks continue to announce more ways to support our cause. You know, ironically, the people in power here, they have managed to ignore their countrymen somehow and hide behind the bureaucracy and the wars of Parliament. But somehow, they seem to listen to the international voices, like for example every time Obama has supported green courses, it has had a big domino effect here in Iceland. That's why I've been doing these international interviews — because it seemed to put pressure on the local politicians, sometimes more than if we just talk here in the local media.
