The new generation of video game consoles has ushered in plenty of cool new gameplay features. Virtual worlds are bigger. Graphics are more realistic. There are even more ways to connect with other people when we play thanks to streaming and social features. But none of those things are truly next gen, at least not compared to my favorite aspect of The Witcher 3: the hero can actually grow a virtual beard.
The Witcher 3 is a sprawling fantasy epic that spans many, many hours. It stars a grizzled monster hunter named Geralt, who sports a nasty scar on his face and two swords across his back. At the beginning of the game, he has a bit of stubble, but due to a visit with a king he's forced to get a clean shave, and from there you can watch...
American Idol will finally come to a close next year at the conclusion of its 15th season. The music reality show was once a cultural phenomenon that was consistently the most-watched entertainment show on television in the US. That streak continued for a good nine years, according to the Associated Press, but over the last several years its popularity has dropped precipitously, falling from a series high of 30.8 million viewers per episode in 2006 to a viewership of around 6.5 million viewers, like it saw just one month ago. It's also no secret that the show's cultural power hasn't been quite the same for well over a decade — it's been a long time since Kelly Clarkson broke out during the show's first season, in 2002. The show's decline...
You might not know Yves Rossy by name, but there's a decent chance you've seen him before. He's one of the only people in the world with a working jetpack — and he's really good at flying it. We've seen him fly next to a B17 bomber, circle Mount Fuji, and soar over the Grand Canyon. But the man with the jetpack just released the most hair-raising video yet.
The video is proportionally scaled in its grandeur — ripe with more than 11 minutes of beautiful HD footage shot from a chase plane and the GoPros attached Rossy and his "Jetman protege" Vince Reffet.
The jet-powered fun starts innocently enough over the desert where the two twist, dive, and climb through a sunset-filled sky. The jetpacks, by the way, let Rossy and Reffet go more...
Tuesday, for instance, is 5/12/15. Or, if you want to write it backward, it's 5/12/15. You get the idea.
Of course, a week of palindromes isn't all that rare. Since 2011, each year has had a streak of 10 straight dates that can be written as a palindrome. It'll be in June next year (because June is the sixth month and it's 2016) and will keep happening until 2020.
Also, curmudgeons will point out that if you write out the year as a four-digit number (5/11/2015), or if you write the month as a two-digit number (05/11/15), this week has no palindromes.
But in this modern, mixed-up world, there's something valuable about taking a moment out of your day to appreciate a bit of meaningless symmetry that occurs within the confines of our arbitrary calendar system.
Living life to the fullest, after all, is all about appreciating the little things.
“In Motion” is a short film by photographer Aaron Grimes showing the city of Tokyo, Japan. It features a novel, surreal effect that was created by stacking video frames inside Adobe Photoshop and then recombining those stacked frames into a video again.
Grimes first shot short clips in Tokyo’s Shibuya district with his Canon 5D Mark III. He then imported the video files as individual layers into Photoshop CC, and then stacked them together using the “mean” option.
“The effect was exactly what I wanted: all the motion blurred together,” he writes on the Adobe blog. “The more frames I stacked, the more it blurred. From there, I realized that if I staggered the effect by overlapping frames (for example: 1-24, 2-25, 3-26, etc.), then stacked those, and played it back, I would get the motion that I’ve always wanted.”
The result is an effect that can be described as blurred long-exposure real-time footage.
Grimes says that the project originally took forever to do, as he was creating each frame individually, stacking 24 images at a time. “Looking back it’s almost embarrassing how much time I spent,” he says. “It was excruciatingly slow and I couldn’t even see the final result until hours of work went by. It was a little like editing in the dark.”
He has since partnered with a couple of developers to create a script that does all the stacking with a “push of a button” to create this effect without too much time or effort.
On Sunday, the legendary investigative journalist Seymour Hersh finally released a story that he has been rumored to have been working on for years: the truth about the killing of Osama bin Laden. According to Hersh's 10,000-word story in the London Review of Books, the official history of bin Laden's death — in which the US tracked him to a compound in Abottabad, Pakistan; killed him a secret raid that infuriated Pakistan; and then buried him at sea — is a lie.
Hersh's story is amazing to read, alleging a vast American-Pakistani conspiracy to stage the raid and even to fake high-level diplomatic incidents as a sort of cover. But his allegations are largely supported only by two sources, neither of whom has direct knowledge of what happened, both of whom are retired, and one of whom is anonymous. The story is riven with internal contradictions and inconsistencies.
The story simply does not hold up to scrutiny — and, sadly, is in line with Hersh's recent turn away from the investigative reporting that made him famous into unsubstantiated conspiracy theories.
A decade ago, Hersh was one of the most respected investigative journalists on the planet, having broken major stories from the 1969 My Lai massacre to the 2004 Abu Ghraib scandal. But more recently, his reports have become less and less credible. He's claimed that much of the US special forces is controlled by secret members Opus Dei, that the US military flew Iranian terrorists to Nevada for training, and that the 2014 chemical weapons attack in Syria was a "false flag" staged by the government of Turkey. Those reports have had little proof, and rather than being born out by subsequent investigations have been either unsubstantiated or outright debunked. A close reading of his bin Laden story suggests it is likely to suffer the same fate.
What Seymour Hersh says really happened to Osama bin Laden
White House officials watch the 2011 raid to kill Osama bin Laden (Pete Souza/The White House via Getty)
The truth, Hersh says, is that Pakistani intelligence services captured bin Laden in 2006 and kept him locked up with support from Saudi Arabia, using him as leverage against al-Qaeda. In 2010, Pakistan agreed to sell bin Laden to the US for increased military aid and a "freer hand in Afghanistan." Rather than kill him or hand him over discreetly, Hersh says the Pakistanis insisted on staging an elaborate American "raid" with Pakistani support.
According to Hersh's story, Navy SEALs met no resistance at Abottabad and were escorted by a Pakistani intelligence officer to bin Laden's bedroom, where they killed him. Bin Laden's body was "torn apart with rifle fire" and pieces of the corpse "tossed out over the Hindu Kush mountains" by Navy SEALs during the flight home (no reason is given for this action). There was no burial at sea because "there wouldn’t have been much left of bin Laden to put into the sea in any case."
In this telling, the years-long breakdown in US-Pakistan relations, which had enormous ramifications for both Pakistan and the war in Afghanistan, was all staged to divert attention from the truth of bin Laden's killing. The treasure trove of intelligence secured from bin Laden's compound, Hersh adds, was in fact manufactured to provide evidence after the fact.
What is the proof?
The evidence for all this is Hersh's conversations with two people: Asad Durrani, who ran Pakistan's military intelligence service from 1990 to 1992, and "a retired senior intelligence official who was knowledgeable about the initial intelligence about bin Laden’s presence in Abbottabad." Read that line again: knowledgeable about the initial intelligence. Not exactly a key player in this drama, and anonymous at that.
Hersh produces no supporting documents or proof, nor is the authority of either source established. We are given no reason to believe that either Durrani or the "knowledgeable official" would have even second- or third-hand knowledge of what occurred, yet their word is treated as gospel. His other two sources are anonymous "consultants" who are vaguely described as insiders.
Beyond that, Hersh's proof is that he finds the official story of the Osama bin Laden raid to be unconvincing. And he points out that in the first days after the raid, the administration released details that cast bin Laden in a negative light — saying he tried to use one of his wives as a shield, for example — that it later walked back. But raising questions about the official story is not the same as proving a spectacular international conspiracy.
If that seems like worryingly little evidence for a story that accuses hundreds of people across three governments of staging a massive international hoax that has gone on for years, then you are not alone.
On Sunday night, national security journalists and analysts on Twitter picked through the story, expressing dismay at its tissue-thin sourcing, its leaps of logic, and its internal contradictions.
Some of the problems with Hersh's history of Abbottabad
Osama bin Laden's compound in Abbottabad, Pakistan (Getty Images)
Perhaps the most concerning problem with Hersh's story is not the sourcing, but the internal contradictions in the narrative he constructs.
Most blatant, Hersh's entire narrative turns on a secret deal, in which the US promised Pakistan increased military aid and a "freer hand in Afghanistan." In fact, the exact opposite of this occurred, with US military aid dropping and US-Pakistan cooperation in Afghanistan plummeting as both sides feuded bitterly for years after the raid.
Hersh explains this seemingly fatal contradiction by suggesting the deal fell apart due to miscommunication between the Americans and Pakistanis. But it's strange to argue that the dozens of officials on both sides would be competent enough to secretly plan and execute a massive international ruse, and then to uphold their conspiracy for years after the fact, but would not be competent enough to get on the same page about aid delivery.
And there are more contradictions. Why, for example, would Pakistan insist on a fake raid that would humiliate their country and the very military and intelligence leaders who supposedly instigated it?
A simpler question: why would Pakistan bother with the ostentatious fake raid at all, when anyone can imagine a dozen simpler, lower-risk, lower-cost ways to do this?
Why not just kill bin Laden, drive his body across the border into Afghanistan, and drop him off with the Americans? Or why not put him in a hut somewhere in Waziristan, blow it up with an F-16, pretend it was a US drone strike, and tell the Americans to go collect the body? (Indeed, when I first heard about Hersh's bin Laden story a few years from a New Yorker editor — the magazine, the editor said, had rejected it repeatedly, to the point of creating bad blood between Hersh and editor-in-chief David Remnick — this was the version Hersh was said to favor.)
If Pakistan's goal is increased US aid, why do something that will virtually force the US to cut aid, as it indeed did? For that matter, why retaliate against the US for the raid that you asked them to conduct? Pakistan's own actions against the US, after all, ensured that it had less influence in Afghanistan.
By the same token, why would the US cut a secret deal with Pakistan to allow that country "a freer hand" in Afghanistan — essentially surrendering a years-long effort to reduce Pakistani influence there — rather than just taking out bin Laden without Pakistan's permission?
There are smaller but still troubling inconsistencies. Why, for example, would the US need to construct a massive double of the Abottabad compound for special forces to train in, if the real compound were going to be totally unguarded and there would be no firefight?
See also, for example, the intelligence material that the US brought back from bin Laden's compound and then displayed to the world. Hersh says that, in fact, bin Laden had spent the previous five years a hostage of Pakistani intelligence rather than an active member of al-Qaeda. The intelligence "treasure trove" was thus a fabrication, cooked up by the CIA after the raid to back up the American-Pakistani conspiracy.
This is a strange thing to argue, as Carnegie Endowment Syria research AronLund points out, because al-Qaeda second-in-command Ayman al-Zawahiri subsequently said the intelligence materials were real, and had quoted from them himself. So either Hersh is wrong or, Lund writes, "Zawahiri is helping Obama forge evidence to boost US-Pakistan relations, which seems like an unusual hobby for an [al-Qaeda] leader."
In other words, for Hersh to be correct that the intelligence material was faked, and thus that bin Laden was a secret prisoner of Pakistani intelligence, and thus that the raid to kill him was a staged American-Pakistani ruse, then al-Qaeda would also have to be in on it — even though al-Qaeda was also the supposed victim of Pakistan's plot.
As for Hersh's story of what really happened to bin Laden's body — "torn to pieces with rifle fire" and thrown bit-by-bit out the door of the escaping helicopter, until there was not enough left to bury — it is difficult to know where to begin. It is outlandish to imagine small arms fire reducing a six-foot-four man "to pieces," not to mention the sheer quantity of time and bullets this would take. Are we really to believe that special forces would spend who-knows-how-long gleefully carving up bin Laden like horror movie villains, and then later reaching into the body bag to chuck pieces of him out of a helicopter, for no reason at all? On the most sensitive and important operation of their careers?
When Hersh acknowledge the vast evidence against his theory, he typically dismisses it out of hand, at times arguing that it is in fact proof that the Pakistani-American-Saudi architects of this plan were so brilliant that they spent years meticulously engineering their actions at every level so as to appear to be doing the opposite of what Hersh suggests.
For example, Hersh says the CIA station chief in Islamabad, Jonathan Banks, was a key player in helping the Pakistanis to stage the bin Laden raid. But the year before the raid, a Pakistani journalist publicly named Banks (many suspect, and Hersh agrees, that this was done at Pakistani intelligence's behest), thus imperiling his life, forcing him to flee the country, and sparking a diplomatic incident that set back US-Pakistan relations. Hersh says this entire, months-long incident was staged, a "cover in case their co-operation with the Americans in getting rid of bin Laden became known."
Hersh's story is littered with such justifications: when facts seem to squarely contradict his claims, his answer is that this only goes to show how deep the rabbit hole goes.
Seymour Hersh's slide off the rails
The prison at Abu Ghraib, Iraq. Seymour Hersh helped bring systemic American abuses at the facility to light. (Wathiq Khuzaie/Getty)
In early 2004, Hersh reported one of the most important stories of the Iraq War: the torture of detainees at the American-run prison complex in Abu Ghraib, Iraq. In a series of articles for the New Yorker, Hersh revealed horrific and systemic American torture, as well as its authorization at the highest levels of the Bush administration. While earlier investigations by the Associated Press and Amnesty International had uncovered aspects of this story, the depth of Hersh's reports proved both damning and shocking, contributing to a public backlash against both Abu Ghraib and the war itself.
The Abu Ghraib stories were in line with Hersh's reputation as one of the most respected investigative reporters alive. That reputation goes back to 1969, when Hersh uncovered the My Lai massacre, in which American troops killed hundreds of Vietnamese civilians. He later broke elements of the Watergate story while working for the New York Times.
In recent years, however, Hersh has appeared increasingly to have gone off the rails. His stories, often alleging vast and shadowy conspiracies, have made startling — and often internally inconsistent — accusations, based on little or no proof beyond a handful of anonymous "officials."
Supporters of Hersh will often point to his earlier stories in defense of his more recent work, saying that we should trust his sources and not dismiss his reporting so easily. Fair enough. But Hersh's stories on Abu Ghraib or My Lai or Watergate were sourced with documented evidence (in the case of Abu Ghraib, a damning internal military report) and interviews with first-hand participants.
For his bin Laden story, however, he has no documented evidence, and his sources are limited to a couple of "consultants," one "retired official with knowledge," and a Pakistani spymaster who left that world 23 years ago. If Hersh still has his once-famous connections in the American intelligence world, they do not show up here.
Similarly, Hersh's earlier blockbusters were all quickly confirmed by dozens of independent reports and mountains of physical proof. That's how such exposés typically work: the first glint of sunshine brings a rush of attention, which uncovers more evidence and encourages more sources to come forward, until the truth is incontrovertible.
That is not how things have gone with Hersh's newer and more conspiratorial stories. Rather, they have tended to remain all alone in their claims, and at times have been debunked. This is not, in other words, the first time.
The growing list of conspiracy theories
The first hints came in the latter years of the Bush administration, when Hersh reported repeatedly that the US was on the verging of striking Iran. These included reports stating that the US might even bomb Iran with a nuclear warhead, and later that the administration had considered using US special forces disguised as Iranians to launch a "false flag" attack as a premise for war.
These reports seemed a bit far-fetched, particularly since Hersh kept predicting a strike that never came. And, troublingly, they were often sourced to perhaps one or two anonymous "consultants" or "former officials" who were said to "have knowledge" of high-level discussions.
The Iran stories were difficult to accept on anything much more than faith. How do you prove that Dick Cheney never had a meeting in his office where someone verbally proposed pinning a false flag attack on Iran? You can't. In any case, Hersh had a long record of excellence, and who was going to doubt Cheney's capacity for hawkishness?
The moment when a lot of journalists started to question whether Hersh had veered from investigative reporting into something else came in January 2011. That month, he spoke at Georgetown University's branch campus in Qatar, where he gave a bizarre and rambling address alleging that top military and special forces leaders "are all members of, or at least supporters of, Knights of Malta ... many of them are members of Opus Dei." He suggested that they belong to a network first formed by former Vice President Dick Cheney that is steering US foreign policy toward an agenda of bringing Christianity to the Middle East.
They do see what they’re doing — and this is not an atypical attitude among some military — it’s a crusade, literally. They see themselves as the protectors of the Christians. They’re protecting them from the Muslims [as in] the 13th century. And this is their function.
... That’s the attitude. "We’re gonna change mosques into cathedrals." That’s an attitude that pervades, I’m here to say, a large percentage of the Joint Special Operations Command.
As Blake Hounshell pointed out at the time, there is no evidence for any of this, many of the US military leaders that Hersh named are known as personally liberal and not outwardly religious, and in any case both Opus Dei and Knights of Malta are Catholic service organizations very different from the shadowy forces portrayed in Dan Brown novels.
The next year, in 2012, Hersh reported in the New Yorker that the Bush administration had secretly armed and funded an Iranian terrorist group known as the MEK in 2005. Two sources, neither with direct knowledge, told Hersh that American special forces had flown the Iranians all the way to Nevada to train at a base there. This detail was both spectacular and puzzling: the US has bases throughout the world, including several in the Middle East; why bring terrorists to Nevada?
To be clear, the story was never specifically discredited, but neither has it ever been confirmed by any subsequent investigations into Bush-era national security policy, of which there have been many. His story was greeted skeptically by many reporters and analysts. Hersh is still employed by the New Yorker, but he has not written an investigative piece for the magazine since.
The Syria chemical weapons story
A UN chemical weapons inspector in Ghouta, Syria (Ammar al-Arbini/AFP/Getty)
Since the 2012 MEK story, Hersh has published his primary investigative work in the London Review of Books.
Two of these articles have focused at great length on the August 2013 chemical weapons attack in Ghouta, Syria, that killed hundreds of civilians. An extensive UN report, while barred from formally assigning responsibility, pointed out that the chemical weapons were delivered by munitions only used by the Syrian military, and had been fired from an area entirely controlled by Syrian military forces. Independent investigations by human rights groups pointed the finger at forces loyal to Syrian leader Bashar al-Assad. So did the US government.
Hersh, in his two articles, states that this is all false. In December 2013, he claimed that the Obama administration, seeking to justify its threat to strike Syria in retaliation, had willingly downplayed or ignored evidence that the chemical weapons had in fact been launched by the al-Qaeda franchise Jabat al-Nusra. He cited a handful of anonymous (and, strangely, often-retired) "officials" who warned of a "deliberate manipulation of intelligence" and compared Ghouta to the 1964 Gulf of Tonkin incident used to justify the US escalation in Vietnam.
Then, in April 2014, Hersh came out with a different story: the government of Turkey, he stated, had orchestrated the Ghouta chemical weapons attack with Jabhat al-Nusra as a false flag operation. Assad was innocent. Turkey and the al-Qaeda branch had cooked up the plan, intending that the attack would be blamed on the Syrian government, thus leading the United States to attack Syria. (You will notice, again, Hersh's preoccupation with false flag operations.)
The accusation of a Turkish-jihadist conspiracy to lure the US into war with Syria seemed stunning — and, to many, outlandish. Could it be true? No independent investigation has yet confirmed it, and the story has been exhaustively and repeatedly debunked, including by Eliot Higgins and Dan Kaszeta, two respected analysts who focus on small arms and chemical weapons in Syria.
As time goes on, Hersh's stories seem to become more spectacular, more thinly sourced, and more difficult to square with reality as we know it. Perhaps one day they will all be vindicated: the Opus Dei special forces cabal, the terrorist training in Nevada, the American plan to nuke Iran, the Turkish false flag in Syria, even the American-Pakistani bin Laden ruse.
Maybe there really is a vast shadow world of complex and diabolical conspiracies, executed brilliantly by international networks of government masterminds. And maybe Hersh and his handful of anonymous former senior officials really are alone in glimpsing this world and its terrifying secrets. Or maybe there's a simpler explanation.
Thoughts? I definitely would have put The Incredible Hulk at the bottom. I might have even put a few non-marvel movies in this list just to shove the Hulk movie further down.
Now that Ant-Man has been in theaters a few days, it's time to answer that perpetual question: which Marvel Studios movie is best?
Alex Abad-Santos and Todd VanDerWerff each ranked all 12 films in the studio's roster, then tallied their results to arrive at this 100 percent definitive list. If you disagree, you obviously have a different definition of the word "definitive" than they do. But that's okay. We can all share this planet together.
Here's every Marvel movie, ranked from worst to best.
Iron Man 2 suffers greatly from having to serve too many masters. It wants to be another fun-loving Iron Man (Robert Downey Jr.) tale, but it's also working diligently to set up the larger Marvel Cinematic Universe.
This was Marvel's first attempt at a film that would serve as a prelude to even bigger things to come farther down the road, and it was clear the studio hadn't quite figured out what it was doing in that regard. It's the only outright bad movie Marvel Studios has made. Mickey Rourke is weirdly fun as Whiplash, though.
Best moment: Whiplash attacks Tony Stark on a racetrack. There aren't a lot of great sequences in this film, but this one has a savagery to it that's worth seeing.
The Incredible Hulk is openly boring. Bruce Banner (Edward Norton) spends most of its run time trying to make sure his heart rate doesn't surpass a certain threshold. In many scenes, Norton simply looks blankly at a number that's increasing or decreasing. It's like Speed, but the opposite.
It doesn't make for compelling cinema, and while the movie does feature lots of tanks and smashing, it isn't even a good action film. It says a lot that Marvel hasn't made another Hulk-centric movie since this one, yet we're getting an Ant-Man flick this summer.
Best moment: In the chase scene through Brazil, Banner's cover is blown, and government special ops pursue him through a winding, maze-like town where the laws of gravity seemingly don't apply.
Marvel's "phase two" started off shakily, as the studio tried to follow up The Avengers with new solo films for Iron Man and Thor. Between the two, Thor: The Dark World suffers most for feeling like a completely generic, fill-in-the-blank take on a Marvel movie. It's largely devoid of personality, and its biggest moment is quickly undone by the end of the film.
Still, it's a chance to watch Tom Hiddleston play the trickster Loki, which is always worth seeing. For that alone, it escapes the absolute lowest reaches of this list.
Best moment: Loki and Thor head into another world on a desperate suicide mission. It's the one time the film feels like its characters actually want something.
Thor marked a change of pace for Marvel, which had found success (at the time) by leaning into the story of Tony Stark and his irreverent worldview. Thor is more staid, with director Kenneth Branagh loading up on majestic monologues and poetic storytelling.
The movie is also a departure from Iron Man in that it's more about the villain, Loki. It's Marvel's first movie where the villain boasts the charisma that characters like Magneto and the Joker have. Sure, Thor's redemption story is fun, and it's cool to see his friends help him out. But, really, this movie lives because of Loki's sinister spirit.
Best moment: Thor smashes the Bifröstto bits to save a planet full of frost giants. He's doing an incredibly noble thing, but he's also destroying the only way for him to return to the love of his life.
This one prompted the most dissension in our rankings, with Todd placing it relatively high and Alex placing it near the bottom.
There are good reasons for both arguments. The middle section of this movie — which is basically a buddy comedy about Tony Stark and a little kid — is as loose and freewheeling as anything Marvel has made. But the actual story is horribly bland, with a third act that struggles to tie everything together. (Come to think of it, lots of Marvel movies are saddled with undistinguished endings.)
Still, there's a lot of charm here, and Downey is as good as he's been playing this character, his way with a wisecrack carrying even the most dour of scenes.
Best moment: This is cheating, but anytime Tony and the kid are on screen together is absolute gold.
Though Marvel fans' enthusiasm has been muted for this one (and its opening-weekend box office earnings were a bit tepid), director Peyton Reed's romp through worlds both human- and insect-sized proves to be a heck of a lot of fun. It doesn't hurt that funnyman Paul Rudd plays the lead, or that the film ends with its best sequence, a big superhero battle that takes place entirely inside a little girl's bedroom.
Ant-Man underscores just how much Marvel has struggled with its women characters (with its female lead, played by Evangeline Lilly, desperately wanting to join the action and being stopped by men at every turn), and its villain is one of the worst in the Marvel canon, which is saying something. But at its best, Ant-Man is a rollicking good time.
Best moment: That final fight is everything you could hope for from a movie where big things get small and small things get big.
How much can mood carry a movie? The actual story of Captain America lurches a bit from set piece to set piece, and its third act — like so many of Marvel's third acts — is a mess.
But that's not why you watch Captain America. You watch it because the movie so perfectly captures its World War II milieu, because it's so different from any other superhero movie out there. You watch it because Chris Evans is as good as any actor since Christopher Reeve at capturing simple goodness and purity of spirit. And finally, you watch it because Hayley Atwell's Peggy Carter makes a very good case for being the best female character in the Marvel Cinematic Universe so far, and she and Evans have terrific chemistry.
Best moment: Steve Rogers goes on tour to promote war bonds as Captain America, in a sequence that's everything this movie does well — particularly the '40s period trappings — in a nutshell.
Guardians was a cinematic heat check for Marvel. Could the studio take a group of relatively obscure, space-traveling superheroes and make a) an enjoyable movie, and b) a hugely successful one at that?
It could, and it did. Propped up by a winsome performance from Chris Pratt, the movie was a breath of fresh air in a sour summer blockbuster season. Marvel vaulted viewers into the cosmos, far away from the world of Tony Stark, the Avengers, and humankind, to a place where talking trees, humanoid raccoons, and master assassins are the norm.
Best moment: The Nova Corps try, in vain, to stop the Dark Aster and save the day.
Avengers: Age of Ultron was never going to have the same crackle as its predecessor. The original just set expectations too high. But imagine if the first Avengers flick didn't exist; we'd be talking about the opening scene of Age of Ultron as one of the best action sequences in years. Because it appears in the sequel to The Avengers, it's the standard, not the exception.
What Age of Ultron does better than its older sibling is confidently stick to and distill a worldview. Humans are beautiful, damaged, and ultimately temporary creatures, the film makes known. And the film's focus on the Scarlet Witch (Elizabeth Olsen) and Hawkeye (Jeremy Renner) conveys this message beautifully.
Best moment: The final battle scene featuring the Avengers working in unison to protect the country of Sokovia.
In some ways, Iron Man earns lots of points for just how different it was when it came out in 2008. It wasn't centered on a character everybody already knew — as was the case with movies about Batman, Superman, and Spider-Man. It was an opening gambit in building a massive franchise, centered on more than just this one character. And it brimmed with snarky brilliance, all thanks to Downey's sarcastic performance as the man in the metal suit.
But Iron Man also possesses a surprising amount of storytelling ingenuity. It's about a man with a literal broken heart who must figure out how to make it whole again, and who is tricked into becoming a better person in the process. This is smart, wickedly fun popcorn filmmaking.
Best moment: This movie is full of them, but there may be none as great as Tony's closing press conference.
The Winter Soldier is a strange creature in Marvel's lineup. It's both a deeply personal film and one built around a huge tectonic shift for the Marvel universe. And the film does both so well.
The chemistry between Steve Rogers and Black Widow (Scarlett Johansson) carries the story. Steve, a good company man, realizes the men he's been saying "yes" to are HYDRA double agents. For Black Widow, who was taught to never let anyone get close to her, the one thing she trusted is sullied and corrupted.
The two have to find a place where they can start over. Throw in the return of Rogers's childhood friend Bucky Barnes (Sebastian Stan) as an unstoppable killing machine, and you've got yourself arguably the best movie Marvel has ever made.
Best moment: Captain America gets stuck in a stopped elevator full of double agents, resulting in a thrilling close-quarters action sequence.
In terms of thematic ambition, both the sequel to this film and The Winter Soldier top it. In terms of importance to Marvel's business strategy, Iron Man stands above it, as well. But there is perhaps no movie that perfectly captures everything Marvel does well (when it's doing things well) as The Avengers.
Just the idea of sandwiching all of Marvel's biggest heroes (plus newly introduced Hawkeye) into one film should have been improbable madness, but in the hands of director and writer Joss Whedon it somehow paid off. Big, pulpy, and fun, this is the movie all comic book films are aspiring to be now — for better or worse.
Best moment: This is the rare Marvel movie in which the final fight sequence is really worth it. The whole third act is terrific fun.
From July 15 to September 15, a large body of American military personnel will sweep through the Southwestern United States to conduct Jade Helm 15, which, depending on whom you ask, is either an unusually large training exercise or a plot to shred the Constitution and place Texas under martial law.
BREAKING!! Jade Helm 15 Is Martial Law in The USA, Russia To Arm Insurgents In The USA! https://t.co/bg7DjttCRW
As far as conspiracy theories go, it's not especially juicy. But it's gained legs because Texas Republican politicians have been curiously reluctant to actually say that the US isn't attempting a military takeover of Texas. Instead, Texas Governor Greg Abbott ordered the State Guard* to monitor the exercise, while Ted Cruz reached out to the Pentagon seeking more details. Each politician who goes fuzzy on Jade Helm further fans the flames of in-state paranoia and out-of-state media rubbernecking, driving this sideshow story deeper into the national spotlight.
What is Jade Helm 15?
It sounds like a Magic: The Gathering card or a Dungeons & Dragons artifact, but Jade Helm 15 is what the Defense Department calls a realistic military training (RMT) exercise. According to the Pentagon, American special operations forces will do some make-believe counterinsurgency in the Southwestern United States. The scenario planning includes this slide, which, if you are reading it very literally and completely out of context, could be construed as an effort to label the conservative states of Utah and Texas as hostile territory primed for a military takeover.
Jade Helm 15. (DOD)
Related to some of the conspiracy theorizing is that hostile territory is colored in red and friendly territory is in blue. In military exercises it's convention to label the hostile force the red team; this convention, by coincidence, lines up with the post-2000 convention of labeling Republican-held states as red and Democratic-held ones as blue, and that's helped fan the flames of paranoia about President Obama trying to occupy Texas. Even Chuck Norris is worried.
What are some versions of the conspiracy theories around Jade Helm?
Unfortunately, the nature of conspiracy theories is that they don't always exist in canonical form. The funniest version of the Jade Helm conspiracy comes from the website All News Pipeline, which connected the dots between Jade Helm and the closure of several Texas Walmarts to ask, "Will these massive stores soon be used as 'food distribution centers' and to house the headquarters of invading troops from China, here to disarm Americans one by one as promised by Michelle Obama to the Chinese prior to Obama leaving the White House?"
Ahiza Garcia of TPM obtained an official denial from Walmart that the store closures were related to an imminent military takeover, but of course that's what you would expect them to say.
Alex Jones's Infowars has walked a tight line on the story, eager to attract the attention of the conspiracy-minded with heavy Jade Helm coverage while also being clear to add disclaimers like, "That is not to say that a military takeover is imminent." Rather, Jones's milder version of the theory is that Jade Helm basically is a training exercise, just a training exercise whose purpose is to practice a military takeover of Texas.
How did this become a national news story?
It's basically Texas Governor Greg Abbott's fault. Internet conspiracy theories are fun, but a little commonplace. Things took a turn on April 27 when a crowd of about 150 people turned up to a county commissioners' meeting in Bastrop County, southeast of Austin, full of Jade Helm concerns.
The next day, Governor Abbott sought to put those fears to rest without wanting to sound dismissive of his constituents' anti-Obama paranoia. Consequently, he wrote a letter to the Texas State Guard requesting that they monitor the proceedings, because "it is important that Texans know their safety, constitutional rights, private property rights and civil liberties will not be infringed." This managed to elevate the level of attention on the issue, to validate the conspiracy theorists, and to give bored reporters the opportunity to ask other Texas politicians to weigh in.
That's how we got Senator Ted Cruz asking the Pentagon for reassurances. (The Pentagon's official line is that they are not planning a takeover, but again, that's what you would expect them to say.)
But it took Rep. Louie Gohmert to really kick things up to a level of gross irresponsibility. In a statement on the matter he says he "certainly can understand" the Jade Helm worries, and casts blame for the matter not on conspiracy theorists but on the military and the Obama administration:
Once I observed the map depicting ‘hostile,' ‘permissive,' and ‘uncertain' states and locations, I was rather appalled that the hostile areas amazingly have a Republican majority, ‘cling to their guns and religion,' and believe in the sanctity of the United States Constitution. When the federal government begins, even in practice, games or exercises, to consider any U.S. city or state in 'hostile' control and trying to retake it, the message becomes extremely calloused and suspicious.
Is Gohmert even characterizing the map accurately?
No. It is true that Utah and Texas are Republican-majority areas, but the map also depicts Southern California in red, solidly Republican Arizona in blue, and Democratic-leaning New Mexico in brown ("leaning hostile"). That's because it is not a map of partisan politics in the United States. It is a map of a military training exercise.
What larger point about American politics does this illustrate?
Ezra Klein recently wrote about new political science research into an interesting paradox — Americans are growing less likely to identify as Democrat or Republican, but more likely to exhibit highly partisan voting behavior. The reason, it turns out, is that partisanship is increasingly driven by hatred and fear of the other guy rather than love of your team.
Jade Helm illustrates this in two directions.
On the one hand, the willingness of Texas conservatives to believe that Obama wants to go beyond the whole job-killing tax hike agenda to actually facilitating a Chinese takeover of the US Southwest says a lot about where we are hatred-wise, and what some of us, at least, are willing to believe about the other side.
At the same time, perhaps more telling is the response of elected Texas Republicans who are showing they are aware, on some level, that their own standing in office depends more on their constituents' hatred of the other guys than on affection for themselves. Consequently, while they certainly don't want to embrace wild conspiracy theories, they want to signal solidarity for the over-the-top anti-Obama zeal that gives rise to them.
* Correction: An earlier version of this story said the letter was sent to the Texas National Guard; the Texas State Guard is a different institution.
Appropriately for a Google Map, roads get a lot of emphasis here. You can follow the Kingsroad down from Winterfell to King's Landing, like Ned Stark did back in season one, while also checking out the less familiar traffic arteries that connect the rest of the Seven Kingdoms. A higher-quality version of the map is available for purchase on Etsy.
If there’s one things dogs don’t like, it’s the Elizabethan collar, popularly known as the “cone of shame” or the “pet lamp-shade.” It’s a protective medical device that’s also commonly used by owners to discipline dogs when they do something bad.
For his new project titled Timeout, photographer Ty Foster shot a series of portraits of dogs that captures the sadness and embarrassment caused by wearing the cone of shame.
“For those of us who have pets I think we’ve all experienced the pain and hardships that accompany the plastic prison that is the cone and I really wanted to showcase those emotions and hardships in this series,” Foster tells PetaPixel.
“Timeout is a series about those hardships that are associated with the cone of shame – emotionally and physically,” he writes. “From being a hinderance at food time, giving the cat a ‘torment handicap’, and preventing the simplest pleasure of scratching behind your ear, Timeout showcases how dogs truly feel about the plastic prison that is the cone.”
Rather, he is the son — quite possibly trueborn — of the late Rhaegar Targaryen, who was Prince of Dragonstone and heir apparent to the Iron Throne before his death during the rebellion that overthrew the Targaryen dynasty. This means Jon is also Daenerys's nephew, and arguably the legitimate heir to the Iron Throne. His Stark-like appearance comes from his mother, Lyanna Stark, Ned's sister and the one true love of the late King Robert Baratheon.
This, at least, is an extremely popular theory among obsessive fans of George R. R. Martin's Song of Ice and Fire books — one that has been extensively discussed and documented in the fan forums online. It's also a theory that obviously has huge implications for the Game of Thrones television series, and could help explain why the most recent episode chewed up a fair amount of precious screen time with reminiscences of two people who've never appeared on the show.
Of course, nobody can be sure whether this theory — known as R+L=J in the fandom — is true. But it does explain several otherwise hard-to-grasp decisions Ned Stark makes in the first season. What's more, if it's true, it provides a plausible path for Jon to ascend to the Iron Throne, which thematically seems to be the direction the series is headed in.
Wait, who are all these people again?
The R+L=J theory involves crucial actions by several characters who haven't been seen since season one, and by other characters who have never been seen on screen.
These are the key players:
Jon Snow: One of the main characters of the series, introduced to the viewers and the world as the bastard son of Ned Stark, Lord of Winterfell, and an unknown woman. Currently serving as Lord Commander of the Night's Watch.
Ned Stark: At the beginning of the show he is Lord of Winterfell and Warden of the North. He is appointed Hand of the King by Robert Baratheon and, after King Robert's death, deposed from office by Cersei Lannister and executed at the behest of her son, the new king, Joffrey.
Robert Baratheon: The King of Westeros at the beginning of the series, he seized power before the show began by leading a rebellion against the Targaryen dynasty, whose last scion was the "Mad King" Aerys Targaryen. Robert is great friends with Ned, but they quarrel repeatedly over Robert's willingness to kill Targaryen children to bolster his claim to the throne.
Lyanna Stark:Ned's sister, who never appeared in the series. She was betrothed to Robert before the rebellion against the Targaryens, and years later, at the opening of the show, Robert still speaks of his love for her. According to the theory, Lyanna is Jon's real mother. She died during the rebellion, which was sparked by her kidnapping by Rhaegar Targaryen and the arbitrary and despotic rule of Rhaegar's father, the Mad King.
Rhaegar Targaryen: Rhaegar never appeared in the series, having died during the rebellion against his father the Mad King. According to the theory, Rhaegar is Jon Snow's real father. Unlike the Mad King, Rhaegar is generally well-regarded by those who knew him, but his decision to abduct Lyanna Stark was the downfall of the Targaryen dynasty. It united the powerful Stark and Baratheon families against the Targaryens, joined by the Houses Tully and Arryn that were linked to the Starks and Baratheons by marital and foster relationships.
Why do people believe R+L=J?
At a high level, R+L=J is compelling because it explains Ned Stark's enigmatic behavior vis a vis Jon.
The one thing we really know about Ned is that he puts a ton of stock in honor. Yet we are supposed to believe that this extremely honorable man fathered a bastard son, then brought him home to Winterfell, where the child's presence is a constant humiliation to a wife he genuinely loves, and that he then — for no clear reason — refuses to tell Jon who his mother is.
R+L=J transforms this from a dishonorable and weird sequence of events into an honorable one. Ned took possession of his sister's son, and claimed him as his own because had he admitted the truth, King Robert would have had the boy killed, lest his very existence undermine Robert's claim to the throne. Ned can't tell anyone who Jon's real father is, because the truth would be deadly.
In addition, close readers of the books have found a number of pieces of more specific textual evidence.
What's the detailed textual evidence for R+L=J?
A number of fragments in the books are cited as textual evidence for the theory:
Jon is said to closely resemble his "half-sister" Arya, who in turn is said to look very much like Lyanna. By contrast, the other Stark siblings are said to look more like their mother, Catelyn Tully.
At the very end of Robert's Rebellion, three members of the Kingsguard aren't guarding the king at all — they are guarding Lyanna Stark. That's a puzzling allocation of Targaryen forces, unless by guarding Lyanna they are also guarding an unborn son who is heir to the throne.
After Ned and his friend Howland Reed subdue the three Kingsguardsmen, they find Lyanna dying in a pool of blood. She asks Ned to promise her ... something ... which is not revealed in the text but which Ned recalls at a crucial moment before her death. If R+L≠J, then what was the promise, and why does it come up?
What's the evidence outside of the text?
Jon Snow's storyline is not exactly the most exciting part of the Game of Thrones narrative. Nevertheless, he's given many chapters in the books and a lot of screen time in the show. The audience is primed, in other words, to expect big things out of him. And the mysteries of Jon's parentage and Ned's promise to Lyanna are both classic Chekhov's gun material — why introduce any of this unless it's going to pay off somehow?
The promise to Lyanna could relate to any member of the Stark family, but whoever Jon's mother is, she's got to be someone significantly related to the endgame for Jon. R+L=J sets up the possibility that Jon will contend for the Iron Throne and/or possess useful and dramatically interesting Targaryen dragon powers.
A related extratextual issue is that the TV show necessarily cuts a lot of material from the books. That's often a good guide to which segments of the books are truly necessary to move the story forward, versus ones that simply serve a general world-building or theme-emphasizing purpose. King Robert visiting Lyanna's grave in Winterfell and talking about her survived the adaptation process.
Is this scene just a waste of time? Or did it make it into the television show because the character of Lyanna Stark is going to prove important by the end, thus making it necessary to introduce her to the TV audience, even if they are certain to forget her right away? Well, last night Baelish and Sansa revisited the crypt and talked about Lyanna again as a reminder. But for what?
Then in a separate scene we get an extended reflection on Rhaegar. These two clearly have some role to play in the rest of the narrative.
What are the broader implications of R+L=J?
Contemplating the R+L=J scenario is also a reminder that the vast majority of what we know — or "know" — about the recent history of Westeros amounts to history as written by the victors. The Starks, the Lannisters, and Renly and Stannis Baratheon all ultimately fought against the Targaryen dynasty. Daenarys was too young to have any recollection of the relevant events. House Tyrell fought on the Targaryen side of the war, but we haven't really heard their perspective on its outbreak.
In the victors' telling, the realm was beset not just by a Mad King but by a sudden and entirely irrational action on the part of his previously not-mad son, who for no reason at all kidnapped the daughter of one of the most prominent nobles in the land while she was betrothed to one of the other most prominent nobles.
But what if this is wrong?
What if Lyanna ran off with Rhaegar out of true love, despite her betrothal to Robert? That would change the narrative somewhat. What's more, though arranged marriages are certainly par for the course among the Westerosi nobility, there's no good reason for the Starks to have preferred a match with Robert Baratheon to one with the heir apparent to the Iron Throne.
Unless, that is, the intertwined network of houses Baratheon, Arryn, Stark, and Tully that ultimately brought down the Targaryens was conspiring to overthrow the ruling house since before the alleged abduction. This is the "Southron Ambitions" theory, which is much broader and less specifically grounded in the text than the core R+L=J theory.
According to Southron Ambitions, Mad King Aerys was much less paranoid (though no less brutal) than his "official" portrayal, and was combating a very genuine threat to his rule that existed long before the specific Lyanna crisis. At a minimum, Southron Ambitions posits a "just because you're paranoid doesn't mean they're not after you" view of Aerys's downfall.
So is R+L=J true?
Well, for starters, the whole idea that assertions about a fictional universe can be true or false raises some puzzling metaphysical issues. David Lewis's 1978 American Philosophical Quarterly article on the subject may be a good place to start if you're interested in that.
On a more banal level, the question is whether the fandom is accurately forecasting where Martin (or HBO, but this seems to be a question that's too fundamental to allow show/book divergence) is going with the story.
One possible issue is that Martin is of course aware of the R+L=J theory and has it within his power to change direction even if this was his original plan for the series. After all, it's clear from events like Ned Stark's execution and the Red Wedding that Martin likes to keep the audience off-balance.
On the other hand, both Martin and HBO's showrunners have repeatedly told the story that when David Benioff and Dan Weiss were pitching the adaptation, Martin tested their knowledge of the books by asking them to guess who Jon's mother was — and they got it right. That's a strong indication that whatever Martin's original plan was, it's still valid, and too central to his long-term plan to be changed.
The piano is one of those inventions that's hard to think of as an invention because it's just always been ... there. When you do think about someone actually inventing it, it's hard not to wonder: why haven't I heard of this person before? And why isn't his name plastered on every piano in existence?
Bartolomeo Cristofori, who celebrates his 360th birthday today, is generally credited with being the sole inventor of the piano. The fact that his name is largely forgotten is a reflection of his times, when a genius could be just another employee.
The piano eventually beat the harpsichord by solving its biggest problem
The first official record of the piano appears in 1700, though Cristofori may have been working on it for a couple of years before then. Cristofori's most recognizable piano dates later, to 1720. But more important than the date was the step forward the piano represented.
At the time, the harpsichord was the dominant keyboard instrument. The biggest problem was that it couldn't play notes with differing degrees of softness. To play a note, a tiny device called a plectrum plucked a string, and the note played. There wasn't an easy way to modify the sound and give it additional nuance. Though there were some hacks (and other instruments) that tried to fix the problem, they never worked well enough.
The piano was clearly indebted to the harpsichord — in early records, Cristofori called the piano an Arpicembalo, which means "harp-harpsichord," and he frequently worked on and invented other harpsichord-like devices. But the piano took one big step beyond that instrument by using a hammer instead of plucking a string. That allowed for a better modulation of volume thanks to its hammers and dampers, which could more artfully manipulate sound than the plucking motion of the harpsichord.
The earliest surviving piano is from 1721, and it's clear it was a transitional instrument: there are hints of the harpsichord in its sound. As the Metropolitan Museum of Art notes, it had a narrower range, thinner strings, and harder hammers than modern pianos, which are part of the reason it sounds a bit like a harpsichord.
But even then, it's obvious why the piano changed music forever:
Soon, the piano got its name. Cristofori also referred to his invention as "un cimbalo di cipresso di piano e forte" (a keyboard of cypress with soft and loud), and over time it was shortened to piano forte, and eventually just piano.
It's rare that such an old instrument has so clear an inventor and is so obviously a revelation. So why do we have to be reminded of Bartolomeo Cristofori's name? After all, there must be a reason pianos aren't called Cristoforis.
Court employment, centuries of improvement, and slow adoption all probably made Cristofori's name fade
The only portrait of Bartolomeo Cristofori. In the bottom right corner, it's possible to see what looks like a piano.
We may know so little about Cristofori because he was just a hired hand (albeit a well-respected one). As an employee of Ferdinando de' Medici, an Italian prince and member of the famous Italian family, Cristofori was hired to serve the court, not music alone.
As an employee of the Medicis, Cristofori was a cog in a royal machine. Though he was earnestly recruited to work for the Medicis, he was initially shoved into a workspace with about 100 other artisans (he complained about how loud it was). Ferdinando de' Medici encouraged Cristofori to innovate, but the inventor was also tasked with tuning and moving instruments, as well as restoring some old ones. Unlike musicians, who circulated royal courts and could become famous far beyond their borders, Cristofori was a local commodity. He wasn't seen as a revolutionary genius — rather, he was a talented tinkerer.
At the same time, without the Medicis Cristofori may never have been able to invent the piano. The royal family gave him a house to work in, space to experiment, and, eventually, his own workshop and a couple of assistants. As the wealth of the Medicis declined, Cristofori did sell some pianos on his own, but he didn't possess anything like a modern patent — other people were free to sell their own improvements on the instrument. He remained in the court until his death in 1731.
A portrait of Ferdinando de' Medici with his musicians. (Imagno/Getty Images)
The piano's relatively slow adoption may have stolen Cristofori's credit, as well. Even if an invention went "viral" in the 18th century, it still had to travel at a glacial 18th-century pace. Queen Maria Barbara de Braganza purchased five pianos of Cristofori's design, and after that the instrument slowly spread in elite circles. There were early objections to the piano — Johann Sebastian Bach thought it could use some tweaks — and even Mozart, born in 1756, played the harpsichord as a child. It probably lessened Cristofori's fame that his invention took 100 years to truly oust the harpsichord from elite musical circles.
Finally, there were a lot of improvements to the piano, and those improvements were crucial to its success. Organ builder Gottfried Silbermann added a sustain pedal, and he also boosted sales of the piano. Other inventors added materials better suited to the piano's unique abilities. Finally, composers eventually came around to the piano, which helped it replace the harpsichord as the premier musical instrument.
Though Cristofori was clearly the inventor of the piano, it's less clear exactly why he's forgotten outside of musical circles. It may be a combination of his employment, the piano's slow adoption, and the subsequent improvements. He wasn't famous when he was alive — that's the reason we only have one portrait of him — and he isn't particularly famous today. But in a way, that nuance is appropriate for an inventor who introduced new shades of sound to music. Cristofori's legacy isn't the sharp plucking of a harpsichord — it's a piano, playing still.
Frustrated by the number of potholes pockmarking his city streets, an anonymous man recently discovered a way to get the city to pay attention: penises. The man has been using industrial chalk to draw penises around each pothole, claiming the eyesores expedite the filling process, BBC reports.
"[The potholes] don't get filled. They'll be there for months," the artist, who calls himself Wanksy, told BBC's Newsbeat. "Suddenly you draw something amusing around it, everyone sees it and it either gets reported or fixed."
The town council, unsurprisingly, says the work is both unnecessary and obscene, claiming a penis frame will not get a pothole fixed any faster than usual. But the potholes are nonetheless getting filled:
Despite the best efforts of law enforcement to convince a Congressional subcommittee that technology firms actually need to weaken encryption in order to serve the public interest, lawmakers were not having it.
Daniel Conley, the district attorney in Suffolk County, Massachusetts, testified Wednesday before the committee that companies like Apple and Google were helping criminals by hardening encryption on their smartphones. He echoed previous statements by the recently-departed Attorney General, Eric Holder.
"In America, we often say that none of us is above the law," Conley wrote in his prepared testimony. "But when unaccountable corporate interests place crucial evidence beyond the legitimate reach of our courts, they are in fact placing those who rape, defraud, assault and even kill in a position of profound advantage over victims and society."
Combine Continuum with this, (and get some good hardware), and I might have a reason to switch to Windows Phone.
Much to the dismay of some viewers watching at home, Microsoft's BUILD developer conference today actually focused on technologies designed to benefit developers. However, some of the new developer technologies shown today may end up having profound impacts on Windows users. While Microsoft has never had any issues with making software available for Windows on the desktop, the same can't be said about Windows in the mobile space. Windows Phones and tablets have suffered from a lack of applications compared to their Android and iOS counterparts, and Microsoft hasn't been able to convince many developers to make Windows a priority for their mobile applications. Given this situation, Microsoft had to find another solution to the problem, and today at BUILD they showed what may very well be it.
The first big announcement was Project Astoria, which enables support for running Android applications programmed in Java or C++ on Windows 10 phones. During the keynote this was described as an "Android Subsystem" within Windows. The end result is that developers can bring their Android applications over to Windows 10 phones with minimal effort. There will still be issues with applications that link into Google Play services for features like Maps and location, but there are now far fewer hurdles for developers than there have been in the past. Microsoft demonstrated this during the keynote by showing the Choice Hotels application for Android running on a Windows 10 smartphone. The demo did run into a few issues, but it was still impressive to see.
What's even more remarkable is Microsoft's work to allow developers to use existing code from iOS applications programmed in Objective C to make Windows 10 applications. This new initiative is called Project Islandwood, and it allows developers can take their existing applications written in Objective C, have Visual Studio convert the Xcode project into a Visual Studio solution, and compile it for Windows 10. The demo shown on stage showed an application written for the iPad being compiled to run on Windows. Not only did it work well, but the application itself was not just a basic app. Apps using UIKit and Core Animation compile fine as Windows 10 applications, and it will be very interesting to see just how far this solution can go in bringing complicated applications over to Windows.
The demonstration during the keynote was a mathematics game which utilized the UIKit framework and Core Animation, and had very complication visual effects and animation. Despite this, the demo worked even more smoothly than the Android application demonstration, and even worked with input using the mouse. Microsoft also revealed that the ability to easily bring applications programmed in Objective C to Windows 10 is not something coming in the distant future, but is a technology that exists now and has already been put to use by game company King in bringing their Candy Crush Saga game to Windows Phone.
One important thing to note is that while Project Islandwood for iOS applications allows developers to create universal Windows apps, Project Astoria is strictly for bringing Android applications to Windows 10 phones.
These two announcements from Microsoft may end up being a game changer for Windows 10 applications on the desktop and more importantly on mobile. Developers still need to be convinced to focus on Windows, but if moving applications over from iOS and Android is as easy as Microsoft has claimed then it shouldn't be very difficult to get developers on board. Only time will tell how this ends up playing out.
blottsie writes: At a hearing in Washington, D.C., on Wednesday, the FBI endured outright hostility as both technical experts and members of Congress from both parties roundly criticized the law enforcement agency's desire to place so-called back doors into encryption technology. "Creating a technological backdoor just for good guys is technologically stupid," said Rep. Ted Lieu (D-Calif.), a Stanford University computer science graduate. "That's just stupid. Our founders understood that an Orwellian overreaching government is one of the most dangerous things this world could have," Lieu said.
Yesterday, as a result of the ongoing Baltimore protests, the Baltimore Orioles and the Chicago White Sox played in the first major league baseball game to not have spectators. The scenario made for a strange experience for everyone involved, and there was an unexpected side effect as well: loud shutter sounds from the photographers.
As you can see from the clip above, without the loud droning of fans in the background, the burst mode from photographers’ cameras became a prominent part of the audio.
Call it landscaping the penguin way: time-lapse footage from a colony of Antarctic Gentoo penguins appears to show the birds using their feces to melt snow in their breeding grounds. The images — captured by the University of Oxford's Penguin Watch initiative — show the snow piling up before the penguins arrive, ready to breed. They quickly blanket the area with what looks like mud (here's a clue: it's not mud) and lo, the snow begins to melt.
whatever's going on, the penguins aren't doing it on purpose
Scientists studying the footage say it's possible that the darker color of the poo is helping to melt the snow by absorbing extra heat — a process known as the albedo effect. "This is something we're testing at the moment," says Dr Tom...
Ok, this is totally amazing. Ever since the Ubuntu Edge tried to do something like this, I've been so excited about the idea of using your phone as a thin client. Continuum for Windows 10 phones will be a game changer.
Today Microsoft revealed a number of new features relating to their various platforms at their BUILD developer conference. One of the most interesting features shown was the Continuum feature of Windows 10 phones. Microsoft has previously shown off the ability for tablets to connect to larger screens and input peripherals to act as a computer, and they have now shown those same abilities working on a smartphone. This is possible because applications developed for Windows 10 will be universal applications that can scale from your phone, to your computer, to your television.
During the keynote a Windows 10 smartphone was shown connected to a large display via HDMI, as well as to a Bluetooth keyboard and mouse. This allowed the phone to essentially act as though it were a Windows 10 computer, with applications like PowerPoint and Excel scaling to use the same layout that you would see when running them on a normal desktop computer. This type of dynamic behavior extends from interface changes to input paradigm changes as well. Devices may change their preferred input mode or interface to suit the peripherals that are or are not attached to a device.
Continuum looks like it will be a very interesting feature. Users will have to wait some time to get their hands on it though, as it won't be available in the preview release of Windows 10 that is scheduled to come out tomorrow. Microsoft has created a short video to explain a bit more about Continuum on Windows 10 phones and the potential use cases that they see for it, and I've embedded that video above.
Well, looks like Rand Paul just lost all respect I had for him.
SonicSpike writes with news about another bump in the road for net neutrality. U.S. Senator Rand Paul, a Republican presidential hopeful, on Wednesday introduced a resolution to block new regulations on Internet service providers, saying they would 'wrap the Internet in red tape.' The 'net neutrality' rules, which are slated to take effect in June, are backed by the Obama administration and were passed by the Democratic majority of the Federal Communications Commission in February. AT&T Inc and wireless and cable trade associations are challenging them in court. Paul's resolution, if adopted, would allow the Senate to fast-track a vote to establish that Congress disapproves of the FCC's new rules and moves to nullify them.
An anonymous reader writes: Someone mistakenly published earnings information on a Nasdaq-run investor relations page for Twitter before the company officially released the news and it sent the stock into a tailspin. Initially the earnings statement went unnoticed, but soon a Tweet with the results got a lot of attention. The stock lost more than $8 billion at one point as news spread. "We asked the New York Stock Exchange to halt trading once we discovered our Q1 numbers were out, and we published our results as soon as possible thereafter," said Twitter's senior director for investor relations, Krista Bessinger. "Selerity, who provided the initial tweets with our results, informed us that earnings release was available on our Investor Relations site before the close of market. Nasdaq hosts and manages our IR website, and we explicitly instructed them not to release our results until after the market close and only upon our specific instructions, which is consistent with prior quarters. We are continuing to investigate with them exactly what occurred."
Photographer Justin Black captured this incredible photo of a jaguar attacking a caiman in the wetlands of Brazil.
Black was leading a group of photographs on a photo expedition through the region when he happened to witness the hunt. It was an eight-foot-long Yacare caiman being attacked by a 290-pound male jaguar that’s known to local biologists as “Mick Jaguar.”
Here’s a sequence of photos Black shot that shows how the whole thing went down:
“The caiman weighed around 150lbs., but Mick appeared to handle it as easily as a big dog with a chew toy,” Black writes. “He’s an amazing animal, and we all felt privileged to have be fortunate enough to witness that spectacular display of power, grace, and hunting prowess.”
“After this experience of a lifetime, we had a new appreciation for each jaguar we were fortunate enough to see.”
The whole thing was also captured in a video that was shared by National Geographic:
There was a time, I vaguely recall, when the notion of dropping a prized gadget into a blender and flipping the switch was interesting — even a little provocative, perhaps. It helped that the stunt was orchestrated by an affable older gentleman, Blendtec founder Tom Dickson, who was using the deliberately silly schtick to advertise the potency and durability of his blenders. Each video made the rounds on the blogs, and you moved on.
But that was a very, very long time ago. The dude blended an iPod in 2006. We get it; circuits and metal are effortlessly turned to a toxic powder when you put them in contact with a blade rotating at several thousand revolutions per minute. Besides being an enormous waste, I would venture that blending an...
"It is the rear-guard action of people who believe that just because other people are coming in with different views, different interests, and different concerns, and aren't willing to naturally accept the previous order of things, that all doom and terror and fire from the skies is happening," John Scalzi tells me.
We're talking about the most recent skirmish in a larger war, a war for the soul of nerd culture. This one involves the Hugo Awards, a literary award ceremony, but it's the latest iteration of a new battle that already feels ancient.
Scalzi is an award-winning, best-selling novelist, the author of enormously entertaining science fiction novels like Old Man's War and Redshirts. If you've read his popular blog, you'll know he's a passionate individual, and he seems incredibly frustrated by those in the science fiction and fantasy community who have launched this "rear-guard action."
Yet if you talk to the people on the other side — who have dubbed themselves the "Sad Puppies" — they will point to Scalzi as part of a larger problem within the community. Yeah, their rhetoric might be a little over the top, but they're the ones saving the industry from political correctness and the "literati."
These Sad Puppies are, depending on whom you ask, the saviors of the Hugo Awards from mediocre books, a bunch of bigots, or part of a cynically motivated awards grab.
Tell me what happened in 100 words or less
Science fiction's prestigious Hugo Awards are chosen by a fan vote at both the nominee and winner stages. However, the number of people who vote at the nominee stage is small enough that a concerted effort by a small group can have disproportionate payoff.
That's what happened with two groups purporting to support traditional space opera science fiction and politically conservative authors, who initially made up 72 percent of all nominees. Once this happened, many accused both slates of supporting racist, sexist sentiments. These voters say — accurately — that they followed the rules.
Who are the Sad Puppies?
The term Sad Puppies is used interchangeably to refer to a group of Hugo voters and a specific slate of works advanced by those awards. It's also often — inaccurately — been used to refer to a completely separate campaign. We'll get to the other campaign — the Rabid Puppies — in a moment.
Those involved in Sad Puppies will tell you their primary motives are, first and foremost, to celebrate science fiction works that return the genre to its space opera roots and, second, to celebrate works by politically conservative authors, whose views may sit outside the mainstream of the current community.
A story often pointed to as an example of why the Sad Puppies exist is Rachel Swirsky's Hugo-nominated "If You Were a Dinosaur, My Love." It's a beautiful piece of writing, but the Puppies argue it's not science fiction enough. It's written in the conditional tense, but that doesn't equal a "speculative fiction" story, say the Puppies.
Brad Torgersen, a science fiction author and Hugo nominee who organized the Sad Puppies voting slate this year, says a tiny clique has taken over the Hugos.
"They don’t want the Hugos to be about 'popular' as much as they want the Hugos to be about 'important,' which is an entirely different mindset," Torgersen says of the science fiction publishing community at large. "Especially when you have the arrival [in the last 10 years] of social justice agitators who are demanding that books and stories now be recognized and anointed due to the fact the author [or the characters] meet a given set of minority demographics."
And if you saw that term "social justice agitators" and immediately pinged on Gamergate's sworn enemies — the social justice warriors — you're starting to see where this is all headed.
The Puppies point to an annual blog post Scalzi does asking professionals in the field to cite Hugo-worthy works as evidence of the hidden cabal running the Hugos.
The Puppies claim they're doing a version of this. They just take it one step further.
What's that next step?
The Puppies created a "voting slate" — meaning Torgersen compiled a list of titles to vote for from reader suggestions. The slate was essentially a way to completely fill one's nominating ballot with Puppies-approved nominees. In some ways, the Puppies are the equivalent of a political party — if you support our cause, this is how you will vote.
This proved wildly successful. The Sad Puppies recommended 60 nominees for the Hugos, and 51 of those were on the initial ballot. The Rabid Puppies recommended 67 nominees, with 58 on the initial ballot. (All data is via Mike Glyer's excellent fan publication File 770, which has top-notch coverage of the controversy, if you want a deep dive.)
Larry Correia's novel Monster Hunter Legion was the impetus for Sad Puppies. (Baen Books)
Several days later, the Hugos ruled one nominee from each slate ineligible, and three separate nominees have opted to withdraw their names from the ballots because of their connection to one of the two Puppy slates. (One of those nominees remains on the final ballot, because the complaint was registered too late.)
The two slates were so stunningly effective for a couple of reasons.
The first is that it's not so hard to game the Hugo list. In most categories, it's possible to land on the final list from less than 150 votes on the nominating ballot. The pool of voters — which is anyone who purchases a membership to the science fiction convention Worldcon — is so small at the nominating stage that essentially any coordinated effort stands a good chance at success.
The second reason is that the Puppies used politically radicalized language to promote themselves. If the Puppies had simply said, "Here are some things we liked; please vote for them," the campaign wouldn't have been as successful. By framing themselves as a force warring against political correctness, the Sad Puppies were able to attract attention from others expressing similar points within nerd culture.
This all sounds kinda academic. Why are people pissed off?
To be sure, there are people who are really mad about the very idea of voting slates at the Hugos (including George R. R. Martin, whose books formed the basis for Game of Thrones). And there are people who don't like the politically reactionary bent of much of the Puppies campaign.
But if you really want to get down to it, what people are upset about is the fact that the two Puppies slates nominated some people who have said some things that have proved hugely controversial — and that's putting it mildly.
The foremost beneficiary of the two Puppies slates is John C. Wright, who received six separate nominations for his work on the initial ballot. One of those nominations was eventually disqualified, as a version of the story had been published outside of the calendar year of 2014. But five nominations in one year is still huge.
It's also, according to some Puppies critics, not exactly a great endorsement of the slate's aims as a whole.
"If your argument is that there's a vibrant field of conservative (politically, stylistically, or both) SF being written that isn't being recognized by the Hugos, then the fact that fully one-third of the works of fiction you got onto the ballot are by the same person isn't a strong point in support of it," 2014 Hugo nominee Abigail Nussbaum told me.
But anger with Wright runs deeper than finding his popularity with the Puppies baffling. It, instead, stems from the fact that he has written several anti-gay posts in the last decade (most of which have been scrubbed from the internet), most recently calling a lesbian couple in the TV series The Legend of Korra a "sexual aberration."
The Puppies defend him as an unsung genius — and one whose work should be supported regardless of what you think of his political views.
John C. Wright's essay collection Transhuman and Subhuman is nominated for a Hugo. (Castalia House)
"Wright’s written some of the deepest, most philosophical and amazing science fiction of the new century. He is wholly able to stand with the greats in the field at this time. All Sad Puppies (and apparently Rabid Puppies) did was aim the spotlight in John’s direction," Torgersen told me.
Should Wright get a pass for his worst comments if his writing is good enough? As Scalzi points out, that's an inherently privileged position to take.
"I'm willing to forgive people a lot of their personal views that aren't related to their art. But then again, I'm a straight white guy," he told me. "If someone's sticking a middle finger in your face and saying, 'You don't exist,' then it's difficult to make an argument that you can treat their art without considering that factor."
The irony here is that the Sad Puppies made an effort to nominate women, people of color, and LGBT writers on their slate. This was the third Sad Puppies slate, and in assembling it the group seemed to at least nominally address former criticisms about its lack of diversity.
Said Kary English, one of the women on the 2015 Sad Puppies slate:
I said yes to Sad Puppies this year because I saw the seeds of change. I saw an organizer who wanted to broaden the slate. Sad Puppies includes greater political variety, more women, more people of color and more non-het writers than it ever has before, and I wanted to support that growth.
But the movement is still fundamentally about defining what science fiction is by excluding all who don't fit into a narrow template. Even without the accusations of bigotry, you're left with a belief that the only true sci-fi writers are those who craft pulpier stories, often involving space exploration.
Thus, the Sad Puppies have become essentially what they campaigned against — an organization that limits the definition of what genre fiction can be.
But that's not what people are really mad about.
"I will say that with the Sad Puppies, a number of the nominees are not overtly bigoted," Hugo-nominated novelist N. K. Jemisin told me. "My general sense is that the Sad Puppies effectively have become a front for the Rabid Puppies."
So what are the Rabid Puppies?
No figure drives more controversy in this year's Hugo nominee list than Vox Day, the lead editor of publisher Castalia House and a three-time Hugo nominee (with two of those nominations on this year's slate).
The logo of the Rabid Puppies. (Vox Day)
Almost all of the criticisms of the Rabid Puppies come back to Day (the professional name of Theodore Beale). To call him a controversial figure is putting it mildly. He has, at various points, suggested women should not vote, called Jemisin half-savage, and been hugely involved in other reactionary movements, including Gamergate.
Day's response when I ask him if he understands why dislike of his views drives so much of the criticism of both Puppies slates is to say that he himself is politically open-minded, so he doesn't understand why others can't be, as well.
"Dismissing great writers because you don't like my beliefs or opinions is ludicrous. I have repeatedly asserted that China Miéville is one of the three best science fiction writers alive, and he's a Trotsky-Leninist who belongs to a revolutionary socialist organization. I'm a libertarian. So would you dismiss Miéville because I think he's a great SF writer despite his ideologically insane views?" he told me.
Markos Kloos withdrew his novel Lines of Departure from Hugo consideration. (47North)
Initially, Day's Rabid Puppies campaign actually proved slightly more successful than Sad Puppies. Yet when Markos Kloos withdrew his nomination for Best Novel, he said explicitly that he was doing so because he didn't want to be associated with Rabid Puppies.
Both Torgersen and Day readily say neither campaign had anything to do with the other.
"Brad Torgersen made the calls this year for Sad Puppies 3, while Rabid Puppies was solely my call. The reason for the two separate lists of recommendations is because I was falsely accused of having gamed the system last year," Day told me. (Sad Puppies founder Larry Correia placed Day on the Sad Puppies 2 slate in 2014.)
For the most part, people who are mad at the Sad Puppies on grounds of overt racism or sexism are mad at the Rabid Puppies.
Are there more cynical reads of this situation than even that?
Sure. You could read this as an elaborate career move.
Day's publishing house, Castalia House, received nine total Hugo nominations, in addition to the two Day received for editing. This is the foremost piece of evidence for the Puppies slates as cynical awards grabs.
"Many of their supporters totally believe they’re part of a sincere crusade to purge SF of evil liberalism and stick it to the 'SJWs' [social justice warriors], but as [Guardian writer Damien Walter] observed, that only makes them useful tools for the organizers’ actual agendas," Hugo-winning editor Patrick Nielsen Hayden told me.
Wait, wait, wait. I just realized. Why do they call themselves "Sad Puppies"?
It all stems from Correia's 2013 campaign for Best Novel at the Hugos, for the book Monster Hunter Legion. In the second post of this campaign, he composed a spoof of the ASPCA ad campaign that features sad Sarah McLachlan music over footage of animals in shelters. In Correia's version, he was the sad puppy — the pulp writer who would never receive recognition unless you did your best and voted for him.
Do the Sad Puppies have a legitimate beef with the Hugos?
Not really.
In recent years, the Hugos have definitely taken a turn away from traditional pulp sci-fi toward more literary works. But science fiction has always had pulp and literary writers, and the latter crowd has traditionally been more successful at award ceremonies — just as it has with the Pulitzers or National Book Awards, where Philip Roth is more likely to win than Stephen King.
The Puppies' claim here also ignores that the science-fiction community has traditionally backed all sorts of authors, of all sorts of political stripes.
"What’s actually notable about the SF subculture is its heterodoxy, expressed by things like the Libertarian Futurist Society sometimes giving their Prometheus Award to the Scottish socialist SF writer Ken MacLeod, or MacLeod himself talking about the importance to him of right/libertarian writers like Robert Heinlein and Poul Anderson. Robust conservative voices have always been part of the SF&F conversation," Nielsen Hayden told me.
John Scalzi's Redshirts is a recent Hugo winner that has irritated the Puppies slates. (Tor Books)
The Puppies also insist there's an unstated secret cabal running things behind the scenes of the Hugos, and that the only way to fight it is to push back against it.
Said Torgersen again: "Sad Puppies was necessary because everywhere I went in the field (as a young professional) I heard the same gripes: that the same predictable names always popped up in the same categories, that other names were always left out in the cold, or in the Hugo Awards blind spots, and that the way to win a Hugo was not to write a fantastic story or book, it was to buddy up with and schmooze the right people."
Do the same names pop up from time to time? Yes, but not as much as, say, Meryl Streep seems to have a default Oscar nomination every new year. The Hugos frequently work in new blood, right alongside fan favorites like Scalzi or Martin.
As author Eric Flint points out, the science fiction world is so much larger and so different from the one that gave birth to the Hugos in 1953. Is it any wonder voters gravitate toward familiar names?
"It's not about conservatives or particular genres in award ceremonies. It's about being angry at people they don't like, getting awards that they don't believe they deserve, for whatever reason. It really boils down to that," Scalzi told me.
What has the fallout been?
The mildest fallout has been the two disqualifications. Jon Eno, a Sad Puppies nominee for fan artist, had not produced any work in 2014. (Torgersen addresses this here.) One of Wright's nominations from the Rabid Puppies' slate was determined to be too heavily based on a story he wrote in 2013. (Day addresses this here.)
However, there have also been three separate nominees — Kloos, Short Story nominee Annie Bellett, and fan publication Black Gate — who requested their work be removed from the ballot. Black Gate submitted its request for withdrawal too late to be pulled from the Hugos' ballot.
I am withdrawing because this has become about something very different than great science fiction. I find my story, and by extension myself, stuck in a game of political dodge ball, where I’m both a conscripted player and also a ball. (Wrap your head around that analogy, if you can, ha!) All joy that might have come from this nomination has been co-opted, ruined, or sapped away. This is not about celebrating good writing anymore, and I don’t want to be a part of what it has become.
I am not a ball. I do not want to be a player. This is not what my writing is about. This is not why I write. I believe in a compassionate, diverse, and inclusive world. I try to write my own take on human experiences and relationships, and present my fiction as entertainingly and honestly as I can.
Finally, acclaimed author Connie Willis declined to participate in this year's Hugos ceremony.
You may have been able to cheat your way onto the ballot. (And don’t talk to me about how this isn’t against the rules–doing anything except nominating the works you personally liked best is cheating in my book.) You may even be able to bully and intimidate people into voting for you. But you can’t make me hand you the Hugo and say "Congratulations," just as if you’d actually won it. And you can’t make me appear onstage and tell jokes and act like this year’s Hugo ceremony is business as usual and what you’ve done is okay. I’m not going to help you get away with this. I love the Hugo Awards too much.
Can the Hugos do anything?
No.
Everything both Puppies slates did was perfectly legal according to the rules of the Hugos. Nobody disputes that, and when I contact the Hugo marketing committee, I'm told by Kevin Standlee, a member of that committee, that the nominations process is "susceptible to passionate minorities."
However, the process of voting for the winners is different. It's conducted via instant-runoff voting, off a preferential ballot, and all voters are allowed to rank "No Award" above any of the nominees. (If "No Award" wins, then no award is given.)
Both efforts tend to undercut said passionate minorities. Thus, even in the categories where the two Puppies slates received all five nominations, it's possible all five will lose.
At the nominations stage, there's little the Hugos can do, short of finding more voters.
"The number of nominators has been increasing steadily and consistently — but it's still not enough. Something like 15,000 people were eligible to nominate this year, and only 2,200 did," Nussbaum told me.
So what's this really all about, anyway?
As with so many things in nerd culture right now, it's about the idea of who gets to be part of the community and who's on the outside, looking in.
In the years leading up to the rise of the Puppies slates, the Hugos increasingly went to books written by women and people of color, or to books that featured main characters who didn't fit the usual straight white male paradigm. Thus, the rise of the Puppies campaigns has been read by many as virulently sexist and racist.
N. K. Jemisin's Inheritance Trilogy is one of the best fantasy series of recent years. (Orbit)
But what's happening here is very similar to Gamergate — a place that used to be a small, safe space for a group of people who have often themselves felt like outsiders is opening up, more and more, to people from outside the typical community. It is no longer safe to automatically assume the average sci-fi fan — or protagonist — is a straight white guy.
While many see that as a sign of progress, others feel like they're being criticized for liking all those stories featuring white men at their center and, thus, feel demonized. Nerd culture has traditionally been a place for people who felt picked on to band together. Yet diverse voices entering this sphere increasingly want to have oppression completely separate from geeky pursuits acknowledged. It requires a genuine shift in how those in nerd culture perceive themselves, one that isn't always easily made.
But as Jemisin points out to me, the overwhelming white maleness of science fiction was artificially created. The influential early science fiction editor John W. Campbell, for instance, rejected stories written by or featuring women or people of color, believing his audience wouldn't like them.
"There's a sense out there that the artificially created monochrome all-male stuff that we used to see was the way the genre was supposed to be," Jemisin tells me. "What we're seeing lately is what is actually more natural. ... I don't think that it is possible to go back."
Correction: This post initially said I contacted the Hugos' "board of directors." In fact, the awards don't have such a centralized body. The post has been updated to reflect this.
Today, Comcast Executive Vice President David Cohen published a 2,900-word essay called "Setting the record straight on criticisms of the Comcast-TWC transaction." Naturally, this noble effort in corporate spin required making inappropriate references to great leaders. "While it may be easy for critics to do this from the sidelines," Cohen wrote, "we would rather try, in the spirit of President Kennedy, to light a candle than to curse the darkness."
So let's do that, Mr. Cohen. Let's light a candle on the only relevant question in the Comcast / Time Warner merger that Comcast has refused to answer.
Are you chicken?
If competition is so vibrant and healthy in the broadband market — enough to make net neutrality regulation a bad idea,...
Comcast is going to abandon its attempt to buy Time Warner Cable, with an announcement to be made as soon as tomorrow, Bloomberg reported today, citing anonymous sources.
When asked if the report is accurate, a Comcast spokesperson told Ars, "We have no comment."
"Comcast Corp. is planning to walk away from its proposed takeover of Time Warner Cable Inc., people with knowledge of the matter said, after regulators decided that the deal wouldn’t help consumers, making approval unlikely," Bloomberg wrote.
The growth of partisan polarization has transformed US politics in recent decades, and the effects are especially visible in Congress. Earlier this year, a new paper in PLOS One (and flagged by Wonkblog's Chris Ingraham) demonstrated this transformation in a particularly cool way.
Six researchers — Clio Andris, David Lee, Marcus Hamilton, Mauro Martino, Christian Gunning, and John Armistead Selden — created a visualization of how likely the House of Representatives' Democrats (in blue) and Republicans (in red) are to vote with their own party, or to cross party lines. The change over the past six decades is remarkable:
You can see here that in the 1960s and 1970s it was actually quite common for members of one party to vote with the other party. The blue dots and red dots are intermixed. But gradually in the 1980s and especially in the early 1990s, partisan voting behavior grew much stronger.
By the 1993-'94 Congress — just before the Republican takeover of the House — the overlap on votes between the two parties had almost completely vanished; you can see the two groups of dots self-segregate into homogeneous clusters. Since then, the gap between the parties has remained large — and very few members of Congress have frequently crossed it. Check out the researchers' full paper here.
WATCH: 'President Obama on today's political polarization'
Several years ago, Alissa Hamilton investigated America's love affair with orange juice in her book Squeezed. She uncovered all sorts of misconceptions about the breakfast staple's virtuousness (most of the health claims about orange juice and vitamin C are inflated) and its origins (most OJ actually comes from Brazil, not Florida).
Now Hamilton has trained her sight on another much-loved beverage: milk. In Got Milked? she argues that milk is not the healthy bone-builder governments and the dairy industry have led us to believe. I spoke with her about our big milk misconceptions, how milk became such a pervasive commodity, and whether there are better places to get calcium.
(HarperCollins)
Julia Belluz: First you waged war on the orange juice industry in Squeezed. Now you're suggesting we're getting bilked by the milk industry. Why did you look at milk?
Alissa Hamilton: The book started to take shape when my best friend growing up was visiting in the summer with her mom and two-and-a-half-year-old son. Neither of us grew up in households where milk was essential with breakfast, lunch, and dinner. We didn’t have parents who pushed milk on us.
So I was really surprised when she said, "I haven’t given Oscar milk yet, and he’s two and a half now. What do I do?" She had this uncharacteristic desperation in her voice. When I looked at her funny and reminded her that we didn’t have glasses of milk growing up, she seemed kind of confused. On an academic level, she knows nobody needs milk to be healthy and grow tall and strong. But she seemed to have bought into this idea that if you don’t drink milk, you’re missing something.
JB: What common themes did you find underlie our misconceptions about these beverages?
AH: Marketing. Both [orange juice and milk] have been marketed as these healthy products that people don’t even really question. With orange juice, it’s [marketed as] an essential part of a balanced breakfast. With milk, it’s an essential part of a balanced diet. We've bought into all of that marketing.
(Tim Boyle/Getty)
JB: How did milk win its staple status in our food universe?
AH: We've had school milk programs and milk in schools since the beginning of the century. During World War II, we needed to boost milk production in order to make processed dairy products to send to soldiers overseas. But farmers weren’t producing enough to meet this demand because they weren’t getting paid enough. So the government decided, "Great, we’ll create demand for milk by giving milk to our kids, and that way we’ll have a demand for the fluid milk and we can make the processed products we need for soldiers."
So war was part of it. Convenience is also part of it. As people moved to the city and women started working away from home, cow’s milk became seen as a convenient way to give babies nutrition if women weren’t able to be home breastfeeding all the time. And as the dairy industry grows, farmers have an incentive to try to boost demand with government subsidies of dairy.
I can’t say which one of these many different forces did it, but it’s just a combination that has led to this health halo around milk. I think what’s more troubling is how deeply ingrained the idea has become and how inaccurate many of our assumptions about milk are.
JB: What are our most inaccurate assumptions about milk?
AH: Milk is the only food that makes up an entire food group. If you look at it logically, it doesn’t deserve that special status any more than pumpkin seeds deserve that just because they’re high in magnesium — which is an essential nutrient Americans are low in.
Even the dairy industry recognizes that milk is not essential to health. They can’t counter that fact. Their comeback is that milk and milk products are the most convenient form of calcium. But that argument doesn’t hold anymore.
That’s part of what I want to reinforce with the book and recipes in the book, to show how easy it is to get all the nutrients we need without milk or milk products. The National Dairy Council recognizes that foods like kale, bok choy, and broccoli all have higher rates of calcium absorption than milk. Who knew that two tablespoons of dried basil have almost the same amount of calcium as a glass of milk? We don’t know that because we have this dairy food group, which has created a crutch for people who don’t think about getting calcium in places other than milk.
JB: Is this love of milk a uniquely North American phenomenon?
AH: Not anymore. That’s another key part of the story. The majority of humans in general, and even Americans (60 percent or more), are lactose-intolerant. Yet in India they are talking about a "white revolution," about getting milk into all the schools. In Thailand they’ve cited the fact that the average height has risen in China [because of drinking milk], so they want to start in Thailand, as well, to raise the height of their citizens.
JB: Why are we so gullible about unfounded health claims?
AH: It’s not all that surprising, because that’s all we’ve heard. We’ve only heard from the dairy industry and government agencies that are built to support agricultural commodities like dairy. So you have the USDA creating the dietary guidelines — but it’s also there to support agriculture. There’s a conflict there.
We accept health messages from the dairy industry. But they’re a food business like any other, like Coca-Cola. In general, we don’t think Coke is out to better the world. We know they’re a company and the bottom line is what they’re after. But we don’t think about that when we read dairy industry advertising.
Walk into any grocery store or coffee shop and you'll find gluten-free muffins, gluten-free chips, and gluten-free bread. Gluten has replaced fat as the ingredient we love to shun.
The Gluten Lie by A. J. Levinovitz
And yet, scientists can't find any good evidence to support this fad. Gluten is a protein composite that gives shape to grains like wheat, rye, and barley. And it's true that a very small fraction of people have celiac disease, a real medical condition that causes their bodies to violently reject gluten. But that's only a small fraction of people, and it's not enough to explain the craze. The rest of us are going gluten-free without any real scientific basis for doing so.
It's exactly because the gluten-free diet has surged in popularity recently, despite the science, that Alan Jay Levinovitz, a professor of philosophy and religion at James Madison University, became fascinated by it. I talked to him about his new book, The Gluten Lie, to better understand why we've gone against this grain to the tune of more than $10 billion this year.
Julia Belluz: You are an academic specializing in Chinese philosophy and religion. Why did you end up looking at diet?
Alan Jay Levinovitz: The most famous myth in the world is the dietary fall from grace. Adam and Eve go into the garden, eat the wrong food, and become mortal. So it makes sense to us intuitively that everything that’s wrong with us can be traced to a mistake we make with that we eat.
These myths are based on really powerful narratives, stories about how we construct our identities. So throwing facts at a narrative of paradise past isn’t going to do anything. It’s not established on facts to begin with. You have to deconstruct the narrative. Facts are great, but if you don’t acknowledge the power of the narrative you have to throw up your hands in frustration.
JB: How did the gluten-free narrative become the dominant one in diet now?
AJL: There was already the popularity of low-carb diets for people who want to lose weight. The arguments against gluten hooked up with the fear of carbs. [It also connects to] this myth that there was a healthier time in the past, different from modernity, when we didn’t have gluten in our diets. People saw gluten as part of a modern engineered agriculture that took us away from a paradise past associated with Paleolithic man and natural eating habits.
One of the things you need for a good diet narrative is to suggest that foods you must avoid are not just high in calories but are wrong, bad. Gluten fit that narrative well.
JB: But was there a tipping point? Because it seemed like overnight, gluten-free products were in stores everywhere.
AJL: It was slow and steady progress. [Alternative medicine proponent] Joe Mercola started talking about evils of gluten pretty early on. Jenny McCarthy started talking about it in the early 2000s. The book Dangerous Grainscame out in 2002. This was a solid 12 years before Wheat Bellyand Grain Brain[two popular books that promoted the gluten-free way].
The success of Wheat Belly really played up this narrative of a fallen present — that we now have [genetically modified] "Frankenwheat." William Davis [the author of Wheat Belly] is a master of the idea that there are all these engineered foods making us sick. That book appealed to these timeless myths and won over the general public.
These themes recur again and again. They are appealing to the same myth: there are a lot of mysterious [health] conditions we don’t understand, and it must be that there’s something wrong with our conventional diet. They come up with this idea of a past before agriculture where everyone was happy because they avoided eating grains.
JB: What’s the potential fallout from our obsession with gluten-free?
AJL: The biggest danger is that the kinds of rationales that people like William Davis [author of Wheat Belly] and David Perlmutter [author of TheGrain Brain] contribute to scientific illiteracy.
If you read Davis or Perlmutter and go gluten-free and feel better, it makes you believe the way these men think is right. Going gluten-free might make you feel better, but [it could be] because you’re more careful about what you eat or because you're cooking at home more. In the same way, if you watch Dr. Oz and feel empowered, you think Oz actually represents science. That is a real danger because it’s not true.
JB: So what do real scientists say about the health benefits of a gluten-free diet?
AJK: The real scientists, people who are actually researching this stuff, happily admit that right now we just don't know. The state of science right now, as best we know is this: the vast majority of people who think they react to gluten don’t. That much we can be sure of. There may be a small segment of the population sensitive to gluten and who don’t have celiac disease, and only time will tell if that really is something. That’s where we are right now.
Boating and navigation app SeaNav US [Direct Link] reported this morning that Apple is no longer welcoming the app on the App Store due to the mention of Pebble support, or "any other mobile platform", within the app's description.
SeaNav notes that its iOS app has been previously approved by Apple with no fuss, and have only faced roadblocks after receiving the rejection email this morning. The app supported Pebble for "nearly 2 years" before today, and the company says the app's most recent update has "no changes to our support for the Pebble", hinting that the impending launch of the Apple Watch could be the main culprit of the crackdown on SeaNav.
We have just had the latest version of our SeaNav US iOS app rejected by Apple because we support the Pebble Smartwatch and say so in the app description and meta-data (we also state in the review notes that "This application was approved for use with the Pebble MFI Accessory in the Product Plan xxxxxx-yyyy (Pebble Smartwatch)". See copy of rejection reason below.
SeaNav US has previously been approved by Apple with no problem, we have had Pebble support in SeaNav for nearly 2 years and there are no changes to our support for the Pebble in this version. What are Apple doing? Have they gone Apple Watch crazy? What can we do?
App Store review guideline 3.1 has covered the prohibition on mentioning competing platforms for some time, but until now developers have generally not had issues with Apple rejecting apps for mentioning Pebble support. With the Apple Watch ready to launch, however, Pebble may now be considered a competing platform.
Apple has been known to deal swiftly with apps it deems questionable on the App Store in the past, but today's news is definitely interesting given the reason for rejection and the launch of the Apple Watch tomorrow. SeaNav US should be able to resubmit the app after removing all mentions of the Pebble smartwatch from its marketing materials and App Store page, but it certainly leaves an interesting question for the future of Pebble-supported iOS apps, especially Pebble's dedicated iOS app, presuming SeaNav's rejection was not the result of a reviewer misunderstanding Apple's intended application of the guidelines.
Update 9:32 AM: The developer of Home Remote notes in the Pebble discussion thread that he had an update approved just last night. Pebble is mentioned in his app's description, so it remains unclear whether SeaNav's rejection is part of a specific shift in policy for Apple.
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