The Girl From Trail's End

by Kathy Dobie

Three teenagers were clustered around the cell phone, heads almost touching as they peered at the video. "Eww...that's nasty." A surge of excitement, of almost electric disgust, passed between them. It was Monday after the long Thanksgiving weekend. The Texas morning was warm and overcast, the air spongy. In the cafeteria of Cleveland High School, the students jockeyed with one another to get a better view of the tiny screen. They could see a naked girl lying on a mattress. A guy moving on top of her. A wall of legs surrounded the couple, like a slatted fence. The faces of the others in the room weren't visible, only their legs and feet, shifting impatiently. It looked like there were eight to ten guys watching the girl, watching and waiting their turn. Each time the guys switched places, another face was revealed—some of them were boys in their school. (One later told a female classmate that he'd stuck a beer bottle into the girl.) Others were older and unfamiliar. But as the video flew from phone to phone that day, almost everyone recognized the girl on the mattress—that long ink black hair, the brown eyes and baby cheeks. She was a sixth grader from the middle school next door. An 11-year-old.

Two and a half months later, the arrests began. On February 18, four Cleveland men were picked up and charged with "continuous sexual abuse" of a child. In court documents, she was referred to as "Regina D. Stewart," a pseudonym. Over the next three weeks, fifteen more men and boys, ranging in age from 16 to 27, were indicted for "aggravated sexual abuse" of a child, bringing the total number of defendants to nineteen. Nineteen men and boys who, if the charges were true, had gathered in a place where no one lived but them—no police, no girlfriends, no fathers, no mothers or grandmothers—and what was wrong became, if not exactly right, then all right. They would all plead not guilty.

Even before the arrests, the press descended on this East Texas town of 8,000 where half the population is white, a quarter is black, and a quarter, Hispanic. Located just forty-five miles north of Houston, Cleveland is both rural and citified. Families keep chickens and donkeys while fast-food restaurants pull in traffic off the main drag. The crime rate is high, the faces are friendly, and the air smells of crispy chicken, toasted ancho peppers, fresh-cut grass, manure, truck fumes, lilacs, pine sap, and mud.

By mid-December, TV-news trucks were gathered outside the high school. Reporters ducked into pews at church services and, notebooks in hand, grimly worked the playgrounds. Each new development brought another wave of media attention. Frustrated, a Cleveland teenager posted on Facebook, "man yall y r we still on the fuckin news they need to let that shit go." The story, already red-hot, became inflammatory when it was reported that all of the suspects were black and the victim Hispanic. Friends and relatives of the men and boys were quoted defending them and blaming the girl, who they said acted much older than 11, wearing makeup and sexy clothes. They speculated that she had probably lied about her age, so how were the males to know? The New York Times was roundly castigated for its "rape-friendly" coverage of the assault, which was heavy on sympathetic quotes about the defendants and uncritical of malicious comments about the victim. After receiving tens of thousands of readers' complaints, the Times took the extraordinary step of sending its reporter back to Cleveland for a do-over, and the media began to cover its own coverage. Clearly no one was planning to "let that shit go" anytime soon.

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Annoying? Yoga? Surely Not

by Sarah Miller

For some it's an ancient path to health and enlightenment. For others it's utterly infuriating. And I should know – I'm an instructor.

In addition to being somewhat crazy – a shrink once diagnosed me with borderline personality disorder, which I thought was a bit of a stretch until I realised that, like everyone else, he just wanted to have sex with me – I am a yoga teacher. Should you, recoiling in horror as you read this, find yourself asking, "But how does someone like this become a yoga teacher?", the short answer is that I gave a man with a beard and his hot wife $3,200. The long answer is … well, I'd like to say that it's because if I hadn't become obsessed with yoga I'd probably be dead, because that's what people always say about things like this. But that would be, frankly, a little overdramatic. Let's just say that if I didn't do yoga everything bad about me would just be worse, and what is bad is already bad enough.

Now, because you can't get something for nothing, there's a problem: yoga can be extremely annoying. There's no getting around it. Yoga has moments of such profound annoyingness that after I finished Eat, Pray, Love (I read the ashram section 100 times) all I could think was: "You wrote an entire book about yoga and meditation and you never mentioned, 'Oh, by the way, sometimes you will want to punch these people in the face'."

And this is where I perform my public service; in yoga we call that a seva (how annoying is that?). All the stuff Elizabeth Gilbert was too high on homemade pizza and Javier Bardem penis to mention, you need to know. Everyone's always telling you how great yoga is, and that's true, but then you go and maybe the studio smells like onions steamed in cat pee, and it might have been helpful to know about that beforehand.

You need to know exactly what will disturb you before you get there, so you can prepare; and you should also know that, even though everyone around you will seem perfectly unperturbed, someone feels your pain. Oh, and by the way, I want to underscore that what follows below is what bugs me about yoga; everything else is a glittering gift from Lord Shiva. Namaste!

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Cost of Doing Business

by Barry Estabrook

Given that Salmonella-contaminated ground turkey produced by Cargill, Inc. had already sickened more than 100 people and killed one, William Marler’s offer to the Minneapolis-based company early last month seemed worth considering: Regularly test your meat for antibiotic-resistant Salmonella, and I won’t sue you.

Suing corporations that sicken their customers is something Marler does often and well. He is a Seattle trial attorney whose firm, Marler Clark, specializes in representing victims of food poisoning. It’s proven to be a lucrative specialty. Marler has won more than $600 million for his clients over the past two decades. A good chunk of that money has come from Cargill, which, according to Marler, has had four outbreaks of resistant salmonella in its facilities in the last 10 years.

Marler also knows a fair bit about self-promotion. His offer was obviously designed to draw public attention to his firm, which represents about two dozen victims of the most recent Cargill outbreak. But in addition, Marler hoped that his overture would shine light on one of the most gaping holes in the tattered safety net that is supposed to keep our food supply safe.

Astoundingly, under current United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) rules, it’s perfectly okay for companies to sell meat to the public that is contaminated with Salmonella and other disease-causing bacteria.

Although the USDA stipulates that meat and poultry containing “adulterants” cannot be sold, it recognizes only one bug—E. coli O157:H7—as an adulterant, even though Salmonella, Listeria, Campylobacter, and many strains of E. coli have also sickened or killed people. In a twist of logic that would baffle anyone other than a bureaucrat, these potentially lethal bacteria achieve official adulterant status after the fact—only in specific instances when they actually make people sick. “Then they magically become adulterants,” said Marler in an interview.

Since the USDA decreed that E. coli O157:H7 was an adulterant in 1994 and required companies to test for the bug and to cook any positive samples before distributing them to consumers, Marler has noticed a dramatic drop in the outbreaks of illness caused by E. coli-tainted ground meat. “Prior to that, 90 percent of our firm’s revenue came from E.-coli cases linked to hamburger,” said Marler. “That’s virtually disappeared—with one little act.”

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Facebook Existentialism

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Paradise

Fiction
by David Guterson

They went in late September, starting out on I-5, which she handled by staying in the right lane with ample braking distance, keeping her hands at 9 and 3 on the wheel, and disdaining speeders and tailgaters. No problem there—he found her driving style charming enough. She was a silver beauty in a dark blue Honda Element—one of those boxy, hip-to-be-square cars—with nearly inaudible public-radio chatter on fade, and all of that was fine too. She wore a jean jacket with mother-of-pearl buttons, an ironed pastel skirt, and suede-laced sandals. Her eyes were green, her smile was warm, and she didn’t talk just to fill space. She seemed self-sufficient but not cold about it. In her politics, she was not so liberal as to be obnoxious, but not so conservative as to suggest one-upmanship. She didn’t pretend to be an organic farmer, kitchen goddess, world traveler, yoga master, artist, or humanitarian; neither was she reactionary with regard to those personas. She was green but not gloomy and, while not indifferent to approaching 60, not obsessed by it either. She had a good sense of humor—quiet and subtle. She didn’t expect to live forever through exercise and a healthy diet. She understood that he was still in the aftermath—damaged goods—without making his condition central to the way she treated him. In short, he wasn’t disenchanted. But he still expected to be.

How had this happened—this trip to Paradise? Via Match.com, that was the simple answer. The idea that he would need Match.com—he wouldn’t have predicted it, hadn’t seen that he would go there. But Match.com was what people did now, and actually it made sense. It saved single people trouble and grief, decreased their disappointments and misunderstandings. Digitized, you put yourself out there, minus the pretense that it was other than what it was. You cut to the chase without preliminaries. And the people you met were just like you—they’d also resorted to Match.com—so you didn’t have to feel embarrassed, really, unless you wanted to do that together and mutually laugh at yourselves.

They’d skipped that step—the self-loathing self-punctures—opting instead for straightforwardness in a wine bar, where he told her immediately about his wife, and she told him about her former husband, long remarried. He described his children—a boy out of college and a girl still in, both thousands of miles from him—and she described her energetic twin sons, who’d found good marriage partners, stayed in Seattle, and started a successful business together selling “hand-forged” doughnuts. He knew about her work from her Match.com profile, but asked about it anyway, as a matter of course: sociology at Seattle University and research, right now, on social networks and epidemiology. His turn arrived: commercial litigation. Specializing in securities fraud. What exactly was securities fraud? And so they got through their first date.

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The Style Council & Tracey Thorn

Beautiful film photography by Willy Ronis, Henri Cartier Bresson, Robert Doisneau and Elliot Erwitt.

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The Last Labor Day

by E.J. Dionne Jr.

Let’s get it over with and rename the holiday “Capital Day.” We may still celebrate Labor Day, but our culture has given up on honoring workers as the real creators of wealth and their honest toil — the phrase itself seems antique — as worthy of genuine respect.

Imagine a Republican saying this: “Labor is prior to and independent of capital. Capital is only the fruit of labor, and could never have existed if labor had not first existed. Labor is the superior of capital, and deserves much the higher consideration.”

These heretical thoughts would inspire horror among our friends at Fox News or in the Tea Party. They’d likely label them as Marxist, socialist or Big Labor propaganda. Too bad for Abraham Lincoln, our first Republican president, who offered those words in his annual message to Congress in 1861. Will President Obama dare say anything like this in his jobs speech this week?

As for the unions, they are often treated in the media as advocates of arcane work rules, protectors of inefficient public employees and obstacles to the economic growth our bold entrepreneurs would let loose if only they were free from labor regulations.

So it would take a brave man to point out that unions “grew up from the struggle of the workers — workers in general but especially the industrial workers — to protect their just rights vis-a-vis the entrepreneurs and the owners of the means of production,” or to insist that “the experience of history teaches that organizations of this type are an indispensable element of social life.”

That’s what Pope John Paul II said (the italics are his) in the 1981 encyclical “Laborem Exercens.” Like Lincoln, John Paul repeatedly asserted “the priority of labor over capital.”

That the language of Lincoln and John Paul is so distant from our experience today is a sign of an enormous cultural shift. In scores of different ways, we paint investors as the heroes and workers as the sideshow. We tax the fruits of labor more vigorously than we tax the gains from capital — resistance to continuing the payroll tax cut is a case in point — and we hide workers away while lavishing attention on those who make their livings by moving money around.

Consider that what the media call economics reporting is largely finance reporting. Once upon a time, a lively band of labor reporters covered the world of work and unions. If you stipulate that the decline of unions makes the old labor beat a bit less compelling, there are still tens of millions of workers who do their jobs every day. But when the labor beat withered, it was rarely replaced by a work beat. Workers have vanished.

But we are now inundated with news (and “news”) about the world of capital. CNBC and the other financial media are for investors what ESPN is for sports junkies. We cheer the markets, learn the obscure language of hedge fund managers and get to know some of the big investors in off-field interviews. Workers are regarded as factors of production. At best, they’re consumers; at worst, they’re “labor costs” cutting into profits and the sacred stock price.

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Breakaway Wealth

by Annie Gowen
 

Millions of dollars worth of federal contracts transformed Anita Talwar from a government accounting clerk into a wealthy woman — one who can afford a $2.8 million home in the Washington suburbs with its own elevator, wine cellar and Swarovski crystal chandeliers.

Talwar, a 59-year-old immigrant from India, had no idea that she and her husband would amass a small fortune when she launched a company providing tech support to the federal government in 1987. But she shrewdly took advantage of programs for minority-owned small businesses and rode a boom in federal contracting.

By the time Talwar sold Advanced Management Technology in 2004, it had grown from a one-woman shop to a company with more than 350 employees and $100 million in annual revenue — all of it from government contracts.

Talwar’s success — and that of hundreds of other contractors like her — is a key factor driving the explosion of the region’s wealth over the last two decades. It also has exacerbated the gap between high- and low-wage workers, which is wider in the D.C. area than almost anywhere else in the United States.

Washingtonians now enjoy the highest median household income of any metropolitan area in the country, and five of the top 10 jurisdictions in America — Loudoun, Howard and Fairfax counties, and Falls Church and Fairfax City — are here, census data shows.

The signs of that wealth are on display all over, from the string of luxury boutiques such as Gucci and Tory Burch opening at Tysons Galleria to the $15 cocktails served over artisanal ice at the W Hotel in the District to the ever-larger houses rising off River Road in Potomac.

But nowhere is the region’s wealth more concentrated than the place where Talwar purchased her 15,000-square-foot white-brick estate home: Great Falls, a once-rural enclave of about 15,000 residents 17 miles west of the White House.

Sixteen percent of Great Falls households earn $500,000 or above a year, and more than half make at least $250,000, according to Nielsen Claritas. By comparison, 11 percent of households in Potomac earn $500,000 or more, and McLean and Bethesda each boast 10 percent at that level.

Talwar’s neighbors are entrepreneurs, lobbyists, CEOs, tech moguls, financiers and defense contractors for whom two wars have been very, very good business. Their portfolios take hits when the stock market plummets, as it did this month, but the setbacks are usually temporary.

While others have struggled to recover from the recession, many of the residents of Great Falls have continued to launch new business ventures, enjoy easy access to venture capital and reap the benefits of bonuses and deferred compensation plans. Median household income there has increased 32 percent in the last 10 years, helping to widen the divide between those at the top and bottom of the economic ladder to a record high in Virginia.

Like their counterparts in California’s Silicon Valley or Seattle, Great Falls residents tend to be low-key about their wealth, more partial to sweatshirts than designer duds. In their jobs they wield enormous power, but it isn’t always obvious at first glance.

Look closely, however, and the patina of affluence is everywhere.

A white Mercedes sits next to a black Jaguar in the student parking lot at the local public high school, Langley High. At the community Easter egg roll, children grab eggs filled with chocolate and tiny gemstones like blue topaz and citrine.

The guest speaker for the new Rotary Club’s first meeting in June? Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia.

A surge in contracting

Forty years ago, few people thought of Washington as a place to get rich. It was a staid town where a third of the residents earned modest but steady paychecks working for the federal government.

The new Washington is a global business hub with thriving technology, biotech and communications industries. Only 12 percent of workers are federal employees. But the federal government remains an engine of job creation, outsourcing its tech support and other services to contracting firms ringing the Capital Beltway, a phenomenon that exploded in the years after 9/11.

More than $80 billion in federal contracting dollars will flow to the region this year, up from $4.2 billion in 1980, according to Stephen Fuller, director of the Center for Regional Analysis at George Mason University. Adjusted for inflation, that’s a seven-fold increase. A third of the region’s gross regional product now comes from federal spending.

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Labor Day, 2011
Photo by William Gedney (American, 1932-1989)
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Bank of North Dakota

by Ellen Brown

In an article in The New York Times on August 19th titled “The North Dakota Miracle,” Catherine Rampell writes:

Forget the Texas Miracle. Let’s instead take a look at North Dakota, which has the lowest unemployment rate and the fastest job growth rate in the country.

According to new data released by the Bureau of Labor Statistics today, North Dakota had an unemployment rate of just 3.3 percent in July—that’s just over a third of the national rate (9.1 percent), and about a quarter of the rate of the state with the highest joblessness (Nevada, at 12.9 percent).

North Dakota has had the lowest unemployment in the country (or was tied for the lowest unemployment rate in the country) every single month since July 2008.

Its healthy job market is also reflected in its payroll growth numbers. . . . [Y]ear over year, its payrolls grew by 5.2 percent. Texas came in second, with an increase of 2.6 percent.

Why is North Dakota doing so well? For one of the same reasons that Texas has been doing well: oil.

Oil is certainly a factor, but it is not what has put North Dakota over the top. Alaska has roughly the same population as North Dakota and produces nearly twice as much oil, yet unemployment in Alaska is running at 7.7 percent. Montana, South Dakota, and Wyoming have all benefited from a boom in energy prices, with Montana and Wyoming extracting much more gas than North Dakota has. The Bakken oil field stretches across Montana as well as North Dakota, with the greatest Bakken oil production coming from Elm Coulee Oil Field in Montana. Yet Montana’s unemployment rate, like Alaska’s, is 7.7 percent.

A number of other mineral-rich states were initially not affected by the economic downturn, but they lost revenues with the later decline in oil prices. North Dakota is the only state to be in continuous budget surplus since the banking crisis of 2008. Its balance sheet is so strong that it recently reduced individual income taxes and property taxes by a combined $400 million, and is debating further cuts. It also has the lowest foreclosure rate and lowest credit card default rate in the country, and it has had NO bank failures in at least the last decade.

If its secret isn’t oil, what is so unique about the state? North Dakota has one thing that no other state has: its own state-owned bank.

Access to credit is the enabling factor that has fostered both a boom in oil and record profits from agriculture in North Dakota. The Bank of North Dakota (BND) does not compete with local banks but partners with them, helping with capital and liquidity requirements. It participates in loans, provides guarantees, and acts as a sort of mini-Fed for the state. In 2010, according to the BND’s annual report:

The Bank provided Secured and Unsecured Federal Fund Lines to 95 financial institutions with combined lines of over $318 million for 2010. Federal Fund sales averaged over $13 million per day, peaking at $36 million in June.

The BND also has a loan program called Flex PACE, which allows a local community to provide assistance to borrowers in areas of jobs retention, technology creation, retail, small business, and essential community services. In 2010, according to the BND annual report:

The need for Flex PACE funding was substantial, growing by 62 percent to help finance essential community services as energy development spiked in western North Dakota. Commercial bank participation loans grew to 64 percent of the entire $1.022 billion portfolio.

The BND’s revenues have also been a major boost to the state budget. It has contributed over $300 million in revenues over the last decade to state coffers, a substantial sum for a state with a population less than one-tenth the size of Los Angeles County. According to a study by the Center for State Innovation, from 2007 to 2009 the BND added nearly as much money to the state’s general fund as oil and gas tax revenues did (oil and gas revenues added $71 million while the Bank of North Dakota returned $60 million). Over a 15-year period, according to other data, the BND has contributed more to the state budget than oil taxes have.

Hacked Off

by Guy Adams

When is a Banksy not a Banksy?

That is the million, or rather $450,000 question facing bonus-fuelled New York collectors who are beating a path to a new, and unsanctioned, exhibition of work by the world's most famous street artist.

The Keszler Gallery in the Hamptons, Wall Street's favourite holiday destination, is facing stern criticism from Banksy representatives and his fans after attempting to sell two high-profile works of public art, which were originally intended to brighten up the streets of Bethlehem.

The pieces, referred to as Stop & Search and Wet Dog, were stencilled on to prominent walls in the West Bank city during a visit by the British artist in 2007. They disappeared shortly afterwards, only to re-emerge at the Keszler Gallery in Southampton Village late last month.

News of the sale has angered Banksy enthusiasts, who argue that the works were meant for public consumption. They argue that street art is meaningless – and therefore value-less – outside of its original context, and say that foreign art dealers had no right to participate in their removal.

The gallery takes an opposing view. It insists that the pieces, among seven large Banksy works in its new show, were legitimately purchased and exported from the Palestinian territory. If left unprotected in their original location, they were in severe danger of deteriorating, and by now would almost certainly have been vandalised.

Fuelling the controversy is Pest Control, an organisation that is the nearest thing the reclusive British artist has to official representation. In a statement to Artnet magazine, it claimed that only one of the six pieces in the Keszler show had been formally authenticated as Banksy's work, and admonished the gallery for removing them from their original setting.

"We have warned Mr Keszler [the gallery's owner] of the serious implications of selling unauthenticated works, but he seems to not care," read their statement. "We have no doubt that these works will come back to haunt Mr Keszler."

The debate highlights the problems that emerge when the soaring contemporary art market turns what some view as petty vandalism into a prized commodity. These days, Banksy pieces can fetch as much as $1.9m, meaning that his public works are often thought to be worth more than the building they originally graced. 

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It's Complicated

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Afghanistan Dispatches

[ed.  As of this writing Michael Yon appears on the verge of losing his embed status with the military in Afghanistan.  I wasn't aware of Mr. Yon until a friend turned me on to his web site.  He has been writing dispatches and photographing the Iraq and Afghanistan wars for several years. For an eye-opening account of life on the ground from a soldier's perspective, check out the following examples of his photo-journal entries. (thanks, Jerry)]

Mosquitoes (be sure to click through the second page).

The Art, Science, and Carpentry of Explosives

Michael Yon is a former Green Beret, native of Winter Haven, Fl. who has been reporting from Iraq and Afghanistan since December 2004.  No other reporter has spent as much time with combat troops in these two wars.  Michael’s dispatches from the frontlines have earned him the reputation as the premier independent combat journalist of his generation.  His work has been featured on “Good Morning America,” The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, CNN, ABC, FOX, as well as hundreds of other major media outlets all around the world.

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Bored UCLA Student Joins Libyan Rebels

by Spencer Ackerman

Bummed out by the end of summer vacation? Want to take the awesomest road trip evar? Not really bothered by the idea of conflict tourism or turning someone else’s struggle for freedom into your bar-stool anecdote?

Dude: you need to join the Libyan revolution!

Bradley Hope, a reporter covering Libya’s uprising, writes in Abu Dhabi newspaper The National that he recently made a curious discovery near An Nawfaliyah: Chris Jeon, a 21-year old University of California–Los Angeles math student. That’s Jeon in the picture above, very unsafely resting his rifle on the ground with the barrel pointed up while his new buddies crowd around. Spoiler: He doesn’t have any military experience.

Why’d he make the long trek from L.A. to L-iby-A? “It is the end of my summer vacation, so I thought it would be cool to join the rebels,” Jeon told Hope. “This is one of the only real revolutions.”

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LikeALittle

[ed.  I think I understand the concept, but I'm not sure.  Seems like social media is (more and more) removing the serendipity and mystery of meeting and connecting with people spontaneously.]

by Alexia Tsotsis

LikeALittle, the social network for college students who want a place to anonymously flirt on college campuses, announces the launch of its first mobile product today, LikeALittle People. Like a Color but with text or a Yobongo focusing on Interests, the LikeALittle people app allows you to log in with Facebook and immediately see the Interests (but not names or emails)of LikeALittle users around you.

The app’s premise is simple enough: People generally want to meet the people around them but don’t know where to start . LikeALittle founder Evan Reas tells me that socializing in real life would be a lot easier if everyone had a thought bubble over their heads announcing their current status. The LikeALittle app, which eliminates real-life identity in favor of Interests, attempts to function as a sort of digital thought bubble.

Reas tells me that the app solves the loneliness problem evidenced by Color and Yobongo by algorithmically matching users near each other based on activity, backgrounds and interests,”Yobongo and Color are both symmetric communication platforms where the most value is derived only if other people are on at the exact same time in the same place,” says Reas.  ”Our app solves that because it connects you to the right people who you can communicate with anytime, either in a symmetric or asymmetric way.”

With LikeALittle people, users can login with Facebook and have their Interests automatically populated through their Facebook Likes. You can scan the app for profiles by refreshing the screen and drill down into a users profile by pressing the + button.

But the app works even if you’re not proactive — If a user around you has similar interests the app will directly message you. In addition you have the option of giving a Shoutout to a particular Interest, messaging someone yourself, bookmarking a person for later viewing or adding Interests to your profile either manually or from someone else’s page.

While the product is a divergence from the core LikeALittle flirting network, Reas says it’s still on point with his overall mission of using location to connect people, “The original likealittle flirting and chatting product did that in a very focused way and this product now broadens the type of interaction from flirting more general communication, discovery and chatting and also broadens the audience to mainstream.”

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