On Web, a Fine Line on Free Speech Across the Globe

For Google last week, the decision was clear. An anti-Islamic video that provoked violence worldwide was not hate speech under its rules because it did not specifically incite violence against Muslims, even if it mocked their faith.

The White House was not so sure, and it asked Google to reconsider the determination, a request the company rebuffed.

Although the administration’s request was unusual, for Google, it represented the kind of delicate balancing act that Internet companies confront every day.

These companies, which include communications media like Facebook and Twitter, write their own edicts about what kind of expression is allowed, things as diverse as pointed political criticism, nudity and notions as murky as hate speech. And their employees work around the clock to check when users run afoul of their rules.

Google is not the only Internet company to grapple in recent days with questions involving the anti-Islamic video, which appeared on YouTube, which Google owns. Facebook on Friday confirmed that it had blocked links to the video in Pakistan, where it violates the country’s blasphemy law. A spokeswoman said Facebook had also removed a post that contained a threat to a United States ambassador, after receiving a report from the State Department; Facebook has declined to say in which country the ambassador worked.

“Because these speech platforms are so important, the decisions they take become jurisprudence,” said Andrew McLaughlin, who has worked for both Google and the White House. Most vexing among those decisions are ones that involve whether a form of expression is hate speech. Hate speech has no universally accepted definition, legal experts say. And countries, including democratic ones, have widely divergent legal approaches to regulating speech they consider to be offensive or inflammatory. (...)

Every company, in order to do business globally, makes a point of obeying the laws of every country in which it operates. Google has already said that it took down links to the incendiary video in India and Indonesia, because it violates local statutes.

But even as a company sets its own rules, capriciously sometimes and without the due process that binds most countries, legal experts say they must be flexible to strike the right balance between democratic values and law.

“Companies are benevolent rulers trying to approximate the kinds of decisions they think would be respectful of free speech as a value and also human safety,” said Jonathan Zittrain, a law professor at Harvard.

by Somini Sengupta, NY Times |  Read more:

Photo: Mohammad Ismail/Reuters

Why Can't We Sell Charity Like We Sell Perfume?

The early Puritan settlers in the New World were pulled in opposite directions by competing value systems. They were extremely aggressive capitalists, but they were also strict Calvinists, taught that self-interest was a sure path to eternal damnation. How could they negotiate this psychological tension? Charity became a big part of the answer—an economic sanctuary in which they could do penance for their profit-making tendencies, at five cents on the dollar.

Today, Americans are the world's most generous contributors to philanthropic causes. Each year, we give about 2% of our GDP to nonprofit organizations, nearly twice as much as the U.K., the next closest nation, according to the Chronicle of Philanthropy. Some 65% of all American households with an income of less than $100,000 donate to some type of charity, according to the Center on Philanthropy at Indiana University, as does nearly every household with an income greater than $100,000. These contributions average out to about $732 a year for every man, woman and child in America.

Yet we cling to a puritan approach to how those donations are spent: Self-deprivation is our strategy for social change. The dysfunction at the heart of our approach is neatly captured by our narrow, negative label for the charitable sector: "not-for-profit."

It's time to change how society thinks about charity and social reform. The donating public is obsessed with restrictions—nonprofits shouldn't pay executives too much, or spend a lot on overhead or take risks with donated dollars. It should be asking whether these organizations have what they need to actually solve problems. The conventional wisdom is that low costs serve the higher good. But this view is killing the ability of nonprofits to make progress against our most pressing problems. Long-term solutions require investment in things that don't show results in the short term.

We have two separate rule books: one for charity and one for the rest of the economic world. The result is discrimination against charities in five critical areas.

First, we allow the for-profit sector to pay people competitive wages based on the value they produce. But we have a visceral reaction to the idea of anyone making very much money helping other people. Want to pay someone $5 million to develop a blockbuster videogame filled with violence? Go for it. Want to pay someone a half-million dollars to try to find a cure for pediatric leukemia? You're considered a parasite.

Two years ago, a group of senators raised questions about the compensation of the CEO of the Boys & Girls Clubs of America, which totaled $998,591 for 2008, nearly half of which consisted of catch-up obligations for her retirement. The critics ignored the fact that over the previous eight years, the CEO had tripled the Clubs' network-wide revenue to $1.5 billion. Would the Clubs have been better off hiring a less talented CEO for $100,000 and leaving revenue stagnant, at a loss of $1 billion?

We tend to think that policing salaries of charitable groups is an ethical imperative, but for would-be leaders, it results in a mutually exclusive choice between doing well for yourself and doing good for the world—and it causes many of the brightest kids coming out of college to march directly into the corporate world.

by Dan Palotta, WSJ |  Read more:

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A Love Story In 22 Pictures

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The Perfectly Fried Egg

José Andrés, the best-known Spanish chef working in the United States today, is the new dean of Spanish Studies at the International Culinary Center in Manhattan. On a recent afternoon in the Culinary Center’s kitchen, Mr. Andrés held forth on the essential Spanishness of the fried egg.

“My whole life, I have been trying to cook an egg in the right way,” he said. “It is the humbleness of the dish. Why do you need to do anything more complex?”

To cook an egg, Mr. Andrés uses a method that begins with a sauté pan in which four tablespoons of olive oil had been brought to medium-high heat. He then tips the pan at a steep angle, so that the oil collects in a small bath, and slides the egg into the oil.

by Glenn Collins, NY Times |  Read more:

Photos: Richard Petty

The Champs-Élysées, a Mall of America

PARIS -- André Malraux, the novelist and minister of culture under Charles de Gaulle, told a French-American journalist in the 1960s that the Champs-Élysées — then considered the most beautiful avenue in the world — had “an American basement.” Today, American business and its brands are prominently aboveground on a Champs-Élysées that has largely lost its distinctive character and has become far less French.

In a movement that has only accelerated in recent years, a large part of the broad street has become overrun with outlets for clothing brands that most Americans would hardly consider haute couture or even exclusive. Banana Republic has just opened a store, and Levi’s has a massive new space, not far from the new H&M. They are joining, and competing with, the Gap, Nike, Tommy Hilfiger and Abercrombie & Fitch. At least Tiffany & Company is coming, replacing a burger joint.

The movie glamour that brought a young Jean Seberg to the Champs-Élysées to meet Jean-Paul Belmondo, her handsome gangster “dragueur,” or skirt chaser, is long gone, as are most of the sights in Jean-Luc Godard’s famous film of 1960, “Breathless,” a kind of French hymn to American culture and cool.

The cool has faded amid the most recent mass-market invasion. Few Parisians who do not work in the neighborhood go to the Champs-Élysées anymore, regarding it as a place for suburbanites and tourists, many of them rich Arabs who seek out the nightclubs.

“It’s an avenue that doesn’t exist in the minds of Parisians, in any case in their everyday lives,” said Céline Orjubin, 31, a writer who came to Paris from Brittany. “I don’t get an exotic feel out of the Champs-Élysées. It feels more like nowhere, because we find the same things as everywhere.”

The Champs-Élysées — the name means the Elysian Fields, a reference to its origins as fields and market gardens — has long played a central role in France. It began in the early 17th century, when the royal gardens of the Tuileries were extended by an avenue of trees. By the late 18th century, as Paris grew, it became a fashionable street, and the city took control of it in 1828.

Connecting the Place de la Concorde, where Marie Antoinette and many others died at the guillotine set up during the French Revolution, to the Arc de Triomphe, which was inaugurated in 1836 to honor the dead of the Revolution and the Napoleonic wars, the avenue became the site of military parades by both French troops and their conquerors. That included the Germans in both 1871 and 1940, and the Free French and the Allies after World War II. In some sense, it remains the symbol of a liberated France, for foreigners and the French themselves.

“In the 1950s and ’60s, the Champs-Élysées was the place to be,” said Jacques Hubert-Rodier, 58, an editorial writer at Les Echos, which used to have its headquarters on the avenue.

But “it’s no longer a Parisian place,” he said, adding, a touch sadly, “It’s no longer a place for lovers.”

by Steven Erlanger, NY Times |  Read more:

Painting: Antoine Blanchard

Daryl Hall

Never Let Me Go.  Kazuo Ishiguro.
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Hip Hop Roots & Bebo Valdes

Numbers About My Mother

It’s August and it’s San Francisco so it’s cold. While I’m walking home from work there’s a call from a Portland number I don’t recognize. I answer. It’s a friend of my mother’s, phoning to let me know that my mother has tried to kill herself, that she’s at a hospital in an induced coma. I slump onto a cement car stop in a parking lot and listen to the details, dig in my purse for a pen, turn the phone away from the wind, write down the hospital’s name and the room number, watch people walk down Polk Street on their way home or to happy hour, thinking how normal they all look, how careless they act while my mother is in a coma. Her friend says she’s not sure how bad it is. I try to figure out how to phrase my question correctly, politely: “You mean she might die?” but I can’t think of how it’s supposed to be said, how a person asks this of a near-stranger regarding her own mother, so I don’t ask it.

My mother is 57 and I am 32. This isn’t the first time she has tried to kill herself. The other time was when she was 32 and I was seven. Back then, she was a single mother of four kids — my three brothers and me. She’d been married twice, divorced twice. We lived in a little house that my brothers and I came into and went out of with impunity while she slept days, worked at a bar nights. The house had two bedrooms and one attic. One of my brothers was still a baby, not yet two years old. That’s a lot of numbers for one paragraph. Here are some more:

Number of brothers I didn’t get to see anymore when my mother gave up custody of all of us and we went into foster care: two.

Number of families, total, my brother and I lived with before graduating high school: seven.

Number of years old I was when I re-met my mother: nineteen.

Average number of times my mother and I talk on the phone per week: three. We’re close, like best friends sometimes. We talk about everything, almost. But then. We’ll never be close enough. We don’t talk about the difficult things. We don’t talk about the days when we were a family of five. I don’t ask her what number of times she had to put her signature on what number of lines, what number of forms she had to fill out to let go of all four of her children. One? Five? Twelve? How does that work?

The mother I know now is a very small, mellow person who wears feather earrings and three or four rings on each hand and gauzy scarves and a denim jacket with a big peace sign on the back, and sometimes when we talk she seems very old and wise, and sometimes she seems very young and simple. Her cell phone ring tone is “All You Need Is Love.”

I don’t call her Mom. I don’t remember what it felt like to call her that. I write it in cards, but when we’re together I can’t think of a comfortable way to address her, so I don’t call her anything.

Although. She is a lot of things. I look just like her, and sometimes when I’m leaving a friend a voicemail or giving a stranger directions on the street, I have to stop, startled for a second, because I’m intonating my words in the exact same way she does.

All these years later, and now she's tried it again. It comes as a shock, because I hadn’t thought ... I don’t know what I hadn’t thought. I try to pinpoint it. I’m still sitting on the car stop in the parking lot, and it seems important to decide, before I get up and continue my walk home and call the hospital, why exactly my mother doing this has come as a shock. I come up with: I guess I just thought she was happy. Well, not in an ecstatic-to-be-living-in-the-world sort of way, but in a regular way — she crochets barefoot sandals, she has a garden — that just-enough sort of happy that prevents people from wanting to die. That’s the kind of happiness I had been envisioning in my mother’s life, I guess. Tomato-and-corn-garden happy.

by Melissa Chandler, The Hairpin |  Read more:

Collective Soul Cat

Please Stare

[ed. Wow, Sasha Weiss. What a great piece of writing.]

Entering the big tent at Lincoln Center, where most of the marquee shows at New York City’s fashion week took place, you feel transported to the scene in the “Hunger Games” movie, where the Capitol’s élite gather to observe the presentation of the new tributes, dressed in their metallic and feathered finest. The figures at Lincoln Center are humans, but humans who have imagined themselves into some mirrored universe, where women walk on craggy stilts, lips are colored the darkest crimson, and nearly seven-foot-tall men in hot pants show off their legs. They drift around the lobby, eyeing one another (eyes, too, are dramatically painted here, often in gold). Occasionally, homage is paid to a particularly daring outfit by means of a photograph.

I thought of the “Hunger Games” because that scene (the most visually arresting one in the film) is designed like a satanic fashion show, the runway serving as a conveyor belt for young children compelled to enact the desires of the powerful for beauty and bloodshed. “Hunger Games” isn’t the only pop-cultural artifact that primes us to view fashion as an expression of some inner rot, as vanity, a grasp at wealth, the shallow aspirations of a classist society. Even the shows devoted to its practice, like “Project Runway” and “America’s Next Top Model,” make fashion into a ruthless competition, presided over by stern, frosty judges (mostly women).

I didn’t expect to love the shows as I did, but I found them surprisingly joyous affairs. Watching them, we’re given permission to project ourselves into idealized, adventuresome future lives—ones that involve shimmering, jewel-toned gowns, stiff metallic trench coats, and flowing pants suits screen printed with images of highways—but we’re pulled even more forcefully to imagine our pasts. The fashion show—which begins with all the calculation and jostling of regular life—ends up depositing us somewhere back in the realm of childhood: before our personalities had coalesced, when we encountered ourselves in mirrors, wondered about who we might become, and pretended.

* * *

In New York, people stare at one another all the time, but it’s usually surreptitious: a flickering once-over walking down Spring street, checking out someone’s jeans. At fashion week, looking is the point. The waiting to enter the shows, and then the waiting for them to start, is interminable, and seems designed to stoke the study of others. Massed in a pack that reluctantly forms a line, the fashionistas gather at the entrance to a show, gobbling each other up with their eyes. (I spy, on the way into Nanette Lepore: many Louis Vuitton totes; a hideous crocheted poncho in garish colors layered over a flared leather miniskirt; a man and a woman who look to be in their eighties, both immaculately attired, the woman in black Chanel with leopard shoes.)

When we’re finally allowed to go in, the room itself is like a giant, blinking eye. At the back wall, hundreds of photographers have arranged themselves, nearly on top of one another, on rafters, creating a wall of jutting cameras. Lining the room are rows of benches and the spectators pile in (buyers, journalists, models, and the pure lovers of fashion, who one can spot because of the inventiveness of their outfits. I watched one latecomer navigate through a thicket of legs to reach her seat in four-inch platformed Oxfords, wearing stripes in all directions, to match her hair, which had one streak of white). We’re seated in descending order of importance—the well-known writers, editors, and models in the front row, closest to the catwalk. I’m in the standing room section, the better to survey the room.

A strobe-like flashing somewhere down below indicates the presence of a celebrity surrounded by cameras. I can see the fit silhouette of a woman in a haze of light. Someone near me murmurs that it’s Edie Falco. Even a crowd of that size (five hundred, easily, in the big tent’s main space) quickly becomes a hive, its lines of hierarchy drawn in thick black. The lights are low, with a glow of illumination from the stage and static of voices, and then, as in the theatre, the room turns a shade darker, the talking subsides. There’s a beat of anticipation, and the bright lights snap on.

Hundreds of well-dressed, strategizing people who have spent the last thirty minutes comparing themselves to one another incline their heads and their attention toward the runway. In this moment, they all want the same thing: to watch the beautiful parade.

by Sasha Weiss, New Yorker |  Read more:

Photo: Maria Lokke

Three Reasons to Salute Ben Bernanke

It’s time to give Ben Bernanke some credit. Under attack from the left and right for much of the past year, the mild-mannered former Princeton prof has shown some leadership and pushed through a major policy shift. In committing the Fed to buying tens of billions of dollars worth of mortgage bonds every month until the jobless rate, currently 8.1 per cent, falls markedly, Bernanke and his colleagues on the Fed’s policy-making committee have finally demonstrated that they won’t stand aside as tens of millions of Americans suffer the harsh consequences of a recession that was largely made on Wall Street.

I’ve had my ups and downs with Bernanke, whom I profiled at length back in 2008. At the start of the year, I thought critics were giving him a raw deal. With short-term interest rates close to zero (where they’ve been since December, 2008), and with job growth seemingly picking up, the calls for more Fed action seemed overstated. But over the past six months, as the recovery sputtered and Bernanke dithered, I too, ran out of patience with him. In a column in Fortune last month, I even suggested that Barack Obama should have replaced him when he had the chance, back in 2010.

It turns out that Bernanke was merely biding his time. I still think the Fed should have moved earlier. Once it became clear that slower G.D.P. growth, rather than some statistical aberration, was generating the big falloff in job creation we saw from March onwards, there was no justification for inaction. But Bernanke has now rectified the error—and then some. For at least three reasons, Thursday’s move was a historic one, which merits a loud salute:

1. Bernanke exceeded expectations. For several months now, he has been saying that the Fed would eventually act if the labor market didn’t improve of its own accord. In Jackson Hole last month, at the Fed’s annual policy gathering, he strongly hinted at another round of quantitative easing—the practice of exploiting the Fed’s capacity to create money and making large-scale purchases of bonds, which puts downward pressure on interest rates, which, in turn, spurs spending and job creation—at least in theory.

The Fed has tried this policy twice before, in 2009/10 (QE1) and 2010/11 (QE2). In retrospect, it was a big mistake to abandon QE2 just as the Obama Administration’s fiscal stimulus, which had provided support to the economy from 2009 to 2011, was running down. The experience of Japan demonstrates that in the aftermath of asset-price busts, when households and firms are seeking to pay down their debts, the prolonged maintenance of monetary and fiscal stimulus is necessary to prevent a semi-permanent slump.

Bernanke didn’t publicly concede on Thursday that he had blundered—that would be asking too much. But in announcing the terms of QE3, he went considerably further than most observers had been expecting. The two previous rounds of quantitative easing were term limited: this one isn’t. Rather, its duration will be directly linked to the jobs picture. “(I)f the outlook in the labor market for the labor market does not improve substantially, the Committee will continue its purchases of agency mortgage-backed securities, undertake additional asset purchases, and employ its other tools as appropriate such improvement is achieved…” the Fed said in a statement.

by John Cassidy, New Yorker |  Read more:

Photo: Platon

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My Life as a TaskRabbit

Standing in the living room of his luxurious two-bedroom apartment, which has sweeping views of the San Francisco Bay, Curtis Jackson informs me that I am a terrible housecleaner. There are soap stains on the walls of his master bathroom and pools of water gathering near the edges of the tub. My Roomba vacuum, we discover after a lengthy and humiliating search, is out of power and stuck under a bed. There’s an entire room that I didn’t know about and thus never cleaned. I also neglected to take out the trash and left the living room coated in the noxious perfume of an organic cedar disinfectant. “I respect what you are trying to do, and you did an OK job in the time allotted,” he says. “But frankly, stick to being a reporter.”

The apartment is one stop in the middle of my short, backbreaking, soul-draining journey into what Silicon Valley venture capitalists often call the distributed workforce. This is the fancy term for the marketplace for odd jobs hosted by the site TaskRabbit, the get-me-a-soy-latte errands offered by the courier service Postmates, and the car washing assignments aggregated by yet another venture, called Cherry. These companies and several others are in the business of organizing and auctioning tedious and time-consuming chores. Rob Coneybeer, managing director of the investment firm Shasta Ventures, which has backed several of these new companies, says the goal is to build a new kind of labor market “where people end up getting paid more per hour than they would have otherwise and find it easier to do jobs they are good at.”

The idea of posting or finding jobs online isn’t new. Craigslist, the pioneering Internet bulletin board, allowed the primitive, gentle folk of the 1990s to find day work, not to mention cheap dates. These new services are different, partly because they’re focused and carefully supervised, and partly because they take advantage of smartphones. Workers can load one of these companies’ apps on their location-aware iPhone or Android device and, if the impulse strikes, take a job near them any time of day. Employers can monitor the whereabouts of their workers, make payments on their phones or over the Web, and evaluate each job after it’s accomplished. The most capable workers then rise to the top of the heap, attracting more work and higher pay. Lollygaggers who don’t know how to recharge their Roombas fall to the bottom of the barrel.

Distributed workforce entrepreneurs and their investors are thinking big. They compare their startups to fast-growing companies such as Airbnb, which allows people to rent out their homes. In this case, the assets for rent are people’s skills and time. Leah Busque, a former IBM (IBM) software engineer who started and runs TaskRabbit, says thousands of people make a living (up to $60,000 a year) on her site, which operates in San Francisco, Los Angeles, New York, Chicago, and five other cities. “We are enabling micro-entrepreneurs to build their own business on top of TaskRabbit, to set their own schedules, specify how much they want to get paid, say what they are good at, and then incorporate the work into their lifestyle,” she says.

Venture capitalists have bet $38 million on TaskRabbit and millions more on similar startups. Other distributed labor companies, with names like IAmExec (be a part-time gopher) and Gigwalk (run errands for companies) are being founded every day. Listening to this entrepreneurial buzz all summer, I got a notion that I couldn’t shake—that the only way to take the temperature of this hot new labor pool was to jump into it.

by Brad Stone, Bloomberg Businessweek |  Read more:

What Was Really Behind the Benghazi Attack?

Were the attacks on the United States Consulate in Benghazi, which killed the American Ambassador and three other diplomats, motivated by the film that the assailants, and many news networks, claim was their motive? Was it really religious outrage that made a few young men lose their heads and commit murder? Have any of the men who attacked the consulate actually seen the film? I do not know one Libyan who has, despite being in close contact with friends and relatives in Benghazi. And the attack was not preceded by vocal outrage toward the film. Libyan Internet sites and Facebook pages were not suddenly busy with chatter about it.

The film is offensive. It appears that it was made, rather clumsily, with the deliberate intention to offend. And if what happened yesterday was not, as I suspect, motivated by popular outrage, that outrage has now, as it were, caught up with the event. So, some might say, the fact that the attack might have been motivated by different intentions than those stated no longer matters. I don’t think so. It is important to see the incident for what it most likely was.

No specific group claimed responsibility for the attack, which was well orchestrated and involved heavy weapons. It is thought to be the work of the same ultra-religious groups who have perpetrated similar assaults in Benghazi. They are religious, authoritarian groups who justify their actions through very selective, corrupt, and ultimately self-serving interpretations of Islam. Under Qaddafi, they kept quiet. In the early days of the revolution some of them claimed that fighting Qaddafi was un-Islamic and conveniently issued a fatwa demanding full obedience to the ruler. This is Libya’s extreme right. And, while much is still uncertain, Tuesday’s attack appears to have been their attempt to escalate a strategy they have employed ever since the Libyan revolution overthrew Colonel Qaddafi’s dictatorship. They see in these days, in which the new Libya and its young institutions are still fragile, an opportunity to grab power. They want to exploit the impatient resentments of young people in particular in order to disrupt progress and the development of democratic institutions.

Even though they appear to be well funded from abroad and capable of ruthless acts of violence against Libyans and foreigners, these groups have so far failed to gain widespread support. In fact, the opposite: their actions have alienated most Libyans.

Ambassador J. Christopher Stevens was a popular figure in Libya, and nowhere more than in Benghazi. Friends and relatives there tell me that the city is mournful. There have been spontaneous demonstrations denouncing the attack. Popular Libyan Web sites are full of condemnations of those who carried out the assault. And there was a general air of despondency in the city Wednesday night. The streets were not as crowded and bustling as usual. There is a deep and palpable sense that Benghazi, the proud birthplace of the revolution, has failed to protect a highly regarded guest. There is outrage that Tripoli is yet to send government officials to Benghazi to condemn the attacks, instigate the necessary investigations and visit the Libyan members of the consulate staff who were wounded in the attack. There is anger, too, toward the government’s failure to protect hospitals, courtrooms, and other embassies that have recently suffered similar attacks in Benghazi. The city seems to have been left at the mercy of fanatics. And many fear that it will now become isolated. In fact, several American and European delegates and N.G.O. personnel have cancelled trips they had planned to make to Benghazi.

by Hisham Matar, New Yorker |  Read more:

Photograph by Ibrahim Alaguri/AP Photo

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