The Transformation of American Journalism Is Unavoidable

This essay is part survey and part manifesto, one that concerns itself with the practice of journalism and the practices of journalists in the United States. It is not, however, about ‘the future of the news industry,’ both because much of that future is already here and because there is no such thing as the news industry anymore.

There used to be one, held together by the usual things that hold an industry together: similarity of methods among a relatively small and coherent group of businesses, and an inability for anyone outside that group to produce a competitive product. Those conditions no longer hold true.

If you wanted to sum up the past decade of the news ecosystem in a single phrase, it might be this: Everybody suddenly got a lot more freedom. The newsmakers, the advertisers, the startups, and, especially, the people formerly known as the audience have all been given new freedom to communicate, narrowly and broadly, outside the old strictures of the broadcast and publishing models. The past 15 years have seen an explosion of new tools and techniques, and, more importantly, new assumptions and expectations, and these changes have wrecked the old clarity.

There’s no way to look at organizations as various as the Texas Tribune, SCOTUSblog and Front Porch Forum or such platforms as Facebook, YouTube and Storify and see anything like coherence. There’s no way to look at new experiments in nonprofit journalism like Andy Carvin’s work at NPR during the Arab Spring and convince yourself that journalism is securely in the hands of for-profit businesses. And there’s no way to look at experiments in funding journalism via Kickstarter, or the coverage of protest movements via mobile phone, and convince yourself that making information public can be done only by professionals and institutions.

Many of the changes talked about in the last decade as part of the future landscape of journalism have already taken place; much of journalism’s imagined future is now its lived-in present. (As William Gibson noted long ago, ‘The future is already here. It’s just unevenly distributed.’) Our goal is to write about what has already happened and what is happening today, and what we can learn from it, rather than engaging in much speculation.

The effect of the current changes in the news ecosystem has already been a reduction in the quality of news in the United States. On present evidence, we are convinced that journalism in this country will get worse before it gets better, and, in some places (principally midsize and small cities with no daily paper) it will get markedly worse. Our hope is to limit the scope, depth and duration of that decay by pointing to ways to create useful journalism using tools, techniques and assumptions that weren’t even possible 10 years ago.

We also highlight the ways new possibilities for journalism require new forms of organization. Traditional news organizations have tended to conserve both working methods and hierarchy, even as the old business models are collapsing, and even when new opportunities do not fit in those old patterns. In interview after interview with digitally focused members of the traditional press, the theme of being thwarted by process came up. Adapting to a world where the people formerly known as the audience are not readers and viewers but users and publishers will mean changing not just tactics but also self-conception. Merely bolting on a few new techniques will not be enough to adapt to the changing ecosystem; taking advantage of access to individuals, crowds and machines will mean changing organizational structure as well. (We recognize that many existing organizations will regard these recommendations as anathema.)

This essay is written for multiple audiences–traditional news organizations interested in adapting as well as new entrants (whether individual journalists, news startups or organizations not previously part of the journalistic ecosystem)–and those organizations and entities that affect the news ecosystem, particularly governments and journalism schools, but also businesses and nonprofits.

We start with five core beliefs:

• Journalism matters.
• Good journalism has always been subsidized.
• The internet wrecks advertising subsidy.
• Restructuring is, therefore, a forced move.
• There are many opportunities for doing good work in new ways.

by Tow Center for Digital Journalism, Columbia Journalism School |  Read more:

Illustration: UBMSB

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Dirk Baksteen (Belgian, 1886-1971)
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The Rise and Fall of Jeremy Hammond: Enemy of the State

On a cold day in mid-December 2011, a hacker known as "sup_g" sat alone at his computer – invisible, or so he believed. He'd been working on the target for hours, long after the rest of his crew had logged off: an epic hack, the "digital equivalent of a nuclear bomb," as it later would be described, on the servers of a Texas-based intelligence contractor called Strategic Forecasting Inc. Stratfor served as a sort of private CIA, monitoring developments in political hot spots around the world and supplying analysis to the U.S. security establishment.

A member of the online activist movement Anonymous, sup_g was part of a small team of politically motivated hackers who had breached Stratfor's main defenses earlier that month – ultimately "rooting," or gaining total access to, its main web servers. In them, they had found a cornucopia of treasure: passwords, unencrypted credit-card data and private client lists revealing Stratfor's deep ties to both big business and the U.S. intelligence and defense communities. But perhaps the most lucrative find of all was Stratfor's e-mail database: some 3 million private messages that exposed a wide array of nefarious and clandestine activities – from the U.S. government's monitoring of the Occupy movement to Stratfor's own role in compiling data on a variety of activist movements, including PETA, Wikileaks and even Anonymous itself.

And now, finally, it was done. Logging on to a secure Web chat, sup_g sent a message to a fellow activist. "We in business, baby," he said. "It's over with."  (...)

For three weeks, sup_g and his crew had worked steadily to ruin Stratfor, one of their biggest and richest targets yet. In addition to supplying geopolitical analysis to everyone from the Pentagon to the United Nations, the firm provided customized security services for leading companies like Raytheon and Dow Chemical, often compiling dossiers on activists and others viewed as threats to corporate profits. By Christmas – which Antisec dubbed "LulzXmas" for the "lulz," or mocking enjoyment, they intended to have at Stratfor's expense – the group had made off with more than 200 gigabytes of data. They then destroyed the company's databases and defaced Stratfor's website with a triumphant message promising a "week of mayhem" that would include posting the firm's secrets online – some 860,000 names, e-mails and passwords, including several dozen belonging to top-secret operators whose identities were now leaked for the very first time. Antisec also planned to use the hacked credit cards to make donations to groups like CARE and the American Red Cross. As an added flourish, the group ended its communiqué with the full text of the influential French anarchist tract The Coming Insurrection. "It's useless to wait . . . for the revolution," the treatise reads. "The catastrophe is not coming, it is here."

Three months later, on the evening of March 5th, 2012, more than a dozen federal law-enforcement officers broke down the door of a small brick house on the southwest side of Chicago and arrested Jeremy Hammond, a 27-year-old anarchist and computer hacker they believed to be sup_g. Six feet tall and lanky, dressed in a purple T-shirt and ratty trousers – a signature style one of his female friends noted was less Salvation Army than "the free box outside the Salvation Army" – Hammond looked more like a crusty punk than a computer nerd. In fact, he was both, as well as many other things: an inveterate "black hat" hacker, an irrepressible agitator and enemy of the "rich, ruling class" who identified with the ideas of the Weather Underground and considered the Occupy movement too tame. (...)

His arrest, the most prominent bust to date of a U.S. hacktivist, was also a major coup for the FBI. Before Hammond was locked up, Anonymous had engaged in a year-and-a-half-long hacking spree, waging a full-scale war against the "rich and powerful oppressors." The group shut down the websites of the CIA, major banks and credit-card companies. They took up the cause of the Arab Spring by attacking the government websites of Libya, Tunisia and Egypt; they broke into computers belonging to NATO and the GEO Group, one of the world's largest private prison corporations. They hacked defense contractor Booz Allen Hamilton – an attack, dubbed "Military Meltdown Monday," that yielded 90,000 military and civilian e-mail accounts and passwords. They even attacked the FBI itself.

But none of these attacks had the political resonance of Stratfor. The computer breach not only cost the company millions, but focused worldwide attention on the murky world of private intelligence after Anonymous provided the firm's e-mails to WikiLeaks, which has been posting them ever since. It was, by any estimate, an audacious hack – and one for which Hammond may face decades in prison.

Hammond, who has never admitted to any of the nine nicknames the government claims he operated under, has pleaded innocent to the Stratfor hack. But he has not disavowed his involvement with Anonymous, nor his desire to "push the struggle in a more direct action, explicitly anti-capitalist and anti-state direction," as he wrote to me from Manhattan's Metropolitan Correctional Center, where he has been held for the past eight months awaiting a bail hearing. Indeed, his hallmark as an activist has always been his revolutionary, militant rhetoric, for which he is unapologetic. "I have always made it clear that I am an anarchist-communist – as in I believe we need to abolish capitalism and the state in its entirety to realize a free, egalitarian society," he wrote. "I'm not into watering down or selling out the message or making it more marketable for the masses."

This unwavering commitment, one of Hammond's greatest strengths, would also be what led to his undoing. He was always aware that betrayal was only a click away. "We know we'll finish in prison," says a hacker who worked with him. "Jeremy knew he was going to be raided, which is why he worked so quickly. He wanted people to remember him." What Hammond never suspected was that his downfall would come at the hands of one of his closest and most trusted allies.

by Janet Reitman, Wired |  Read more:

Illustration by Sean McCabe

A Requiem for Syria

Cities, like dreams, are made of desires and fears, even if the thread of their discourse is secret, their rules are absurd, their perspectives deceitful, and everything conceals something else.

In Italo Calvino's novel, Invisible Cities, a world traveler named Marco Polo describes the cities of a vast but crumbling empire to its ruler, Kublai Khan. Over time, the intricate descriptions of the cities begin to overlap until the khan slowly realizes that his appointed traveler has been describing the same city, an imagined city, over and over, in fragments -- each vignette exposing another perspective, unveiling yet another city, where death mirrors life and cities are named after Italian women. Each city is suspended between reality and imagination, structured on a set of absurd rules, reminding the reader that a city can only be absorbed through short glances, each glance anchored to an object, a story, or a memory.

I've been reading and rereading Invisible Cities for over a decade. Before the Syrian revolution, Calvino's poetics were safely rooted in the realm of fiction. When I recently picked it up to look for a quote, I began to read it once more -- this time sneaking a few pages at a time between my daily intake of endless streams of gruesome images emerging from our all-too-real Syrian cities. For the first time, Calvino's words detached from fantasy; Syria's cities became embedded within the lines of the Invisible Cities. I listened, along with Kublai Khan, to Marco Polo's narrations and tried to understand how cities become invisible.

Watching death has become a pastime of the revolution. There is much to learn from it. Death is sudden; it is shorter than a short YouTube clip. Death is a man wrapped in his shroud, bloodied gauze strips tied around his head, cotton stuffed in his nostrils, and the bluish-gray tinge of his skin. Death is the camera panning over mass graves where children's bodies are arranged in long, perfect lines, then covered with rust-colored dirt. The death of Syrians accumulated so fast it seems impossible to comprehend over 40,000 lives lost in less than two years.

But the death of a city is different. It is slow -- each neighborhood's death is documented bomb by bomb, shell by shell, stone by fallen stone. Witnessing the deaths of your cities is unbearable. Unlike the news of dead people -- which arrives too late, always after the fact -- the death of a city seems as if it can be halted, that the city can be saved from the clutches of destruction. But it is an illusion: The once-vibrant cities cannot be saved, so you watch, helpless, as they become ruins.  (...)

Aleppo is Calvino's city of Lalage, a city of minarets on which the moon "rest[s] now on one, now on another." It is a city of churches, temples, relics, and graves of revered mystics. It is a city where the spices of Armenia meld with the tastes of Turkey. It is a city where Arabic, Kurdish, and Armenian tongues speak parallel to each other, with an occasional French word mixed in here or there. It is a city of trade and industry, where men are constantly bargaining and negotiating in the same souks as their fathers before them. It is a city where girls walking down the streets in tight jeans and high heels pass by women in long black coats and white veils pinned under their chins. And they know they all belong right here, to Aleppo.

A man who is not from Aleppo recently told me, "When you travel to Aleppo, you don't see it until you arrive." I had never noticed that. Perhaps, because I was always inside it, I never searched for it when we returned. I never doubted that it would always be there, exactly as I left it, untouched, unchanged. But he was right; Aleppo is an inward-looking city; it sees the world reflected in itself. And because we've lived here for generations, we became like that too.

by Amal Hanano, Foreign Policy |  Read more:

Holding Our Breath

Imagine a world without alcohol. Or a world where alcohol can only be obtained by dealing with clandestine and sometimes sketchy homebrewers and illicit moonshine operators (sort of like Prohibition but not quite, since alcohol was legal before Prohibition was passed and many of the economic and "infrastructure" elements contributing to alcohol's consumption were already in place, like bars, breweries, taxes, etc.).

Now imagine this highly sought after drug suddenly being legalized, in effect creating a new and lucrative commodity out of thin air. That's pretty much how normalization of existing marijuana policy might affect our economy and society.

By now most Americans are aware of recent voter initiatives in Colorado and Washington state that legalize the use, production and commercial distribution of marijuana. Over the next year or so each state will be tasked with determining how best to proceed in developing a system for regulating, taxing, monitoring and distributing both the drug and its expected revenues. However, nearly everyone is holding their collective breath (for those that did inhale) as the federal government decides what to do. Under federal law marijuana is still classified as a Schedule I drug under the Controlled Substances Act. So, all or parts of each state's laws could be invalidated unless federal law is changed, or the entire matter gets lobbed over to the courts and packaged as a state's rights issue. So far, the Obama administration has given little indication of what it intends to do -- and for good reason, the effects of federal acquiescence on this issue are likely to be both far reaching and profound.

To begin with, the states of Colorado and Washington will probably enjoy an immediate and "value added" advantage within their respective economies by being able to grow, market, dispense and 'export' high quality commercial marijuana products more efficiently than anyone else (including drug dealers) -- exports being defined here as sales to out of state residents as the product is transported across borders to various regions of the country (which, as Amsterdam can attest, includes another benefit, pot-centric tourism). There will also be massive new revenues to allocate. But, if the situation gets to that point it will only be because the federal government and courts have allowed it to do so, and most other states are likely to pass initiatives of their own very quickly, given the immense revenue potential to be gained. So any advantage for early adopters might be short-lived.

Continuing with the 'new' commodity analogy, what will then be needed to bring marijuana fully into the mainstream?

Let's start with the producers: Who gets to plant it? How are they licensed and regulated? Who oversees monitoring, quality assurance, product health and safety, and other things like production quotas, and crop subsidies, etc. that "normal" agricultural products require? What about hemp as a commodity for other industries? What is hemp, and what is pot? Basically, the whole gamut of bureaucracy that now manages any other food commodity on the market will need to be revised.

Then there are the distributors: What are the requirements for licensing and reporting? How do you deal with interstate (and international) transport of a some times/some places illegal drug? What are all the various products that might need regulating (brownies, candies, pills, etc.). What tax schemes should be developed, and how should the the tax code be written to encourage or discourage growth of the industry? What restrictions do you place on marketing (or not)? Who manages and enforces all of this? (It makes my head ache just thinking about all the new forms that will need to be designed and printed).

Finally, there are the users: What's an acceptable inebriation level? Where do you go to buy your pot (state dispensaries, liquor stores, bars, the internet)? Will use be banned in certain places like public parks and other venues (as alcohol currently is)? What penalties need to be codified in law to address various use infractions?

Those are just some of the economic and institutional problems, I'm sure there are many more.

But there are societal issues as well, which may be even more complex: Should legal marijuana be part of a more comprehensive drug policy involving things like cocaine, psylocybin, ecstasy, etc. since nearly everyone agrees our so-called "war on drugs" has pretty much failed on all levels? Where alcohol has been responsible for many tragic deaths, broken relationships, lost dreams and more is marijuana a better drug for what ails the human condition? And, if so, are we ameliorating an existing problem or making it worse? Is it even possible to imagine all the issues that could arise if use of the substance explodes and becomes more mainstream?

Finally, there is Washington D.C. Given the issues both large and small that they've been unable to deal with do you think dropping an economic and societal bomb like legalized drug use in the middle of an entrenched bureaucracy and polarized Congress will ever go over very well? How do you think corporate institutions will respond either for or against legalized marijuana based upon their own vested interests?

All I can say is, I'm not holding my breath.

For a more detailed examination of these and other issues see: 'Marijuana Legalization: What Everyone Needs To Know'

Also, this excellent historical review by Lewis Lapham on our basic human need to seek out altered states: Raiding Consciousness. Why the War on Drugs Is a War on Human Nature ]

by markk
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Greta Garbo and John Gilbert Flesh and The Devil dir Clarence Brown 1926
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Football is Dead. Long Live Football.

In a typical regulation football game, the two teams combine to run roughly 120 plays from scrimmage compared with nearly 300 pitches in a typical baseball game. There are no "waste pitches" in football. Every play is meaningful, consequential, suspenseful. Every play is part of a mighty struggle, a drive, and in the end all 120 plays combine to create a narrative, or metanarrative. Baseball, boxing, handball, sooner or later every game gets compared to narrative, but only in football are the plays perfectly linear, drawn up with letters, and only in football is the field itself lined like a sheet of notebook paper. The metanarrative of a single football game then fits within the larger saga of Football, which fits within -- and helps explain -- the masterplot of America.

My cousin Jim doesn't think like this. He just loves the Jets. He has season tickets, even though he lives in Chicago. He keeps a green jersey in the trunk of his car, just in case a Jets pep rally breaks out. He once tried to buy Fireman Ed a beer at the Meadowlands. (Ed said no; he needed to stay focused on the game.) If Jim were stranded on a deserted island for 30 years and a rescue boat finally came, after the rescuers had treated his sunburn and poured cool water down his throat he'd ask them: How are the Jets doing?

But seven years ago Jim found a soul mate to rival Ed: Colleen. So on a sparkling autumn Sunday, Jim made the ultimate gesture of love. Though the Jets were hosting Jacksonville, he agreed to drive Colleen all the way the hell out to Wapella, Ill., in the middle of the cornfields, to meet her folks.

I remember the first time he told me this story. I could just imagine his stoic face as he made super-polite small talk with Colleen's mom, dad, sibs as he looked through old photos, petted the family dog, ate the waffles or scrambled eggs -- all the while darting furtive glances at the TV. The Jets weren't on, of course. In Illinois farm country it was the Bears. But every few minutes the screen flashed the out-of-town scores, and Jim saw that his Jets were locked in a nail-biter. Nursing a one-point lead. Third quarter.

Finally he couldn't take it anymore. Like a twitchy junkie he leaped up and announced he forgot something in the car, he'd be right back. Moments later, hunched behind the wheel, he tuned in the feed from New Jersey. (Do I need to say that Jim subscribes to NFL Radio?) The situation, he learned, was dire. Chad Pennington, shoulder injury, return questionable. Grabbing the Pennington jersey from the trunk, Jim sealed the car windows, cranked the volume and pumped his fist as Pennington's backup, Jay Fiedler, came on.

What the --? Suddenly the announcer said Fiedler was down too, making snow angels on the snowless turf. Just then Jim looked up. He saw Colleen's sweet mom peering through the farmhouse window. He'd lost all track of time. Had he been gone 10 minutes? Half an hour? As he and Fiedler struggled to recover (return questionable), Jim saw what Colleen's mom saw, what anyone would have seen. A grown man in a bright green smock, sitting alone in a car that sways with the vehemence of his pounding and cursing. Clearly Colleen's mom was wondering, as anyone would have, what sort of disorder afflicted her future son-in-law.

It's the same disorder that afflicts tens of millions of Americans. Maybe Jim suffers from a more virulent strain. Maybe not. Football simply has an iron grip on our collective psyche, to the extent that America has a collective psyche anymore. We love it. God help us, we love it.

We always have, going back 143 years, ish, to when it was nothing but a scrum of sweatered Ivy Leaguers, a mosh pit of privileged brats. The depth of our love, however, the irrational ferocity of it, has grown steadily, exuberantly, until now, in post-Ivy, post-9/11, postmodern, post-American America, we love football to distraction. We love it to the tune of $9 billion per annum. (That's just the pros.)

And yet, as with so many relationships, we quietly tell our friends: It's complicated.

by J.R. Moehringer, ESPN | Read more:

Photo: Dominic Disaia

Inside The New Yorker

The office feels like a bubble. There is an incredible hush here, the quiet starkly at odds with the bustle of Times Square, where The New Yorker office occupies two floors of the Condé Nast Building.

On the floor I visit, the only area that is not dead quiet is the magazine’s legendary fact-checkers department, where people are talking on the phone. The New Yorker is “a living thing”, the magazine’s editorial director Henry Finder tells me. “There’s a certain resistance to indirection,” he says in response to a question on the magazine’s style and possible friction with writers, “but we know that to be a real writer is to be concerned about not sounding like everybody else, and The New Yorker prides itself above all else on being a magazine of writing, not just information. We’re not just decanting knowledge, we’re purveying stories.” Finder says that indirection, according to the magazine founder and first editor Harold Ross, is the tendency to presuppose a fact that has not been established.

The New Yorker has been around since 1925, and has about 1.1 million subscribers now, Finder tells me. For much of its existence, it has been considered a well- respected magazine, a symbol of discernment, and its heft has only grown in recent times. Finder has been with The New Yorker since 1994, and took over as editorial director in 1997. That is a year before David Remnick took over from Tina Brown as editor of the magazine, and it is Finder that Remnick directs me to, when I ask who edits him.

Remnick and I first met earlier this year, on a small plane to Jaipur, and had a conversation ranging from the problems of Kingfisher Airlines to luck in careers to writing and fiction to the fall of communism in Russia and much else besides.

This time it is a more structured chat, but no less eclectic in range. I start by asking him what he makes of the grim prophecies about journalism. “We are all prone to, victim to, and sometimes joyously involved in our devices, both for good reasons and stupid reasons and in between, and find ourselves looking at and reading things that are maybe not the most edifying things in the world,” he says. “But the whole magazine is devoted to the proposition that there is a large number of people, thank God, who want depth and want deep reporting, or when it comes to fiction, deep emotional involvement, because human beings require it. We require more than soundbites and banalities and clichés and brevity and tweets and all the rest.”

“We need it,” he exclaims. “Because it helps us be human. And understand ourselves more thoroughly and operate at a higher plane. I mean, I’m an idealist about this,” he says, while acknowledging that business matters and day-to-day concerns running a magazine are far from idealistic. (...)

You can be sure The New Yorker takes its quotes seriously. Enter the legendary fact-checking department. It all started with a piece found to be “riddled with errors,” according to the head of the fact checking department, Peter Canby, who says he cannot divulge more of the story. Everything, from long pieces to cartoons to poetry… everything is checked. When it comes to a cartoon, there are details, like which side of a blazer the buttons are on, or in a poem, historical references. Wherever there is a fact, it can be checked.

The New Yorker has 16 fact checkers, including Canby, who started out working as a ‘checker’ part time. He split the job with someone, as they both also focused on their own writing. Canby’s book on Maya Indians, The Heart of the Sky: Travels Among the Maya was published in 1992. He started working at The New Yorker again in 1994 and says he does think being a writer helps him in this job. “I would say most people here, to some degree, aspire to be writers. Many of them are successful. Many of them have gone on to be editors at The New Yorker or elsewhere. So it’s a very talented group, with, for me, too much turnover.”

He looks for generalists, he says, highlighting the language expertise. “We have lots of languages here, we always have. To some degree we are kind of captive to our reputation. We have, I think, typically between seven and eight or nine languages spoken fluently to varying degrees, including French and Spanish. We have a German speaker now, also a Mandarin speaker and an Urdu speaker. That isn’t really strictly necessary for us, because we can hire translators for our foreign pieces, but it seems to be part of our sensibility,” he says.

“I also hire for other things. Naturally, people who want to be in this department typically have a literature background or history or something, but we also want people who know economics and science,” he says, emphasising that checkers have to be fast learners. “A lot of this magazine is put together on a very very tight schedule, and our schedules change at an almost frightening rate. We get very long and complicated pieces coming late one week and, say, closing the next Thursday, that are, say, 10,000 words or 12,000 word [pieces] and I’ll have to put two or three checkers on those.”

What they do on those pieces is not just look at the details, but also at the way arguments are constructed. “I’ve come to think of it as reporting in reverse. We kind of take the piece apart, take it down to its components and put it back together again.”

by Amrita Tripathi, Open | Read more:

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The Republic of Samsung

So sprawling is Samsung’s modern-day empire that some South Koreans say it has become possible to live a Samsung-only life: You can use a Samsung credit card to buy a Samsung TV for the living room of your Samsung-made apartment on which you’ll watch the Samsung-owned pro baseball team.

Samsung is South Korea’s greatest economic success, and, more recently, the subject of major controversy. Economists, owners of small- and medium-size businesses, and some politicians say Samsung no longer merely powers the country but overpowers it, wielding influence that nearly matches that of the government.

Debate over how to curb the size and power of Samsung and other family-run conglomerates has become the key issue in South Korea’s Dec. 19 presidential election, with polls showing that about three in four voters say they feel negatively about the country’s few behemoth businesses. Candidates are sparring over how far to go to constrain them.

Samsung draws the greatest scrutiny because it is by far the largest chaebol — the Korean term for corporate groups that were jump-started with government support — and because it is wildly prosperous as the rest of the economy slows down. The conglomerate contributes roughly a fifth of South Korea’s gross domestic product.

Some Koreans call the country “The Republic of Samsung.”

Famous globally for its electronics, Samsung would be one of the largest conglomerates in almost any country. But within its tiny home country, the size of Virginia, it acts more as a do­-everything monolith, building roads and oil rigs, operating hotels and amusement parks, selling insurance, making not only the world’s best-selling smartphone, the Galaxy, but also selling key components to Apple for the iPhone — even as the two battle in a series of lawsuits.

In its domestic market, Samsung is far ahead of Apple. Only one in 10 South Korean smartphone users has an iPhone. (Samsung holds about 33 percent of the global smartphone market, while Apple accounts for about 17 percent. In the United States, Apple controls 34.3 percent of the smartphone market. )

Critics say Samsung elbows into new industries, knocking out smaller businesses, limiting choices for Korean consumers and sometimes colluding with fellow giants to fix prices while bullying those who investigate. They also see in Samsung the picture of closed-door wealth, a family affair in which Chairman Lee Kun-hee is passing power to his son.

“You can even say the Samsung chairman is more powerful than the South Korean president,” said Woo Suk-hoon, host of a popular economics podcast. “Korean people have come to think of Samsung as invincible and above the law.”

by Chico Harlan, Washington Post |  Read more:

Image: Wikipedia

Skate Fever

I suffer from a seasonal illness that was once very common in Britain but is now rare. It still afflicts the Dutch, though, in the thousands. It strikes me like delirium, when the lakes nearby freeze over and the ice issues an imperative: Carpe diem! Get your skates on! Love, yawns, and suicides, they say, are all infectious. So is play, and skate fever is a highly contagious form. The industrious, beware.

In the Welsh hills where I live, years can pass without the waters freezing, but this one and last were both skating winters—a few precious days of frost and rapture. If joie de vivre could be distilled to one image alone, it would be a skating party sliding down the hill to wake the lake. Last year on a clear night, I skated with friends by moon- and starlight, lanterns scattered around the edge of the lake like fireflies, and we wore full evening dress plundered from charity shops: feathers, fascinators, and fake furs. Wrapped up and amazed, the wrigglers and rugglers (small children and puppies) stayed at the edge, near the soup and the wood fire on the lakeshore. Though the “ecstasy”—in its root “standing apart from”—comes from skating out to the lake’s center and farther to its far and silent shores, across the Zuiderzee.

This kind of joy is superfluous and therefore absolutely necessary. It is the deep meaning of revelry and play, as the historian Johan Huizinga wrote in his masterpiece Homo Ludens. Culture itself “arises in the form of play.” “Play cannot be denied. You can deny, if you like, nearly all abstractions: justice, beauty, truth, goodness, mind, God. You can deny seriousness, but not play.” Flemish paintings of ice merriment depict lovers and children and horse-drawn sleighs; the Dutch still hold carnivals on ice. In homage to Homo Ludens, we skated in the time between Christmas and New Year, honoring the play ethic rather than the work, the ludic revolution rather than the industrial, racing one another and improvising a new form of hockey with a skinny, squeaking rubber chicken. A local farmer came on skis, someone else tried to fly a kite, puppies slipped comically on the ice, and children slid and pushed each other over.

Skating oscillates between the twin arts of conviviality and of solitude: you can join up with the carnivaliers for hot chocolate laced with brandy, then swing away on a trajectory of glorious freedom, a world apart (“All, alone, together,” wrote E. E. Cummings in his poem “skating”). One skating day this past year, I was circling the center of a lake and found my movement mirrored in the sky, as a bird of prey, similarly alone, was curious and circling overhead.

Wild skating, as opposed to rink skating, always suggests this twofoldness: the water which freezes and thaws, the crisp breath in and the steamy breath out, life above in the air and death below the ice. You swing a long arc out to the left and a curve back to the center; a long arc out to the right and a curve back to the center, each skate leaving slender S’s, cut into the ice like cold calligraphy. The twofoldness is an image of balance, a balance which, skaters know, comes best from movement.

Skating, diving, and dreaming are all forms of flying. “When to his feet the skater binds his wings …” wrote the aptly named poet Robert Snow, who is not to be confused with Robert Frost (“Style is the mind skating circles round itself as it moves”) or indeed with Samuel Taylor Coleridge (“The Frost performs its secret ministry,/Unhelped by any wind.”) The god Mercury was, according to Coleridge, the first maker of skates, and every skater has wings at their feet. The flight is compelling to watch: huge numbers of spectators turn out for ice races in Holland, and millions of people around the world watch figure-skating championships in the Winter Olympics—perhaps not so much for the element of competition but for the momentary quality of flight, of sheer grace. While out wild skating, the birds (accustomed to watching us trudge) hover and gaze at skaters as we humans become occasional flyers on the evanescent ice.

In the Flemish painter Pieter Bruegel the Elder’s Winter Landscape with a Bird Trap, the sense of swift movement in the skaters is such that, about 450 years later, they look as if they’re moving. The eye jumps from figure to figure, each caught in a slightly different pose, the effect like the early animation “thumb cinema,” flip books which rely on the eye’s persistence of vision to give the impression of speed. “Peasant Bruegel,” as he has become known, paints the equality of ice games. This is an open carnival of the commons where even poverty cannot stifle the zest of play which steams through the boisterous carnivaliers with such immediacy you can almost hear them laughing.

People have been skating for thousands of years. Skates fashioned from the shank or rib bones of animals have been found throughout Scandinavia and Russia, including some thought to date back to 3000 bc. Similar finds have been made in Britain, where the first written record of skating occurs in a work by the twelfth-century monk, William Fitzstephen. Writing about the children of London attaching bones to their ankles, he observed, “They fly across the ice like birds … then attack each other until one falls down.” Some things never change.

by Jay Griffiths, Lapham's Quarterly |  Read more:

Image: Dutch skater Jaap Eden, c. 1890.

The True Cost of Empire

“Are you monitoring the construction?” asked the middle-aged man on a bike accompanied by his dog.

“Ah, sì,” I replied in my barely passable Italian.

“Bene,” he answered. Good.

In front of us, a backhoe’s guttural engine whined into action and empty dump trucks rattled along a dirt track. The shouts of men vied for attention with the metallic whirring of drills and saws ringing in the distance. Nineteen immense cranes spread across the landscape, with the foothills of Italy’s Southern Alps in the background. More than 100 pieces of earthmoving equipment, 250 workers, and grids of scaffolding wrapped around what soon would be 34 new buildings.

We were standing in front of a massive 145-acre construction site for a “little America” rising in Vicenza, an architecturally renowned Italian city and UNESCO world heritage site near Venice. This was Dal Molin, the new military base the U.S. Army has been readying for the relocation of as many as 2,000 soldiers from Germany in 2013.

Since 1955, Vicenza has also been home to another major U.S. base, Camp Ederle. They’re among the more than 1,000 bases the United States uses to ring the globe (with about 4,000 more in the 50 states and Washington, D.C.). This complex of military installations, unprecedented in history, has been a major, if little noticed, aspect of U.S. power since World War II.

During the Cold War, such bases became the foundation for a “forward strategy” meant to surround the Soviet Union and push U.S. military power as close to its borders as possible. These days, despite the absence of a superpower rival, the Pentagon has been intent on dotting the globe with scores of relatively small “lily pad” bases, while continuing to build and maintain some large bases like Dal Molin.

Americans rarely think about these bases, let alone how much of their tax money -- and debt -- is going to build and maintain them. For Dal Molin and related construction nearby, including a brigade headquarters, two sets of barracks, a natural-gas-powered energy plant, a hospital, two schools, a fitness center, dining facilities, and a mini-mall, taxpayers are likely to shell out at least half a billion dollars. (All the while, a majority of locals passionately and vocally oppose the new base.)

How much does the United States spend each year occupying the planet with its bases and troops? How much does it spend on its global presence? Forced by Congress to account for its spending overseas, the Pentagon has put that figure at $22.1 billion a year. It turns out that even a conservative estimate of the true costs of garrisoning the globe comes to an annual total of about $170 billion. In fact, it may be considerably higher. Since the onset of “the Global War on Terror” in 2001, the total cost for our garrisoning policies, for our presence abroad, has probably reached $1.8 trillion to $2.1 trillion.

by David Vine, TomDispatch |  Read more:

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Gustavo Torner, Sin título. De la serie de “Clara oscuridad”
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Paul Almásy
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Game of the Century: Notre Dame vs. Alabama

Protecting a 24-23 lead in the final minutes of the 1973 Sugar Bowl against Alabama, underdog Notre Dame faced a pivotal third-and-8 at its 3-yard line.

From the broadcast booth, Howard Cosell, in the overtly theatric tone he summoned for moments like these, bellowed into his microphone: “This is the dream matchup: Notre Dame-Alabama. At Notre Dame, football is a religion. At Alabama, it is a way of life.”

Thirty-nine years ago, there was a college football national championship game arranged not by computer rankings or a rubric of poll results like this season’s Alabama-Notre Dame matchup for the Bowl Championship Series title, but by the kind of primitive challenge heard in a sandlot.

In 1973, Bear Bryant, coach of undefeated Alabama, sent a wily message from the tradition-rich football fields of the Deep South to a single football-centric university in northern Indiana. Bryant was taking his No. 1-ranked squad to the Sugar Bowl in New Orleans, and his stated opponent of choice was a team that Alabama had never played: Notre Dame.

The undefeated, untied Fighting Irish, who entered the 1973 bowl season ranked third, had been tempted by a more lucrative offer from the Orange Bowl. But a dare was a dare, especially one with the national championship on the line. Notre Dame Coach Ara Parseghian committed his team to the Sugar Bowl matchup, a contest immediately billed as the game of the century.

“It was the North against the South, Bear Bryant against Ara Parseghian, the Baptists against the Catholics,” Parseghian said last week from his home in Florida. “It had all these compelling comparisons. And it was played on New Year’s Eve, not New Year’s Day, so we had the national stage to ourselves.”

Bryant called it “the biggest game in the South’s history.”

Parseghian said a host of coaches from north of the Mason-Dixon line, and across the country, called to offer encouragement.

“None of them had gone down there and beat Bear,” Parseghian said, laughing.

by Bill Pennington, NY Times |  Read more:

Photo: Joe Raymond/Associated Press

Andrea Mierswa and Markus Kluska
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Good Gas, Bad Gas

The last rays of sun filter through the snow-covered spruces along the shore of Goldstream Lake, just outside Fairbanks, Alaska. Out on the lake Katey Walter Anthony stares at the black ice beneath her feet and at the white bubbles trapped inside it. Large and small, in layer upon layer, they spread out in every direction, like stars in the night sky. Walter Anthony, an ecologist at the University of Alaska Fairbanks, grabs a heavy ice pick and wraps the rope handle around her wrist. A graduate student holds a lighted match above a large bubble; Walter Anthony plunges the pick into it.

Gas rushing from the hole ignites with a whoomp that staggers her. “My job’s the worst, because usually you catch on fire,” she says, smiling. In the gathering twilight she and her team ignite one bubble after another.

The flames confirm that the bubbles are methane, the main component of natural gas. By counting and measuring them, Walter Anthony is trying to gauge how much methane is rising from Goldstream Lake—and from the millions of similar lakes that now occupy nearly a third of the Arctic region. The Arctic has warmed much faster than the rest of the planet in recent decades, and as the permafrost has melted, old lakes have grown and new ones have formed. Methane bubbles from their muddy depths in a way that is hard to quantify—until the first clear ice of fall captures a snapshot of the emissions from an entire lake.

Sometimes as Walter Anthony walks that ice, in Alaska, Greenland, or Siberia, a stamp of her boot is enough to release an audible sigh. Some lakes, she says, have “hot spots” where the methane bubbling is so strong that ice never forms, leaving open holes big enough to spot from an airplane. “It could be 10 or 30 liters of methane per day from one little hole, and it does that all year,” she says. “And then you realize there are hundreds of spots like that and millions of lakes.” By venting methane into the atmosphere, the lakes are amplifying the global warming that created them: Methane is a potent greenhouse gas. Carbon dioxide is the main one, because the atmosphere holds 200 times as much of it. But a given amount of methane traps at least 25 times as much heat—unless you burn it first. Then it enters the atmosphere as CO₂.

That’s the other side of this Jekyll-and-Hyde story: A lot of methane is being burned these days. In the past decade the technology called hydraulic fracturing, “fracking” for short, has enabled drillers in the United States to extract natural gas from deeply buried shales they couldn’t tap before. Natural gas supplies have surged; prices have plummeted. Fracking is now spreading around the world, and it’s controversial. The gas boom has degraded landscapes and polluted water. But it has also had environmental benefits. Natural gas burns much cleaner than coal. In part because American power plants have been switching from coal to cheap gas, U.S. emissions of CO₂ from fossil fuels fell last year, even as the world set another record.

The catch is, methane emissions are rising. What’s coming out of Arctic lakes is troubling, Walter Anthony says, because some of it seems to be coming not from bottom mud but from deeper geologic reservoirs that had hitherto been securely capped by permafrost—and that contain hundreds of times more methane than is in the atmosphere now. Still, most methane emissions today come from lower latitudes, and most are related more directly to human activities. A growing amount seems to be leaking, for instance, from gas wells and pipelines. Just how warm Earth gets this century will hinge in part on how we balance the good and bad of methane—on how much of it we capture and burn, and how much we inadvertently let loose.

By Marianne Lavelle, National Geographic | Read more:
Photograph by Mark Thiessen

Do My Tweets Really Matter?

“Find a band to manage. Understand the news. Study Japanese. Practise the harp,” reads Sasha’s to-do list in Jennifer Egan’s novel A Visit From the Goon Squad. Egan distills in four short sentences a prevalent kind of anxiety. Sasha’s goals require her to possess multiple shades of talent and skill, and the list is poignant because we know it’s unlikely she’ll actually do these impressive to-dos. Had the list read, “Become a better teacher. Walk more frequently. Remember people I love,” its poetic impact would have been quite different. But Egan wishes us to anticipate the miniature tragedy awaiting Sasha just as it awaits us all during lives in which there is never time to download all the photographs; lives in the context of which, like Sasha, we find it hard to “understand the news”, not solely because we are wise to the fact we are not hearing the whole story, but because the concept of “understanding” entails a purposive change in behaviour in order to make it feel meaningful.

A new book by Anne Cvetkovich, Depression, A Public Feeling (Duke University Press, £15.99), sets out to challenge “contemporary medical notions” of depression “that simultaneously relieve one of responsibility (it’s just genes or chemicals) and provide agency (you can fix it by taking a pill)”. Depression, she says, “can be seen as a category that manages and medicalises” the feelings associated with “keeping up with corporate culture and the market economy, or with being completely neglected by it”. A section in which Cvetkovich describes her own depression is followed by chapters that focus on contemporary artists and also on a number of writers, each of whom suffered from depression and writer’s block. In anatomising her “lived experience” of writer’s block, Cvetkovich invites the reader to ask whether, despite the trade-specific terminology, this is still a symptom exclusive to writers.

In a celebrated essay published in Harper’s magazine in 1996, Jonathan Franzen describes being “a local kid returning to St. Louis on a fancy book tour”. This was “obscurely disappointing” to him, but he said nothing, having “already realised that the money, the hype, the limo ride to a Vogue shoot weren’t simply fringe benefits. They were the main prize, the consolation for no longer mattering to the culture.” What kind of mattering would have been enough?  (...)

Franzen’s “obscure disappointment” developed into what he called “depression”. He is a writer, so it got pretty intellectual and complicated. He describes his emergence from this state in terms of his writing, as “a move from depressive realism”, in which “you decide that it’s the world that’s sick”, to “tragic realism . . . the most reliable indicator [of which] in a work of fiction, is comedy”. The psychoanalyst Melanie Klein described aspects of infantile development that bear comparison with Franzen’s ordeal. In order for a baby to emerge from a primitive mental state, which Klein called “paranoid-schizoid”, he must acknowledge the separateness and the coexisting virtues and flaws of his mother. This new consciousness comes with grief but it also engenders compassion and art, and one of its reliable indicators is comedy. Once experienced, the paranoid-schizoid state is not forgotten, however; it is recalled in adult life through paranoia or any state that seeks to locate an unequivocal badness outside the self. There have always been experiences afforded by a writing life – the omnipotent fantasy at the desk, the horrors of the mixed reviews – that seem to invite this recollection.

But as a psychotherapist I see people with solicitor’s block and banker’s block and designer’s block and surgeon’s block – and the pain is the same pain in each case. The variation is in its intensity, the circumstances in which it is experienced and the vocabulary used to describe it. The degree to which the “block” gives rise to “depression” in writers, or non-writers, may depend on each individual’s adjustment to the impossibility of “mattering” in any way that obliterates the fact of death, the possibility that there is no God and the minuteness of the self in the grand scale of time. Existential fears, like the literary ones that give them a specific iteration, may be a grown-up way of recalling the first experience of powerlessness, of “not mattering” to a mummy busy with an independent life.

When asked to name what sort of training is required to become a writer, Hemingway is said to have replied “an unhappy childhood”. Could it be that people are all somehow becoming more like individuals who have, historically, become writers? Could our lives all somehow be offering experiences very like writers’ experiences? No matter how extraordinary the circumstances in which they experience their “not mattering”, writers are themselves extraordinary only in the sense that our maladjustment to ordinary vulnerabilities requires such extraordinary palliation – whole lives spent toiling away at not very lucrative works of art. Tolstoy eventually gave up writing because he felt it distracted him from the more important work of prayer. He was probably right but it is hard to be so generous to his private soul as to wish away his art, even though its production must have required him to realise – even after Anna Karenina – that he still didn’t matter enough and there would need to be another book.

Cvetkovich notes the universal vulnerabilities exacerbated by the specific crises of her academic life – getting tenure, writing papers, teaching, publication. This widescreen perspective makes room for her abstract idea that “depression emerges in response to the demand that the self become a sovereign individual defined by the ability to create distinctive projects and agendas”. The consequence of this “demand” is that “those who fail to measure up . . . are pathologised as depressed”. Sasha’s to-do list captures precisely this contemporary desperation to “create distinctive projects”, which, if you don’t write a book, require a personalised and personally demanding array of accomplishments. And alongside this need to prove oneself sits the related longing to achieve a meaningful role in an unfathomable, media-imparted sense of the world. Or, in Egan’s excruciating abbreviation, to “understand the news”.

by Talitha Stevenson, The New Statesman |  Read more:

Photo: Getty Images