Month: August 2013

Zachary Seward notes a growing trend in movie names, especially among video-on-demand titles:

Film studios have figured out that, all else being equal, it’s better for a movie to appear toward the top of the A-to-Z listings where people increasingly pick what they’re going to watch next.

“We call it alpha-stacking,” says Paul Bales of the Asylum, an independent studio that specializes in straight-to-video horror films. Last year, the company generated $16 million in revenue with movies that included Adopting Terror, Air Collision, Alien Origin, American Worships, and Abraham Lincoln vs. Zombies.

But movie studios aren’t the first to play this game:

Phonebooks are typically front-loaded with small businesses that all seem enamored of the letter “A.” Authors writing under pseudonyms have been known to pick names that appear closer to the start of fiction shelves in bookstores. But it’s worse for digital media, with seemingly endless supply but few good ways of navigating among the competitors. Companies depend on their products to appear in hand-selected feature menus, crowdsourced most-popular lists, or algorithmic picks. (Netflix recently said that 75% of viewing on the service is driven by its personalized recommendations.) Short of that, it comes down to tricks. People who make mobile apps, for instance, admit to naming conventions they hope will compete alphabetically in crowded app stores.

Update from a reader:

My friend’s dad growing up was the president of a bank named BancFirst, and I was told it was so it would appear in front of all those loser banks that used the “K”.

Strange how foreign media ignore how Russians wrote Edward Snowden’s name in English. Namely: Eduard Dzhozef Snouden pic.twitter.com/7RW8sNCq1R

— Russian Market (@russian_market) August 1, 2013

Snowden is already getting job offers in his new host country. Julia Ioffe speaks to the leaker’s lawyer:

“[H]is father is coming [to Moscow] soon, his American lawyer is coming. He won’t be left to face his fate alone.” He added, “He has American friends here. So everything will be okay.”

It is unclear who those “American friends” are, and how Snowden, who has not had visitors for 39 days, and has never been to Moscow, made them. What we do know is that Moscow is still crawling with American spooks—as we learned from the CIA agent nabbed in Moscow while wearing an obscene blond wig—so maybe those are his American friends in Moscow. Likely, though, Snowden will live in an apartment that is bugged to the hilt, as any of my American (and British) friends in Moscow can tell you. They’d also likely tell you about how the Russian security services will regularly pay visits your apartment, usually when you’re not there, and leave overt “we were here” clues behind: missing rugs, opened emails, a ladder in the bedroom, a gun on your welcome mat. It may not be as excruciating as intercom announcements from a world now closed to you, but it’s a close second, believe me.”

Well, Snowden wanted to protest a surveillance state, so we await his resistance to the full metal version in Russia. Or will he stay mum? Is it only when the US engages in surveillance that he is troubled? A week ago, Ioffe imagined what life would be like for Snowden in Russia:

The reality that lies before [him] is not that of a Petersburg slum or a cherry orchard. More likely, he will be given an apartment somewhere in the endless, soulless highrises with filthy stairwells that spread like fields around Moscow’s periphery. He will live there for five years before he will be given citizenship. He’ll likely be getting constant visits from the SVR (the Russian NSA) to mine the knowledge he carries in his brain. Maybe, he will be given a show on Russia Today, alongside the guy who got him into this pickle to begin with, Julian Assange. Or he, like repatriated Russian spy Anna Chapman, might be given a fake job at a state-friendly bank where he will do nothing but draw a salary. (Chapman, by the way, recently tweeted this at Snowden: “Snowden, will you marry me?!”) Maybe he will marry a Russian woman, who will quickly shed her supple, feminine skin and become a tyrant, and every dark winter morning, Snowden will sit in his tiny Moscow kitchen, drinking Nescafe while Svetlana cooks something greasy and tasteless, and he will sit staring into his black instant coffee, hating her.

Update from a reader:

Maybe I’ve read too many spy thrillers (and I adore “The Americans” on FX) but what if this all an elaborate plot by the US to plant Snowden in Moscow as a spy! He’s a double double agent!

Amanda Palleschi profiles blogger-turned-therapist John Kim, whose practice is conducted on a site called The Angry Therapist:

After logging years in L.A. coffee shops working on a screenplay, [Kim] decided to become a licensed therapist. He began a Tumblr blog chronicling career change and post-divorce struggles. One day, a Tumblr follower wrote him an email asking for advice on how to cope with a recent breakup. Kim wrote an insightful email back. The girl followed up, sending Kim an unsolicited $20 bill. Not long after, she became Kim’s very first client, and the site acquired a donation button. The rest is every blogger’s fever dream: He quit his day job, had to start a waiting list of clients, started hiring a team to assist with marketing and product development as well as run his online groups.

Nearly one million page views, over 100 clients and over 3,000 tumblr “followers” later, Kim hopes he is giving talk therapy a needed image tune-up.

[Both patient Charlene] Corpus and Kim say today’s twenty- and thirty-somethings are more open to therapy and self-improvement practices than their parents’ might have been, and that, paired with their tech know-how, could change the market of psychotherapy. A one-on-one Google Hangout session with Kim runs around $90 an hour and group sessions are $25 (like many therapists in brick-and-mortar offices today, Kim does not accept health insurance), but it costs just $9 a month to become a “member” of The Angry Therapist’s “community”: a word Kim uses often when describing the goals of his practice. Clients find Kim online – through their own tumblr blogs, through friends’ referrals on Facebook, through someone posting an Instagram of a quote from his blog. Kim’s clients are all over the U.S. and abroad. They are college kids with eating disorders, young professionals going through breakups and divorces, busy business travelers, even high-class escorts.

Palleschi points out, “Experts believe that 80 to 90 percent of all therapy will be done remotely within 10 years” but therapists like Kim also face unknown regulatory hurdles. Since I moved to New York, almost my entire talk-therapy has been via phone, as it always is when I’m in Provincetown. It works for me, but I’m not sure if it would if I hadn’t spent an intensive amount of time in her office in her presence for several years. Sometimes, especially with issues like transference, you need to be physically with a therapist. But sometimes, depending on the type of therapy, you don’t. I can see the logic of expanding online shrinkage.

Michele Catalano shares her recent run-in with the FBI and Homeland Security [see update] a “joint terrorism task force”, whose agents searched her home after her family’s combined search history produced keywords like “pressure cooker” and “backpack”. It’s a vivid reminder of the police surveillance state we now live in to protect ourselves from deaths by terrorist. Philip Bump speculates how the feds could end up at her door:

It’s possible that one of the two of them is tangentially linked to a foreign terror suspect, allowing the government to review their internet activity. After all, that “no more than two other people” ends up covering millions of people. Or perhaps the NSA, as part of its routine collection of as much internet traffic as it can, automatically flags things like Google searches for “pressure cooker” and “backpack” and passes on anything it finds to the FBI.

Or maybe it was something else. On Wednesday, The Guardian reported on XKeyscore, a program eerily similar to Facebook search that could clearly allow an analyst to run a search that picked out people who’d done searches for those items from the same location. How those searches got into the government’s database is a question worth asking; how the information got back out seems apparent.  It is also possible that there were other factors that prompted the government’s interest in Catalano and her husband. He travels to Asia, she notes in her article. Who knows. Which is largely Catalano’s point.

Update from a reader:

The Atlantic updated their story to clarify that this was not the feds. From there the speculation is all nonsense. There are any number of ways that this could be happening. None of them have much to do with XKeyscore which, judging by the map in the slide show, doesn’t have enough data collection points in the US to cover all of this. One very explanation is that Boston area ISP’s are flagging these searches since the terrorist attack. This sounds like a possible violation of the wiretap act on the part of the authorities to me. I’m looking forward to hearing how they legally justify it.

After reading Beutler’s autopsy of the Republicans’ transportation and housing bill, Sargent sighs:

It turns out that cutting spending is difficult and unpopular. This and the recent House GOP farm bill fiasco again suggest House Republicans will struggle to pass major governing items without moderating and enlisting the help of Dems, rather than moving ever to the right in search of conservative votes. … One House GOPer even openly lamented the GOP leadership’s misguided priorities. Rep. Thomas Rooney of Florida wanted to get the farm bill done, telling the Post: “I would have loved to go home, especially to my district, which is mostly agricultural … and been able to be like, ‘It’s a done deal. We’re good.’” But here’s what actually happened:

Instead, Rooney found himself voting Wednesday on measures with such flashy titles as “Keep the IRS Off Your Health Care Act” and “Stop Playing on Citizen’s Cash Act.” There’s also the STOP IRS Act — STOP stands for “Stop Targeting Our Politics” — that would permit the IRS to fire employees “who take official actions for political purposes.” And there’s a plan to bar the IRS from implementing or enforcing any aspect of the 2010 health-care law — the 40th time in recent years that the House has voted to repeal, defund or otherwise deconstruct the legislation.

This is talk radio insanity posturing as legislation. These people have no business being in the Congress at all. Dish coverage of the farm bill here and here. Yglesias zooms out:

It’s in the conjunction of these two failures [the farm bill and the latest one] that you see a mortal threat to the practical existence of the Republican governing majority in the House.

That’s because if you can’t find 218 Republicans out of 234 to vote for a bill, the other option is to start with 201 Democrats and try to add two dozen Republicans. And in many ways, that kind of coalition makes more sense given that to become law a bill also needs to pass a majority-Democratic Senate and be signed into law by a Democratic president. A “Pelosi Plus” House bill, in other words, can actually become law whereas a Boehner Majority House bill is at best a bargaining ploy. Now normally that kind of legislation simply can’t move in the House. The party that holds the majority forms a cartel and blocks bills from coming to the floor that don’t have support in the majority caucus. Boehner has allowed select violations of this so-called Hastert Rule (though in practice the rule predates Hastert) but there’s at least a chance that he’ll be forced to suspend it wholesale throughout the appropriations process.

A relevant precedent for this, in some ways, could be seen in the 1981-82 congress that gave us the Reagan Revolution. Republicans won the presidency in the 1980 elections and secured a majority in the Senate, but Democrats still held the House. A large faction of conservative Boll Weevil Democrats were willing to support a lot of Reagan ideas, but that was far from a majority of the House Democratic caucus. But in what I think you’d have to consider a rare concrete example of a “mandate,” Speaker Tip O’Neill let conservative bills come to the floor and let the Democratic majority get rolled by a GOP-Boll Weevil coalition on a bunch of key votes.

The dynamics of a meltdown of the GOP majority would be different from that and so would the legislative outcomes. There won’t be an “Obama Revolution” if the Republicans get rolled, but there just might be bipartisan deals to replace sequestration and reform the immigration system. The Republican majority, in other words, may be nearly immune to electoral defeat thanks to favorable district boundaries—but it’s not immune to its own dysfunction.

Any political system where one party is “nearly immune to electoral defeat” is a broken one. Bernstein’s take:

I’ll just add one bit that I don’t think is getting quite enough emphasis. … [E]ven these bills, bills too extreme to pick up any moderate Democrats, bill so extreme that they lose moderate Republicans … also are not extreme enough to get all of the conservatives. That’s what the reporting about Transportation-HUD says. See also: the vote on this appropriations bill, which lost 9 Republicans; or this one, where they lost 10. There are 234 Republicans in the House, but the cold hard fact is that on appropriations bills there are at least a handful who are probably out of reach.

Kilgore’s two cents:

No wonder some conservatives want to make the debt limit/appropriations battle this fall “about” Obamacare. At least they know how to say “No!” in unison.

My take on the GOP’s latest nihilism here.

(Photo: Tony Karumba/AFP/Getty)

The military is cracking down on the “hundreds” of officers and enlistees who use Craigslist Baghdad for hookups:

In Afghanistan, where commanders have forbid any sexual encounters between unwed people, virtually anyone who tries to set up a meeting online can become a target of investigators. One Marine lance corporal found that out in 2012, after he posted an advertisement on Craigslist for a sexual rendezvous. The guy he met at Camp Leatherneck, whom he thought was also looking to hook up, turned out to be an undercover agent with the NCIS.

My first thought: there’s a Craigslist Baghdad? Lester Brathwaite is indignant:

What is this, Baton Rouge? Officers entrapping sexed-up service members? Isn’t there a war or something going on? And considering the danger these brave and incredibly horny men face each day, what’s wrong with getting an innocent beej from a fellow soldier?

Laura Beck adds:

I guess whenever you confine a bunch of 23-year-olds in one place, they’re gonna get laid or post penis pics trying.