Sy Hersh has some troubling details about the way the Obama administration explained its intelligence that Assad was solely responsible for the sarin gas attack last August 21. They also downplayed the distinct possibility – aired in their own intelligence – that the al Nusra front may have gotten access to the materials.
A History Of Sponsored Content
The always-worth-reading Jack Shafer digs up the long history of passing off advertizing as editorial:
Advertisements masquerading as editorial copy date back at least to the late 19th century, when they were called “reading notices,” according to the Encyclopedia of American Journalism. Publishers encouraged the placement of reading notices, which placed brand and company names in news stories without any disclaimers, because it was more profitable than conventional advertisements.
And the critics then sound uncannily like this blog today:
In his memoirs, Washington Gladden wrote about quitting his job as a reporter at the New York Independent in 1874 because he could not convince the paper to stop publishing reading notices and publisher’s notices that looked like news stories. “They seem to
be essentially evil, and a weakness to the paper,” Gladden wrote. “My scruple may be a foolish one, but I cannot overcome it.” (Hat tips to Prof. Ronald R. Rodgers for this and several other historical pointers.) Renowned journalist Charles A. Dana despised the form, too, writing in 1895, “Let every advertisement appear as an advertisement; no sailing under false colors.” His sentiment was shared by many colleagues, including Editor and Publisher, which editorialized against them, and Adolph S. Ochs, owner of the New York Times. Idealistic publisher E.W. Scripps, who founded an ad-free newspaper in Chicago in 1911, thought avoiding unlabeled reading notices made “good business sense.”
But reading notices were considered so effective that one 1908 book on advertising devoted an entire chapter to “Puffs, Reading Notices, Want Advertisements, Etc.” The key to writing a good reading notice, author Albert E. Edgar advised, was duplicity. “A reading notice of any kind has a certain amount of value because the public reads them as matters of news and not as items of advertising.”
The core business model of sponsored content is lying to readers in order to whore out more completely to advertizers. Call that what you will – “advanced advertorial techniques” or “partners” – the better the lie the more effective the ad. The small question is whether media sites whose fundamental goal is deceiving readers eventually render themselves obsolete. As the WSJ’s Gerard Baker puts it:
An advertiser wants to advertise in The Wall Street Journal to be seen and to be associated with a brand like The Wall Street Journal, or The Financial Times or Bloomberg, because those news organizations are respected. If [advertisers] manipulate the digital or print operations of those news organizations, it makes the reader confused as to what is news and what is advertising, and the reader’s trust, the very reason that those advertisers want to advertise in those news organizations, goes away.
Nate Silver gives it eighteen months, tops. I suspect that’s optimistic. By which time no one may be able to tell the difference between an ad and a piece.
Vermeer’s Dirty Little Secret
Curiosity turned into a major discovery in the art world when inventor Tim Jenison stumbled into proving that the celebrated, hyperrealistic paintings of 17th century master Johannes Vermeer were achieved not through pure genius but through the aid of the camera obscura, a device that projects a perfect image of its surroundings onto a screen:
[Jenison] traveled to Delft again and again, scouting the places where Vermeer had painted. He learned to read Dutch. He paid for translations of old Latin texts on optics and art. Much later, he did a computer analysis of a high-resolution scan of a Vermeer interior, and discovered “an exponential relationship in the light on the white wall.” The brightness of any surface becomes exponentially less bright the farther it is from a light source—but the unaided human eye doesn’t register that. According to Jenison, the painting he digitally deconstructed shows just such a diminution from light to dark.
But still, exactly how did Vermeer do it? One day, in the bathtub, Jenison had a eureka moment:
a mirror. If the lens focused its image onto a small, angled mirror, and the mirror was placed just between the painter’s eye and the canvas, by glancing back and forth he could copy that bit of image until the color and tone precisely matched the reflected bit of reality. Five years ago, Jenison tried it out on the kitchen table. He took a black-and-white photograph and mounted it upside down, since a lens would project an image upside down. He put a round two-inch mirror on a stand between the photo and his painting surface. He immediately found that “when the color is the same, the mirror edge disappears,” and you’re through with that bit. Five hours later, he had painted a perfect duplicate of the photo, an astounding proof of concept by someone who can’t draw and had never painted a thing. Then he used his mirror trick to copy a color photo. Again, perfect. “I couldn’t believe my eyes,” he says.
[Illusionist and entertainer] Teller, who with Penn Jillette made a documentary of Jenison’s project, doesn’t believe it spoils the legacy of Vermeer or any artist who made use of the method:
“One of the things I learned about the world of art,” Teller says, “is there are people who really want to believe in magic, that artists are supernatural beings—there was some guy who could walk up and do that. But art is work like anything else—concentration, physical pain. Part of the subject of this movie is that a great work of art should seem to have magically sprung like a miracle on the wall. But to get that miracle is an enormous, aggravating pain.” To see Vermeer as “a god” makes him “a discouraging bore,” Teller goes on. But if you think of him as a genius artist and an inventor, he becomes a hero: “Now he can inspire.”
Stop Giving Out Awards For Arrests
A recent Brennan Center report suggests reforming the Justice Assistance Grant (JAG) Program, which doles out money to states:
Current measures inadvertently incentivize unwise policy choices. Federal officials ask states to report the number of arrests, but not whether the crime rate dropped. They measure the amount of cocaine seized, but not whether arrestees were screened for drug addiction. They tally the number of cases prosecuted, but not whether prosecutors reduced the number of petty crime offenders sent to prison. In short, today’s JAG performance measures fail to show whether the programs it funds have achieved “success”: improving public safety without needless social costs.
Scott Lemieux wholeheartedly supports this idea:
Using the power of the purse to reduce incarceration rates would not necessarily find a hostile reception in state capitols. As the Prospect‘s Abby Rapoport reportede arlier this year, prison reform is not the sole province of the left. Several states controlled by conservative Republicans—including Texas and Kansas—have enacted salutary prison reforms. Indeed, state legislatures should consider using their own budgets to focus police and prosecutors on crime-reduction goals rather than rewarding incarceration as an end in itself.
Unpleasantville
The architecture of “unpleasant designs” shapes the behavior of urban-dwellers:
San Francisco, the birthplace of street skateboarding, was also the first city to design solutions such as “pig’s ears” – metal flanges added to the corner edges of pavements and low walls to deter skateboarders. These periodic bumps along the edge create a barrier that would send a skateboarder tumbling if they tried to jump and slide along.
Indeed, one of the main criticisms of such design is that it aims to exclude already marginalised populations such as youths or the homeless. Unpleasant design, [PhD student Selena] Savic says, “is there to make things pleasant, but for a very particular audience. So in the general case, it’s pleasant for families, but not pleasant for junkies.”
Preventing rough sleeping is a recurring theme. Any space that someone might lie down in, or even sit too long, is likely to see spikes, railings, stones or bollards added. In the Canadian city of Calgary, authorities covered the ground beneath the Louise Bridge with thousands of bowling ball-sized rocks. This unusual landscaping feature wasn’t for the aesthetic benefit of pedestrians walking along the nearby path, but part of a plan to displace the homeless population that took shelter under the bridge.
(Photo of rocks beneath Calgary’s Louise Bridge by Flickr user anarchitect)
MFAs Aren’t Worth It
Jerry Saltz urges all but the wealthiest young artists to stay away from MFA programs, which after two years are “hovering near a quarter-million dollars” in cost. And besides, students have to deal with “a lot of bullshit”:
Iffy artist-teachers wield enormous artistic and intellectual influence over students, favors are doled out in power cliques. Zealous theoreticians continue to scare the creativity and opinions out their third generation of young artists and critics. Too many students make highly derivative work (often like that of their teachers) and no one tells them so. A lot of artists in these programs learn how to talk a good game instead of being honestly self-critical about their own work.
… I’ve taught at institutions across the prestige spectrum. Truthfully? Students who go to high-profile schools get a subtle eighteen-month bump after they graduate, in part because dealers and collectors (oy) see their MFA shows. However, once this short-term advantage dissipates, the artist becomes one in a crowd, with a mountain of debt, and may need to have a full-time job indefinitely to pay it off. There’s no surer way to throw away that early advantage than getting a job that saps their art-making energy.
Saltz also recommends a new essay by artist Coco Fusco, who “pulls back the curtains on the risky business and chancy racket of the Master of Fine Arts degree.”
Dropping The E
Joshua David Stein chronicles how the letter is used less and less on the Internet:
[I]n 2004, Stewart Butterfield and Caterina Fake founded Flickr, a photograph-sharing
application, without the standard penultimate E. “The most compelling reason to remove the E,” explained Ms. Fake, “was that we were unable to acquire the domain Flicker.com … The rest of the team were more in favor of other options, such as ‘FlickerIt’ or ‘FlickerUp’ but somehow, through persuasion or arm-twisting, I prevailed.” It was good news for the company but bad news for the letter. A year later, the company was acquired by Yahoo for $35 million.
Soon many startups began jettisoning their Es like toxic assets. In 2009, Grindr, a geosocial network application for gay men, chose to make do without the letter E. Membership quickly swelled. Myriad other brands followed suit, including Blendr, Gathr, Pixlr, Readr, Timr, Viewr, Pushr.
And of course, there is the blogging platform Tumblr, whose launch in 2007 may have marked the true end of E. “There are a variety of reasons why Tumblr contains no E, from branding considerations to environmental factors (fewer letters mean lower power consumption by our servers),” said the company’s editorial director, Christopher Price. “At the end of the day, however, it all comes down to one simple, absolute truth: Tumbler.com looks fucking stupid.”
(Image via Flickr user Double–M)
Emigration Reform
Charles Kenny proposes that we export the growing ranks of unemployed Americans to other countries that need more workers, pointing to Chile, Hong Kong, Indonesia, Mexico, and South Korea as potential destinations:
According to the State Department, only about 6.3 million U.S. citizens live abroad, or around 2 percent of the domestic population. In relative terms, that’s pathetic. About 5.5 million British people live permanently abroad, almost five times the U.S. level in per capita terms. Maybe they’re trying to escape the lousy weather, but it isn’t like Brits have natural advantages over Americans as travelers. British people are almost as bad at speaking other languages as Americans are, and in terms of haughty isolationism and disdain for foreigners, surely Brits are worse. (I’m allowed say this — I’m British.) So why shouldn’t America send out some huddled masses for once?
But would these other countries want American workers?
It is true that Gallup polls suggest only 14 percent of U.S. citizens claim they can speak Spanish well enough to hold a conversation. Look at any other language and the numbers become truly dire… The good news is that English has official or special status in countries that are home to 2 billion people, and one in four of the world’s people speak English to some level of competence. And though it’s true that jobs are hardest to come by for the least educated Americans, it’s still not a pretty picture for recent grads. The unemployment rate for those ages 20 to 29 who had graduated from college in 2011 was 12.6 percent as of October 2011. But even young Americans who haven’t made it to university have received a quality of education considerably higher than that of most people in emerging economies.
The Fine Art Of Oppression
Noting that Qatar “is estimated to have recently spent well in excess of $1 billion on Western art,” James Panero considers the implications:
On the one hand, Qatar’s art initiatives can be seen as a modernizing force, one that could liberalize the tribal attitudes of the country’s native population and pave the way for further political reform. On the other hand, contemporary art may merely serve as a cover for further repressive policies. This artifice of modernism mirrors Qatar’s other contradictory diplomatic positions. An ally to the United States and host of U.S. Central Command, Qatar nevertheless reportedly helped Khalid Sheikh Mohammed escape U.S. capture in the 1990s, may have been paying protection money to al Qaeda, and is currently arming radical Syrian rebels and offering safe haven to Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood.
The terrible history of Iran demonstrates what can happen when a modernist culture merely overlays a repressive regime. In such circumstances, artists and organizations might profit by spreading modernity, but they are also abetting a compromised state.
(Photo of skyline in Doha, Qatar, as seen from the Museum of Islamic Art, by Mark Pegrum)
What Inspires Altruism?
Christine Gross-Loh profiles the famed bioethicist Peter Singer, author of The Life You Can Save:
One reason, according to Singer, that people are so hesitant to give is they think their kindness will not matter. This tendency to think that one can’t do very much, or to dismiss all forms of aid as useless, is what researchers call “futility thinking:” What difference can one person even make? Research indicates that money makes people more individualistic and less altruistic. In other words, as societies become wealthier, their citizens become more individualistic and depend less upon one another. Self-interest becomes the norm.
But one antidote against futility thinking is to carefully research charities and organizations—something that Singer’s $100 donation experiment allowed students do. They were presented with four organizations, asked to research and discuss their merits, and vote on where the $100 should go. They applied the lessons they’d learned in the course: that not all donations are equal, and that some donations have a measurably more positive impact than the same amount donated elsewhere…. They learn that their money will always go much further overseas: that a very small amount of money for an American can be life-saving to someone who is desperately poor. In other words, they learn about the tenets of effective altruism: how to evaluate organizations for transparency and benefits, and figure out which forms of aid are the most cost-effective. This is information that tends to inspire more giving.
