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The View From Your Window Contest: Winner #239

A reader gives it a shot:

Based off of substantial research – those look like funny cars! / green / mountains / Google: “towns in Iceland near mountains” – I believe this is Seyðisfjörður, Iceland. I don’t actually think I’m right, but Seyðisfjörður is probably the coolest name of a town ever.

Já. Another reader shivers:

I’m not sure if it’s an educated guess or a wishful thinking to get away from the snow and cold of a Michigan winter, but either way, I feel like it’s a street I have driven down in Cancun. Or maybe I’m just wishing I could.

Or maybe this charming locale?

Bumblefuck, Idaho

This contestant gets to the right hemisphere:

New Zealand. I’ve read the Dish for year and this is my first time writing in. I gasped when I saw this week’s VFYW. I travelled around North and South Island for six weeks this past summer and I miss it terribly. It’s an incredible country. The trip marked my first time backpacking and that that green encircled “i” was a constant source of help. It is a sign for an i-SITE, NZ’s immensely helpful network of information centers that even the smallest towns seem to have. After five minutes of searching I decided to give up- looking for pictures of all the notable mountains would take forever… Oh the NZ mountains!

Spinning the globe, this reader hits the right continent:

The construction techniques, vehicles, and topography all look like the Andes to me, and are particularly reminiscent of Cajas National Park, so let’s go with Cuenca, Ecuador.

Another gets the right country:

Could it be we’ve gone literally to the end of the earth this week? I’ve been Google-wandering Latin America today, and Ushuaia, Argentina is where I’ve landed. The mountains are tall, jagged and young, and the terrain is green in January: it’s either near the equator or somewhere in the Southern Hemisphere. Too mountainous and too snowy to be Hawaiian volcanos. The cars are left-hand drive, so it’s not New Zealand. License plates are shaped like North American plates, unlike Chile’s, Peru’s or Brazil’s. They’re light-colored with what seems to be a horizontal black streak: Argentina. So—Patagonia? And pretty far south: last exit before Antarctica, in fact. Google Street View seems to confirm matching architecture (vibrant colors on walls and peaked roofs) and sidewalks. I can’t get quite to the right street today…but for kicks, I’m going to guess I’m somewhere near the corner of Neuquén and Islas del Atlántico Sur. Unless I’m on the wrong continent. Either way, Ushuaia looks amazing, and I’ve now discovered a new town to put at the very top of my wish list. Thanks, as always, for this challenge.

To far south on the guess though. Here’s the right one:

Oh my fucking god, I got it! I’m not the type of person who gets these things, so I think you’ll have thousands of correct answers this week. Something said “Patagonia,” I Googled “patagonia argentina village” and got pics of El Chalten that looked right, decided to look around on Street View and dropped the little man right next to the hotel. The triangulation to find the right window (see pic), figuring out how to draw an arrow on the picture and export it, and composing this email took way, way longer than finding the location. Cleverly, I scribbled a superfluous “here” on the picture in an attempt to get featured:

That’s the right window too. Another reader adds, “what an welcome change”:

A view where I’m not on wild goose chases researching page after page of minarets. I think, being from Minnesota, I’m better at finding cold places than warm. I can sniff out Nunavut or Halifax no problem, but Dakar or Turkey leaves me bewildered. This week is no different. This week’s view shouted high Andes at me. Don’t know why, never been there. A really good hunch. This looked like the kind of place that outdoor adventure seekers would flock to, as evidenced by the mountain bike leaning on the building in the foreground. A Google search for “Andes mountain hostel” led in short order El Chalten, Argentina. With the aid of Street View and I found our hotel, The Chalten Suites Hotel.

Indeed, no one seemed to mind looking through Patagonian imagery this week, as summed up by this former winner:

Those mountains! If you told me that was a painted background I’d believe you.

Another sets the scene with a digital background:

Hotel Los Cerros is circled in red and the Chalten Suites is circled in green with an arrow indicating the direction of the view:

And a rookie gets his first ID with this impressive entry:

Okay, I’m new to the contest. But I narrowed this one down to four windows. I couldn’t read any of the signs, but I could see that they were written in the roman alphabet. And it was probably a language in which “i” stands for information.

First, I ruled out countries that drive on the left side, so it couldn’t be New Zealand or South Africa. Next, I ruled out real northern mountains (Canada, Alaska, Norway), because of the lack of evergreen trees, and the lack of snow. Right now, it’s winter here in the Northern Hemisphere. A place at this altitude would be covered in snow and ice. So I figured it was South America. My first hunch was Chile. So I started looking at Chilean license plates, but they didn’t look right. The license plate in the picture looks like it has a black spot in the middle. I googled photos of traffic in Argentina. Cars in the distance, ones whose plates are too far to read, appear to have a black spot in the middle (because the plates are black with white letters, and there’s a large black space between the letters on the left, and the numbers on the right). So I googled Patagonian mountain town images. One of the first towns I found was El Chaltén. Everything looked right: the snowcapped mountain, the greenery, the architecture. I confirmed it when I kept seeing photos of the building with the huge red roof (in the top right corner of the VFYW photo).

In the view, there’s a sign that sticks up over the larger yellow building that looked like it said “coffee.” So I googled “El Chaltén Coffee Shops,” and found a guy’s Twitter photo of him sitting in a hammock outside of Mathilda, a coffee shop, in El Chaltén. Mathilda is the yellow building next to the information center. You can see the information center in his photo, and I knew I was there. It was scintillating stuff. Then I used Google’s satellite map, found the roofs I was looking for – it’s not a large town – and used Street View (lucky) to put myself on that corner. I was staring at El Chaltén Suites Hotel.

There are four rooms with balconies like the one in the photo. I tried to do some kind of geometric voodoo to figure out which one it was. I think it’s one of the two closer to the center of the building. I’ll go with the furthest right of the balconied windows.

Team Facebook is back as well:

I was fixated on Iceland until someone set me straight … the moral of the story is: have well-travelled friends who can recognize Patagonia at a glance:

In Which The Democrats Finally Get A Clue

I have to say that, as rumors and reports came in last week that Obama was going to propose a straightforward redistribution from the mega-mega-rich to the struggling middle classes, I could scarcely believe it. I mean: how often does the Democratic party actually exercise solid pro-active political judgment? How often do they seize the policy initiative from Republicans? How often do they propose things thay passionately believe in and unabashedly direct the message to the vast majority of Americans treading water in rougher and rougher seas? How often does a winning Congressional party get effectively marginalized in the public debate just after a stunning mid-term win?

The proposal will no doubt be tossed around, as it should. But I see it as narrowly targeted in precisely the right way. It’s aimed at the way in which the super-rich avoid paying the same rates as middle class Americans, via a low capital gains rate; and in which they avoid taxes – the “step up in basis” loophole – which allows inherited wealth to be a much bigger factor in social and economic equality than is in any way justifiable in a democracy that values work over inheritance. It’s nicely targeted at the super-rich, super-shameless 1 percent, now busily taking even more sunlight away from Manhattan. And all this $320 billion would be redirected to the middle class – a tax cut for married couples; free community college; bigger tax credits for higher education; and wage subsidies for the working poor.

The term “populist” has been used to define this kind of package. I don’t quite buy that. Sure, it’s a piece of major redistribution. But that has to be seen in the context of the post-Reagan decades. Inequality now is far, far higher than it was in the 1970s and even the 1990s. If one tiny sector of society has seen its income (let alone wealth) go up by 120 percent in 35 years, while the vast majority have seen their incomes flat for the same thirty years, this is not populism. It’s an attempt at rescuing the basic social compact at the heart of any functioning and healthy democracy.

The wealth imbalance is at century-level highs. And socially, we are, it seems to me, at that Tocquevillean danger point, at which expectations as the economy recovers are getting higher. Dash those expectations with continuing minimal gains for the 99 percent – and continued enrichment of the very, very rich, and you have, to this conservative, a deeply unstable society, one teetering on the edge of serious unrest. That unrest never seems likely to come until it does. And so I see Obama’s redistribution from the mega-rich toward those who are not part of the rentier class of the finance sector as a balancing, rather than a revolution; as actually concerned with social stability and the sense of fairness that underlies the very legitimacy of a democracy, rather than the abstract theories of those Republicans still stuck in the 1970s (if you’re lucky) and the 1870s (if you’re not).

Some are claiming that this is “pure politics” because with a GOP-controlled Congress, none of it stands a chance of passing. You could say the same thing of much of what the GOP is proposing and has proposed for the last six years. And politics is made by bold moves like this that seem to read the signs of the times. They force the opposition to fashion a response to the same set of problems. And, in the recovery, they insist that the struggles of the middle class can indeed be ameliorated a little by government. What’s the GOP alternative? Giving the most reckless and culpable part of our economy – the finance sector – what it wants to unraveling Dodd-Frank bit by bit.

Torture defender Marc Thiessen suggests the following response to Obama’s sudden move:

Last July, Rep. Paul Ryan (R-Wis.) — now the chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee — laid out serious anti-poverty initiatives, including “opportunity grants” that would allow states to test different ways of fighting poverty and an expansion of the earned-income tax credit for childless workers, paid for by eliminating ineffective programs and corporate welfare. Other good ideas include my American Enterprise Institute colleague Michael Strain’s proposals to create relocation vouchers for the long-term unemployed, which would help those in high-unemployment areas move to states where jobs are abundant, as well as a lower minimum wage that would encourage firms to hire the long-term unemployed while supplementing their income with an EITC-like payment.

Those ideas are all worth exploring, but can they actually match the sheer appeal of a more direct lifeline to the middle class? But lowering the minimum wage at a time like this – even with an expanded EITC? Helping people to move to states with more growth? And the costs will be borne not by the top 0.1 percent, still making out like bandits on a bender – but by “eliminating ineffective programs and corporate welfare”. Let’s see them spell that out. But if the debate is about helping a middle class left in the dust of globalization and technological change and financial sector recklessness, you think that’ll work?

And this debate will take place, it now seems likely, at a time of rising growth rates, tumbling unemployment, unprecedented energy independence and an American economy now out-stripping all its developed country peers – even as the US middle class has stagnated, as Andrew Ross Sorkin notes today with a link to this graph:

There is something truly odd about the wealthiest country no longer with the wealthiest middle class, and in which every major competitor’s middle class is converging with ours’ in standards of living. This is the real end of American exceptionalism, in which working hard in the middle class is like being on a treadmill rather than a track.

Or to put it in another way: nothing Obama is proposing does more than spit in the wind of the soaring inequality of the last three decades. He would not even begin to preside over a society as equal as when Ronald Reagan was president. He’s just trying to use government to nudge us back toward that sane, middle-class, democratic middle so essential to a functioning and health democracy. I’d love to see the Republicans counter with something – but their ideology still prevents them from using government as a real tool in combating the dangerous trends of social and economic inequality.

So Obama’s next term begins today, in effect, because it will chart the future of Democratic priorities and offer them a clear and popular set of policies that address majority concerns in ways that the GOP has yet to figure out. My suspicion is that Jeb Bush gets this – and his position will strengthen as the appeal of the Democratic proposals sink in – for once, they’re easy to explain). Can Hillary Clinton channel her inner populist? She’d channel her inner anything if it meant winning the presidency. Can Jeb Bush persuade his Fox-addled base that only he can successfully counter the appeal of this populist agenda with a kinder to bankers, gentler to plutocrats version of the same? I don’t know.

What I do know is that the pattern we’ve observed with Obama from the get-go is reasserting itself yet again. Hang on the ropes; get pummeled; get shellacked; then punch suddenly back. What we’re seeing from Obama now is an attempt to shape the future of the Democrats for the next decade or so. And he’s kinda forcing Clinton’s hand in this. If she’s smart – and she is – she’ll grasp it tightly and go on the offensive.

Meep meep motherfuckers.

(Charts via Mother Jones here and here)

Why Cuba Needs The US

Joshua Jelly-Schapiro focuses on the island’s troubled economy:

A big part of the calculus informing Cuba’s new openness to the U.S., though, is about economic necessity. With Cuba’s birth rate having fallen below replacement level as far back as 1980 (partly thanks to Cuban women’s universal access to reproductive health and abortions), and its work force shrinking, the country’s vaunted health system faces pressing concerns about how it will care for the huge number of citizens readying to retire. Simply put, Cuba’s economic planners realized long ago that their socialist system couldn’t survive without more sources of foreign cash.

Francisco Toro connects the US-Cuba deal to falling oil prices:

The reason is that the considerable help Venezuela sends Cuba is in the form of barrels, not dollars. As oil prices fall, the value of Venezuela’s aid falls. In the final quarter of last year, Cuba’s state finances began to look worse and worse.

He calculates that it would “take some 480,000 extra tourists next year to make up the fiscal hit just from the recent drop in oil prices”:

The only other plausible source of extra revenue on this scale is remittances from the Cuban exile community in Miami and beyond. This is a dicier proposition, as the money relatives send creates a space for independence from state control that Havana’s old-line Stalinist leaders clearly fear. But in an economy that’s still as thoroughly state-controlled as Cuba’s, there’s little doubt that remittance money “trickles up” from individual pockets to the state, as people spend their foreign currency in the state-owned “convertible peso” shops that have a monopoly on the sale of a whole range of consumer goods, from PCs to refrigerators.

Which is why Havana negotiated for — and got — much looser rules for remittances from stateside Cubans. The new limit quadrupled to $2,000 per year and the licensing regime was greatly simplified.

Reviewing a new paper on remittances, Drezner considers how that money might change Cuba:

Multiparty elections are the key mechanism through which remittances can affect democratization. It doesn’t matter if these elections are neither free nor fair, just that they happen, and the dominant party can be surprised by weak electoral support. So, a key U.S. foreign policy goal should be for Cuba to allow for multiparty elections, even if they seem like sham elections at the outset.

Being There For A Stranger

Craig Lambert considers our propensity to make confidantes of outsiders:

Sociologists call the set of friends and family members people turn to when they want to talk out important matters the “core discussion network.” Its size averages about three people, and for 20 percent of the population, this network, sadly, includes no one. For nearly 30 years, social-network researchers have argued that each person’s closest, strongest ties comprise the core discussion network, but no one has empirically tested that assumption.

[Researcher Mario Luis] Small analyzed data from an online survey of 2,000 adults selected to represent the national U.S. population. Half the respondents were asked to identify their core discussion partners, but the other half were asked to “recall the last time they discussed a matter that was important to them. They were then asked to report on the topic they talked about and the person they talked to,” writes Small. They were also asked to report whom they were close to. These data produced the finding that 45 percent of confidants were people whom the respondents did not consider personally important; they were often not the family and close friends social scientists thought them to be.

Instead, a confidant might well be a barber or beauty-salon employee, a bartender, a therapist (either physical or psychological), or a trainer at the gym; they are priests, rabbis, doctors, and financial advisers. …

“In fact, we often avoid using people who are close to us as confidants,” Small explains, “exactly because they are important to us.” For one thing, a troublesome issue might concern that potential listener directly: one classic case is an extramarital affair. Another obstacle can arise if the discussion would worry the confidant: “A graduate student running short of money might not talk about this with his parents, out of fear of worrying them,” says Small. Third, people have more at stake in how important others see them. “If you are close to your sister, you don’t want to talk with her about some borderline-unethical action you are considering,” he explains. “You care a lot about her opinion of you.” And fourth, people avoid confiding in others because, inevitably, word gets around to someone else: in Small’s formulation, “Amy won’t talk to Bob about this, because then it will get to Charles.”

The Ruling We’ve Been Waiting For?

News broke on Friday that SCOTUS will rule once again on marriage equality. Orin Kerr predicts a historic victory:

The briefing schedule indicates that the Court will hear oral argument and decide the cases by the end of June — this Term rather than next Term. I don’t think there’s a lot of uncertainty as to how the Court will rule. Justice Ginsburg’s extrajudicial statements are usually a reliable guide, and her past comments suggest that there are already five votes for a right to SSM.

Garrett Epps considers the possibility of a mixed decision:

[E]ven if Justice Anthony Kennedy’s vote seems foreordained, he must choose between the rights of gays and lesbians—an issue on which he has fashioned a historic legacy—and the prerogatives of the states, about whose “dignity” and honor he has often rhapsodized. He might be tempted to split the baby by holding for the states on the “celebration” issue but for the challengers on “recognition.” (The Court’s grant of review was careful to split the two questions.) That is, he might say, a state could refuse to perform marriages itself, but could not refuse those legally married out of state the benefits of marriage under state law.

But, in a later post, Epps downplays the chances of such a scenario:

Some justices (I name no names) seem to enjoy writing like patent-medicine pitchmen. But even those most critical of Kennedy must admit that his written opinions are achingly, crushingly sincere. He is never just President of Hair Club for Men; he is always a member too. “Recognition” and “celebration” go together like a horse and carriage. I don’t see a way to split them that would allow the Court—or its key justice—to escape this term’s rendezvous with destiny.

David B. Cruz also imagines possible rulings:

It is unthinkable to me that the Court would now turn around and tell the people who married only after it cleared the way for them to do so that the Court was wrong to do that and their marriages were void. I suppose the Court could say, okay, couples already married are protected but other couples in any state where marriage equality exists due to court decree would henceforth not be able to marry. …

Far more likely it is that the Court will issue a decision holding that the Constitution protects same-sex couples’ right to marry – probably by a five-to-four vote judging from the Justices’ positions in the Windsor decision (unless Chief Justice Roberts flip-flops and decides that although his Windsor dissent argued that state marriage exclusions were distinguishable from the federal law partially invalidated in Windsor, on reflection he’s concluded that’s wrong and so, accepting Windsor as precedent, the same-sex couples here win).

Brianne Gorod and Judith E. Schaeffer likewise wonder if Roberts’ vote is gettable:

Roberts has seen what a watershed decision Windsor has been, and he must surely recognize that if the Windsor majority takes the final step to recognize full marriage equality (as it should), that decision will be even more historic and undoubtedly one of the greatest legacies of the Roberts Court. Will Chief Justice Roberts be content to have such a momentous ruling be issued over his dissent, or will John Roberts want to be part of one of the greatest legacies of the Roberts Court?

Ilya Somin thinks the “prospects look good for the pro-same-sex marriage side”:

Thanks to a combination of judicial decisions and legislative changes, there are now 36 states that recognize same-sex marriage. That creates a very different situation than existed even a few years ago, when same-sex marriage was only legal in a small minority of jurisdictions.

Furthermore, both elite and public opinion have moved strongly in a pro-gay marriage direction in recent years. Even some conservative evangelicals have begun to step back from opposing same-sex marriage. The Court certainly does not always follow public opinion. But if a majority of justices are inclined to endorse a constitutional right to same-sex marriage, they are now unlikely to be deterred from doing so by fear of a massive political backlash, of the sort that would have greeted such a ruling a decade ago.

Dale Carpenter agrees that marriage equality is likely to prevail. He emphasizes that “how the Court decides to reach that result is also important”:

Nationwide legalization of same-sex marriage would be a huge victory for gay couples and their children, but it won’t immediately end discrimination against them or against gay people in general. What the Court signals in its decision about the constitutionality of other anti-gay legislation will have substantial legal effects down the road, just as the Court’s decision in Romer v. Evans put an end to growing state-wide efforts to repeal all civil rights law protecting gay people.

One of the court’s options:

The Supreme Court could clear up any remaining doubt by squarely holding that classifications based on sexual orientation are subject to heightened (or close or searching or intermediate) scrutiny. The analysis would be: first, laws denying marriage licenses to same-sex couples are a form of sexual-orientation discrimination because of the close connection between the classification and sexual orientation (like the connection between yarmulke-wearing and Jewishness); second, laws discriminating against gay people raise the usual concerns that justify heightened scrutiny; and third, the state can’t justify the discrimination under the heightened standard.

A suspect-classification decision would logically dispose of proposals like MARFA, the Virginia anti-gay licensing bill, and the anti-gay government-workers bill in Texas. Laws like that would then either be declared unconstitutional as written or would have to be written so as not to target same-sex couples, in which case they might be subject to other constitutional attacks.

Steve Sanders expects that the “question of animus will be prominent – perhaps pivotal – in this final phase of marriage litigation”:

So far, the arguments made by plaintiffs have been remarkably sterile, emphasizing formal equal protection and due process arguments and failing to say much about how the mini-DOMAs actually came into being. But such a picture is incomplete. To fully consider the constitutionality of the remaining anti-marriage laws, we must lift up these proverbial rocks to see what was festering underneath them.

And Richard Socarides looks beyond the ruling:

It’s not unreasonable to expect that the Supreme Court will make same-sex marriage legal in all fifty states. The question, for longtime marriage-equality activists, is what exactly will this achieve, and what will happen next? Will nationwide marriage equality lead in time to full nationwide acceptance, or will they discover, like many civil-rights activists before them, that there is a big gap between legal rights and true equality? This is a big moment for the gay-rights movement, and an important one in which to remember that there is likely more struggle ahead.

(Photo: A same-sex marriage supporter has her forehead painted with rainbow colors as she joins demonstration in front of the Supreme Court on March 27, 2013 in Washington, DC. By Jewel Samad/AFP/Getty Images)

Our Driverless Future

Google expects the public will be using their driverless cars within two to five years. And there appears to be high demand:

According to a study, as many as 12 million driverless cars—that’s 10% of annual sales of new vehicles—could hit the world’s roads just twenty years from now.

But Emily Badger is unsure how driverless technology will change the auto market:

Here are just two competing theories: Autonomous cars will reduce car ownership, because we’ll simply be able to order them when we need them, and they’ll come to function as shared assets akin to public transit. Alternatively: Autonomous cars will increase car ownership because, as the utility of each vehicles rises (now you can send your 7-year-old to ballet alone!), people will want to own even more of them. These hypotheses are equally plausible and mutually exclusive.

So are a lot of other theories around how autonomous cars will change our travel behavior. If they make travel easier, perhaps autonomous cars will induce new trips that we aren’t making today. You’ll never have to say to yourself on a Friday night, “I think I’ll stay home because I can’t find parking/don’t want to deal with traffic/don’t want to drive home drunk.” As a result, the number of trips and the number of miles we collectively travel could increase.

Or, maybe, autonomous cars will create new efficiencies, enabling better carpooling, less idling in traffic, and smarter route-planning. Computers won’t waste gas getting lost or circling for parking spots. And, as a result, total miles traveled and greenhouse gases will decline.

Stephen L. Carter dismisses some common concerns about the cars:

The most common worry seems to be that the computers that run the cars might be hacked. And there are larger fears. Last summer, the Guardian quoted a restricted report from the Federal Bureau of Investigation warning that criminals or terrorists might use driverless cars to their advantage. Imagine a car bomb whose builder doesn’t need to go to the trouble of recruiting a sufficiently fanatical driver.

These warnings, however, may be less dire than they seem. Yes, there might be harm if the cars were hacked, but that risk would likely be offset by a sharp reduction in drivers operating under the influence of drugs or alcohol. And, yes, terrorists would most certainly find a way to turn autonomous cars to their advantage. But terrorists will find a way to turn every new technology to their advantage. That’s a reason to fight a war on terror, not a war on technology.

Built To Thrill

On a trip to Japan’s Hanegi Playpark, or “Savage Park,” Amy Fusselman found herself surrounded by “structures that looked like what remained when my sons decided to build an airport out of Legos and then abandoned the project halfway through.” She reflects on the history of such free-wheeling “adventure parks”:

A very good resource for someone who is interested in going to a playpark and picking up a hammer and nails and pounding away at scraps of crap to make something is the work of the 19th-century British writer John Ruskin. In Ruskin’s On Art andLife, a contemporary repackaging of two of his essays, “The Nature of Gothic” and “The Work of Iron, in Nature, Art, and Policy,” he offers a moving plea for allowing men—in particular, the men who built the Gothic cathedrals of the age—to be, as he says, “fully men” and not mere tools of the architect; to be allowed to use their imaginations in their work, to be allowed to make mistakes.

Let him but begin to imagine, to think, to try and do anything worth doing; and the engine-turned precision is lost at once. Out come all his roughness, all his dullness, all his incapability; shame upon shame, failure upon failure, pause after pause: But out comes the whole majesty of him also; and we know the height of it only when we see the clouds settling upon him. And whether the clouds be bright or dark, there will be transfiguration behind and within them.

In this, written more than a 150 years ago, he articulated why my modern-day love of Savage Park was so immediate. It wasn’t just that the children were flying in the air there, it wasn’t just that they were making insanely great structures, it wasn’t just that the playpark hut was a junk lover’s dream. It was because the place existed at all for just this reason: the full and complete allowance of a self, including all the ineptness, failure, and possibility of death—because it is understood that only with this allowance do we have the capacity to be great.

(Photo of Hanegi Park’s “Play at your own risk” area by Driscoll Reid & Bonnie McElfresh)

Was Selma Really Snubbed? Ctd

An insider joins the debate, quoting a reader:

A qualified film not receiving “enough” nominations is no reflection of the quality of the film. Instead, it’s simply a failure of the film’s PR hacks’ effectiveness at marketing directly to the Academy voters. It’s not the film’s fault, nor is it the Academy’s fault; it’s the film’s publicists’ fault. In the case of Selma, I’ve seen more publicity for Paddington.

I’ll call bullshit on that one. To say Paramount’s failure to get a screener to guild members on time is the reason for Selma‘s failure to nominate director Ava Duvernay is condescending to those members that vote on said nomination. As a Producers Guild member, almost every member I know sees it as their responsibility to see all the major potential nominees and they take that responsibility seriously. Aside from screeners, you’ll notice at the bottom of your local paper advertisements for the prestige films a notice that guild members are accepted free at all the major multiplexes. Combine that with the screenings the studios hold before and after a film’s release in not only New York and L.A., but also San Francisco, Atlanta and Chicago, there are plenty of opportunities for guild members to see all of the pictures. Being in the Academy especially is a big honor (besides being an organization that’s very difficult to join) and Academy members treat the nominations period like the High Holidays.

And it may just be that Duvernay’s lack of a nomination has nothing to do with the color of skin but rather the fact that Selma is, frankly, a good but not great movie.

While her approach is refreshingly unsentimental in its portrait of not only King but other heroes of the Civil Rights movement, from a nominating standpoint, historically the Academy likes movies that make the heart ache. Selma‘s exacting and serviceable portrayal of the political minefield Dr. King and his fellow activists had to wade through didn’t strike that nerve – at least among the Academy folks I saw the movie with. Of course, one can say, well then, by that logic Steven Spielberg shouldn’t have gotten a nomination for Lincoln. But the latter film had an artistry that Duvernay lacked.

Of course, that’s just my opinion – but apparently a lot of other guild members agree with me. But Duvernay can take heart that Christopher Nolan was also snubbed as Best Director and I guarantee we’ll still be talking about Interstellar ten years from now. But that’s the Oscars for ya.

Two cents from another reader:

What’s intriguing about this snub is that Selma is exactly the type of movie the academy generally loves. It’s historical, ostensibly a biopic, liberal, and most crucially, “important.” It’s an issue-driven film.

My main take away from the nominations is that four of the films – Boyhood, Birdman, The Grand Budapest Hotel, and Whiplash – are all quirky, independent, character-driven films. Basically, they are movies that don’t usually get a lot of love from the Academy. Think about it: Richard Linklater – Linklater! – is the front runner for best director. For film buffs (er, snobs) like myself, that is a huge thing.

Another:

I am with your reader who wonders why the only “people of color” who seem to matter when people are counting heads (or faces, as it were) are African-Americans, not Hispanic or Asian artists. (I also agree that the first issue is who is writing, directing, and starring in the movies, which necessarily determines the pool of potential nominees.) Last year, people were up in arms that Saturday Night Live didn’t have any black women (but did have two black men), but no one seems to mind that the only Hispanic cast member in recent memory is Horatio Sanz (and I can’t think of another one in its 40-year history). And I don’t think they’ve ever had an Asian cast member, unlike the Daily Show. (Asian-Americans have become a significant force in the comedy world – Mindy Kaling, Aziz Ansari, Aasif Mandvi, not to mention Margaret Cho – yet they are nowhere on SNL.)

The show “ER” had a similar track with Hispanic characters. I watched the show for its entire run and can recall one Hispanic doctor – John Leguizamo, whose character was an irresponsible drug user who crashed and burned. In contrast, there were many, many African-American doctors, including one of the main characters in the original cast. (And plenty of Hispanic nurses and patients.) They also reflected a diverse population in other ways – several gay or lesbian doctors and one with a physical disability.

In short, it’s time for people to realize that we are not just a country of black and white people, that we are a multicultural country with many different nationalities and ethnic groups, and that any discussion of diversity needs to look beyond these two categories.

Update from another reader:

I have to call bullshit on your “insider” calling bullshit. My partner is a member of the Academy and STILL hasn’t received his screener of Selma … and neither have many people he’s talked to. We were invited to a screening for Academy members in LA that took place on the Sunday night before Christmas. Since it was my partner’s first day off in many months and we had relatives coming in town the next day, we declined to attend, assuming a screener would arrive in the mail any day. It’s true that members can watch the films at most theaters for free, but the time between Selma‘s release and the nominations was a very small window during the holidays. If Al Sharpton wants to have an “emergency meeting” in Hollywood about the supposed snub, perhaps he should start with the marketing department at Paramount. They clearly failed to do their job.

Shining Light On The Underground Railroad

In a review of Eric Foner’s new history of the Underground Railroad, Gateway to Freedom, Jennifer Schuessler reflects on the various ways scholars have understood the way slaves escaped north to freedom:

The first scholarly study of the Underground Railroad, published by Wilbur Siebert in 1898, named some 3,200 “agents,” virtually all of them white men, who presided over an elaborate network of fixed routes, illustrated with maps that looked much like those of an ordinary railroad. That view largely held among scholars until 1961, when the historian Larry Gara published “The Liberty Line,” a slashing revisionist study that dismissed the Underground Railroad as a myth and argued that most fugitive slaves escaped at their own initiative, with little help from organized abolitionists. Scholarship on the topic all but dried up, as historians more generally emphasized the agency of African-Americans in claiming their own freedom.

But over the past 15 years, aided by newly digitized records of obscure abolitionist newspapers and local archives, scholars have constructed a new picture of the Underground Railroad as a collection of loosely interlocking local networks of activists, both black and white, that waxed and waned over time but nevertheless helped a significant number reach freedom.

Wendy Smith notes that Foner “gets his detailed information about the workings of the underground railroad during this fraught period from two invaluable contemporary documents”:

The first is a Record of Fugitives compiled in 1855-56 by Sydney Howard Gay, white editor of the National Anti-Slavery Standard, who recounted the journeys of more than 200 runaways who passed through his Manhattan offices. The second is the journal of William Still, son of a fugitive slave and leader of the Philadelphia Vigilance Committee, which played a vital role because of southern Pennsylvania’s proximity to Delaware, Virginia and Maryland, sources of most fugitive slaves.

Using these documents and others, Foner puts names and faces to activists less famous than Harriet Tubman (who makes a brief appearance) but more important to the functioning of the underground railroad. While Tubman rescued some 70 slaves, Jermain W. Loguen of Syracuse was credited with assisting 1,500 fugitives; Thomas Garrett, one of the many Quakers active in the underground railroad, helped more than 2,200 people cross the Delaware border to freedom.

(Image courtesy of Jeanine Michna-Bales, whose photography project Through Darkness to Light retraces the Underground Railroad)

Dissent By Design

Cassie Packard reviews Disobedient Objects, an exhibition at London’s Victoria and Albert Museum devoted to examining “the powerful role of objects in movements for social change”:

The disobedient objects in the exhibition range from the more tactically frivolous, like the [inflatable] cobblestones [from a 2012 May Day demonstration in Berlin-Kreuzberg], to the blindingly necessary, like DIY tear gas masks. They are largely the products of various left-wing grassroots social movements, though a few objects made in service of paramilitaries — but questionably dressed in the show’s glamorizing rhetoric of left-wing activism — make it into the mix. On the whole, the exhibition is right on trend, combining a growing public interest in design activism with a recent popularization of “object”-centered museum exhibitions and publications. …

In one section of the exhibition is a collection of handmade “book blocs,” a functional riff on the riot shield in which Plexiglas and cardboard are made to resemble oversized book covers. Wielded by groups protesting tuition hikes and budget cuts to education programs, these blocs put police in the bizarre position of physically assaulting oversize books when they attack protestors. It’s a memorable image, and one that certainly drums up attention for its causes as it’s disseminated on the web. Another standout is the Spanish-born “flone” [see above video], an economical marriage of laser-cut plywood and open-source software. “Reinventing airspace as public space” in an age of insidious drone warfare, the flone allows the user to fly his or her smartphone for the purpose of filming police and demonstrations. Of all the items on display, it is the flone whose revolutionary potential feel the most formidable.

In an earlier review, Alice Bell also praised the exhibit:

Entering the gallery, you are greeted with rows of metal poles holding up the displays. An allusion to the bars of prison walls, they also offer the basis for one of the best exhibits: a history of the “lock-on” technique used by activists to attach themselves to each other and/or objects. … [A] history of lock-ons and the Capitalism is Crisis banner [made for the 2009 Blackheath Climate Camp] are as much part of modernity as a gallery of wedding dresses. Their arguments are part of the hard tissue of our world, even if we don’t always recognise it. As are the history of the pink triangle, a collection of anti-apartheid badges and a simple poster-paint-and-cardboard banner that declares “I wish my boyfriend was as dirty as your policies”, all also displayed in the gallery. It’s not complete – there are many protest movements missing – but it’s diverse and engaging.

In another earlier review, Victoria Sadler noted that she “found this a very emotive exhibition, one that drives up a lot of anger and frustration”:

Supporting the exhibits is a number of video clips, including footage from protests such as Tiananmen, the Middle East, Seoul and Japan. The level of violent resistance from the state in almost all instances is incredibly depressing. And the disproportionate use of that violence can be harrowing to watch.

Watching again the tanks of the Chinese Army toppling over the 30ft Goddess of Democracy in Tiananmen Square was quite distressing, as it was to see the footage from Palestine of kids throwing stones with their slingshots, only for their pebbles to be met with gunfire. The V&A has managed to obtain one of these slingshots, a makeshift item created from the tongue of a child’s trainer, and alongside this VT this really had an impact. Included in the video clips is commentary and observation from those that have been active in protest movements, or who have studied them.

It’s eye-opening to listen to how these movements do bring in the egalitarian principles and community consciousness they want to see in the world, but how they also struggle with gender and class structures within their own ranks. But it was easy to agree with these commentators that change has only come about from direct action, from challenges to property and power, rather than negotiation and dialogue.

The exhibition runs through February 1st.