Tag: Premium

by Jonah Shepp

To support democracy abroad, Charles Kenny advocates inviting more foreign students to study at American universities:

Student experiences can have a huge impact on attitudes toward democracy and governance, and those with foreign education are an incredibly influential group in their home countries regardless of where they live. In national security terms, that points to a high return on efforts to increase the number of foreign students studying in U.S. universities—and suggests that recent policy has been going in completely the wrong direction. The share of foreign students studying in the U.S. dropped from 23 percent to 18 percent between 2000 and 2009, a decrease attributed not least to toughened immigration procedures.

We want those future leaders coming to the U.S. Along with easing the burden of visa application, the U.S. should offer more financial support for scholarship programs and consider it a highly effective form of foreign aid. The Fulbright program alone has supported the education of 29 heads of state or government. For U.S. government funding of $243 million, supplemented by $80 million in overseas and private contributions, there are around 3,000 students in the U.S. as well as over 4,000 U.S. citizens abroad. That makes the program considerably cheaper than other U.S. efforts to make friends overseas—it’s about $20,000 less per enrollee than the Peace Corps, for example. On an annual basis, the price tag is about 0.2 percent of the annual cost of the military effort to promote security and democracy in Afghanistan and Iraq in 2011.

The preponderance of autocrats and apparatchiks in developing countries with American or European diplomas might dampen enthusiasm for this idea, but only by a bit. Kenny focuses on how an American education can produce more democrats, but there’s another side to the coin: it stands to reason that many of those who seek an American education do so because they are already attracted to liberal ideas, but can’t engage those ideas freely in their own societies. Reaching out to these people is of a piece with the notion, advanced by Masha Gessen among others, that sometimes the best (or only) thing we can do for oppressed people in illiberal societies is to get them the hell out of Dodge. That includes those who would like a Western education but can’t get one.

Perhaps there’s a way to target Kenny’s proposal toward those proto-democrats rather than the children of privileged classes seeking only to purchase prestige diplomas.

By Chas Danner

In our next video from Shane, who spent four months in solitary confinement while imprisoned in Iran, he shares what most shocked him when he subsequently investigated solitary here in America:

Bauer goes on to explain how reforming the way American prisons use solitary confinement starts with treating it as a temporary, rather than permanent, solution:

Shane and his fellow former hostages, Sarah Shourd (now his wife) and Josh Fattal, have co-written the memoir, A Sliver of Light, about their experience as Iranian political prisoners. You can read some excerpts from the book here. The Dish’s ongoing coverage of the horrors of solitary confinement is here. Shane’s previous videos in the series are here.

by Tracy R. Walsh

Sophie Quinton looks at an attempt to simplify the notoriously complex Free Application for Federal Student Aid (FAFSA):

The Education Department has made it easier for students and families to fill out the FAFSA on their own by removing repetitive questions and streamlining the online application using methods common to tax-preparation software. The online form—which almost all students now use – skips questions that don’t apply to that student, alerts them to glaring errors, and will automatically input tax information from the Internal Revenue Service. It takes most students about a half-hour to complete.

But Laura M. Colarusso isn’t too impressed with the new form:

[T]here are still 100 questions on the FAFSA’s six pages, many of which have several parts and ask for sensitive financial data beyond what’s required even on a tax return. Some are straightforward, but many are so convoluted they require their own separate sections of instructions.

Take, for example, Question 45, which has 10 parts.

It requires that students list any “untaxed income not reported in items 45a through 45h, such as workers’ compensation, disability, etc. Also include the untaxed portions of health savings accounts from IRS Form 1040—line 25. Don’t include extended foster care benefits, student aid, earned income credit, additional child tax credit, welfare payments, untaxed Social Security benefits, Supplemental Security Income, Workforce Investment Act educational benefits, on-base military housing or a military housing allowance, combat pay, benefits from flexible spending arrangements (e.g. cafeteria plans), foreign income exclusion or credit for federal tax on special fuels.”

And that’s just Part I.

Update from a reader:

My kids are hopefully college bound in the next couple years, and after doing the research on funding college tuition, I am currently engrossed with rearranging my assets just so that I won’t have to spend a big chunk of my savings on tuition. If you own anything – a vacation home for instance, that was part of my retirement plan – you get nothing, nada. The colleges might just as well be raiding your retirement fund. So now I have to sell real estate, pay off debt, find alternative investments, make big changes in my portfolio just so that I can send my kids to college without wrecking my retirement plans or sending them into a debt spiral.

We have to jump through so many hoops just for affordable health care and education. Is this what America has become? Every man for himself? I envy the citizens of other nations – even if they do have to pay higher taxes – because they don’t have to worry so much, or expend so much energy, to take care of their health and education needs.

An expected update from another:

Really? This person is upset at the idea that he/she might have to spend savings to pay for the kids’ college education? Really??? Might I suggest that paying for your child’s education is something you should do if you can? Financial aid is there for families that do not, in fact, have second homes waiting for them when they retire; people without substantial real estate holdings and stock portfolios; people who might hold jobs well into their 70s just to pay off the loans they take to ensure their kids get the college education they did not?

Is filling out the FAFSA a pain in the tail? Sure. Most “help” comes at the cost of time and effort. Streamlining would be a good thing, but making it easier for wealthy kids to get aid so their parents don’t have to use their savings? Not really what the whole thing is about.

By Jonah Shepp

Chris Goodfellow doesn’t think MH370 was hijacked:

For me, the loss of transponders and communications makes perfect sense in a fire. And there most likely was an electrical fire. In the case of a fire, the first response is to pull the main busses and restore circuits one by one until you have isolated the bad one. If they pulled the busses, the plane would go silent. It probably was a serious event and the flight crew was occupied with controlling the plane and trying to fight the fire. Aviate, navigate, and lastly, communicate is the mantra in such situations. …

What I think happened is the flight crew was overcome by smoke and the plane continued on the heading, probably on George (autopilot), until it ran out of fuel or the fire destroyed the control surfaces and it crashed. You will find it along that route–looking elsewhere is pointless.

Jeff Wise shoots down that theory:

Goodfellow’s account is emotionally compelling, and it is based on some of the most important facts that have been established so far. And it is simple—to a fault. Take other major findings of the investigation into account, and Goodfellow’s theory falls apart.

For one thing, while it’s true that MH370 did turn toward Langkawi and wound up overflying it, whoever was at the controls continued to maneuver after that point as well, turning sharply right at VAMPI waypoint, then left again at GIVAL. Such vigorous navigating would have been impossible for unconscious men.

Goodfellow’s theory fails further when one remembers the electronic ping detected by the Inmarsat satellite at 8:11 on the morning of March 8. According to analysis provided by the Malaysian and United States governments, the pings narrowed the location of MH370 at that moment to one of two arcs, one in Central Asia and the other in the southern Indian Ocean. As MH370 flew from its original course toward Langkawi, it was headed toward neither. Without human intervention—which would go against Goodfellow’s theory—it simply could not have reached the position we know it attained at 8:11 a.m.

Meanwhile, Jessica Trisko Darden considers how the search reflects on national security and politics in Asia:

While the countries of the region lack the ability to effectively monitor their airspace and maritime borders, they clearly have the capacity to blame one another. Political haranguing has been an evident part of the Malaysian-led search process. Both China and Vietnam repeatedly expressed frustration with Malaysia for providing contradictory details that hampered their ability to search for wreckage. Vietnam temporarily downgraded its search in the absence of credible information before ending it following word that Malaysia had suspended its search in the same area. Relations between Malaysia and China have been strained by an inability to locate the 153 Chinese citizens on board the flight and Malaysia Airlines’ handling of the passengers’ families.

David Wertime zeroes in on China’s mounting frustration with Malaysia:

Malaysian authorities have certainly given China ample room for angst. The New York Times reported on March 16 that a series of errors, delays, and obfuscations by the Malaysian government and military has hampered the search process. Chinese social media, which provides the best available public indicator of citizen sentiment, has not shown a proclivity to forgive. An online short comic series shared over 50,000 times on Weibo depicts a haggard boss (China) defenestrating a lazy employee (Malaysia) after he gives lackadaisical answers at a meeting about MH370 also attended by well-prepped Vietnamese and U.S. avatars. (In an introduction, the artist calls the Malaysians a “pig troupe.”) A phrase combining the character for Malaysia with a popular Internet curse word became a Weibo hashtag and been used more than 400,000 times.

Follow all the Dish’s coverage of the missing plane here.

by Patrick Appel

Americans mostly hear bad news about the economy:

Frequently, assessments of the economy have a partisan dimension – and in this week’s poll that is true when it comes to overall judgments.  But that isn’t the case when it comes to what people are hearing.  For example, 58% of Republicans say the overall economy is getting worse, and only 6% say it is improving.  Democrats say the economy is improving, by 35% to 23%.  While that is a much smaller margin in the positive direction than the Republicans’ negative evaluation, it is still positive. But both Democrats and Republicans hear bad news more than good news – and from both the news media and from friends and relatives.

Last week, Josh Barro tackled why many Americans incorrectly believe we’re still in a recession:

Two trends are responsible. The labor market is still slack, meaning millions who would like to work can’t, and those who do work have limited ability to demand higher wages …

For four decades, even in stronger economic times, wage gains have not kept pace with economic growth. Wages and salaries peaked at more than 51 percent of the economy in the late 1960s; they fell to 45 percent by the start of the last recession in 2007 and have since fallen to 42 percent.

When the economy does grow, that growth disproportionately accrues to the owners of capital instead of to wage earners; and in the last few years, weak growth and abundant labor have made that pattern even stronger than normal.

Arnold Kling adds a caveat:

I would note that a very important part of that trend is the shift from “straight” wages and salaries to other forms of compensation, notably health insurance. Higher payroll taxes also play a role. The share of total compensation to GDP held up fairly well until recently.

by Chris Bodenner

A reader appears adrift:

I need help understanding this issue. Put frankly, I don’t know that I buy the imperative that we should be making a thing out of preventing suicide. Loved ones are hurt by suicide. But what else? I am not exactly suicidal, but it’s not at all infrequent for me to be acutely aware that I have no preference for being alive over not being alive.

I don’t know. I’m having trouble putting words to this. Maybe it’s our cultural aversion to death – now that the shroud of religion has become threadbare – that propagates this. Maybe it’s the opposite: a fascination with celebrity deaths as “tragedy” combined with our contemporary obsession with crafting a personal narrative out of every bullshit event in the world. Maybe it’s as simple as, if I ever were to kill myself, I’d want to be able to justify it. I don’t know. There is something that smacks of musty morality in the suicide conversation. Why should we be preventing suicide? Why should we be second-guessing individuals’ relationships with themselves?

That email provides a good reason to revive one of our most popular threads from last year, “Suicide Leaves Behind Nothing.” Many of the scores of emails we received went unpublished, such as:

One thing that seems overlooked in all these stories from loved ones left behind is the fact that we can’t hear the stories of those who left.  We can only ever hear one side of the story, one side’s pain.  (Suicides do sometimes leave a note, but we, the general public, usually don’t see or hear them except through the filter of loved ones left behind.) Personally, I’m with these two readers:

What could be more selfish than other people presuming that we should stay alive just to meet their needs?

And:

People can be tortured by their brain’s messed-up chemistry as brutally as they can be tortured with stress positions and sensory deprivation. People break. That’s not a character flaw. Too much pain and a person will do whatever he or she has to to make it stop.

I disagree with the first one a bit in the case of children (including adult ones).  If you’ve brought people into the world, you do owe them something. Children aside, though, the reader is spot on.

The second one calls attention to something that seems overlooked, which is that the very notion of selfishness is problematic in the case of those who are mentally ill, because their sense of self is either deranged (disarranged) or completely missing.  In the case of depression, for example, by the time it’s extreme enough for the sufferer to contemplate suicide, they’ve lost almost all sense of self.  The barrier between self and other is gone, or is so porous it might as well be.  That’s the very reason they’re in such pain: they feel everything, and all of it cuts right to the quick.

There’s a certain amount of pain that’s unavoidable in the world.  How much of it should be born by one person before we’re willing to let them stop?

Several more readers share their stories:

My brother killed himself twenty years ago, six days before my second child was born.

No one in our family saw it coming.  We all knew that he had been struggling with work and love, but just had no idea that he was so terribly depressed.  Afterwards, my parents, five siblings and I began to reconstruct his pain and of course felt that we had let him down by not seeing his downward spiral.  The guilt and questions were overwhelming.  He and I were not particularly close and had definitely clashed in the past (which brings it’s own kind of despair), but even the brothers he had a close relationship with were riddled with what-ifs.  It is hard to describe the anguish of watching my parents struggle with their grief.

Twenty years later, my heart still twists if someone asks how many siblings I have because I feel that I can’t say five; I have to say six, even though he is gone.  He springs to mind every time I think about or prepare for my daughter’s birthday.  The pain never really goes away, but I remember so clearly the moment that I reached a sort of peace about his death.  It was shortly after my daughter’s birth and I was rocking her, weeping, wondering how we could ever deal with this awful reality when my husband came in and one of the things he said was, “Honey, he’s not suffering anymore”.  I cannot describe the relief I felt at that moment.  He had been suffering and we didn’t see it and we will have regrets forever and would do anything to change it, but he isn’t suffering any more.  It is not a happy feeling, but it is a kind of peace.

Thanks for “listening”.

Another:

I’m a therapist and several years back I lost a client to suicide. He was a young man struggling with identity and relationships, and a painful rejection sent him into a spiral, overwhelming him.  He denied having any suicidal thoughts, so his death was clearly a shock for me, and I will never know whether he kept those thoughts and plans to himself or if his suicide was impulsive and in reaction to the rejection.

I do know that his death changed me in so many ways, and marked a loss of innocence for me as a therapist (I was a relatively new therapist at the time).  As intimately as I can come to know my clients, I now understand that there are parts of themselves they may not share with me, and that I can’t completely know them. I also believe that therapy and medication may not be enough to relieve the psychic pain some of my clients may experience, and that I have to accept the limitation of my work.  Clearly, this is the hardest part of my job.

I wouldn’t say that suicide is selfish, but it certainly emerges from a very hopeless, narrow state of mind.  I have to believe that I can make a difference in my clients’ struggles with this hopelessness, but I humbly accept that it may not always be effective.  In that case, I do not believe I am in a position to judge that client’s decision.  I can feel sad, angry, and devastated by that choice, but ultimately it is my client’s choice.

Another:

Well, as someone who had to break down the door of my brother’s bedroom after he killed himself (or, rather while he was still alive, barely), I find the title of your thread odd. Suicide leaves behind a lifetime of pain. That’s hardly “nothing”, and as for all your readers who think suicide is a selfish act, I strong disagree. My brother was not selfish. He simply wanted to escape the pain that my parents inflicted upon him (and the rest of us siblings) with their never-ending bickering and violence, which extended throughout their divorce.

I’m what’s called “an emotional wreck”, I know that. Nothing – not years of useless therapy nor years of being experimented on by misguided doctors who thought that prescribed drugs can wipe away memories – nothing can “heal” me. It’s accepting that fact that was the beginning of my new life.

When I stopped the hunt for outside salvation, I came to see the truth: that the scars that deform my very being could never be healed and that my goal is to keep on living despite the fact my scars so easily bleed when scratched. I am walking in the woods and come out into a clearing, look up, and see the same cloud formations that were in the sky the night my brother died – and SCRATCH! I think of my brother. I am in the grocery store and see the word “Swanson” on a TV dinner and SCRATCH! – it was his favorite thing to eat. I walk along the ocean, peacefully contemplating the waves, when a child runs up behind me with his dog and I look into his face and SCRATCH! I see my brother.

It never ends. I have prevailed, despite the fact that I went through years of emotional hell. I came to accept the new me. I had to accept that I would never be the same person that existed before I took a hammer and literally tore a door apart in order to collapse into a room where my brother’s face was covered with his brains after he shot himself.  I’ve learned. Carry on is the only thing one can do. Accept the pain and carry on. Accept the scar that never heals and ceaselessly bleeds. It’s hardly “nothing”. I can only assume your thread is meant to be ironic. I hope so.

Anyway, I am glad you are posting about suicide. It touches so many people in so many ways and most people just don’t want to talk about it. Thank you.

One more reader:

I work in mental health and I just want to caution you about publishing opinions rationalizing suicide. Some of your respondents sound like they would benefit from professional help. It might be a good idea to append your posts with info on the national suicide prevention line:

If you are in a crisis and need help right away: Call this toll-free number, available 24 hours a day, every day: 1-800-273-TALK (8255). You will reach the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline, a service available to anyone. You may call for yourself or for someone you care about. All calls are confidential.

On the above photo:

It is with a deep honesty and powerful frankness that New York-based photographer Kristina Knipe creates a complex narrative of self-harm in her series I Don’t Know The Names of Flowers. Returning to her hometown in Pennsylvania, Knipe collaborated with others who struggle with self-harm by contacting acquaintances and posting on NYC’s Craigslist in an attempt to find healing.

by Jonah Shepp

The LA Times was the first to report on the earthquake that hit LA on Monday. But reporter Ken Schwencke didn’t write the piece on his own, as Will Oremus explains:

And it’s not just earthquakes:

It’s just one of several bots that the LA Times uses to produce stories. The site also automates the opening sentence for its Homicide Report, a story for every homicide in the Los Angeles area, as Journalism.co detailed. Another bot sends a daily email of the LAPD’s arrests, alerting journalists to any high-profile arrests, such as ones with particularly high bail or with newsworthy occupations.

Other similarly automated stories would be just as simple, especially for data-heavy news like the monthly employment numbers, sports results, or company IPO filings. The idea of using automatic computer programs to craft stories is not new — all you need is a set of facts and few rules about sentence structure — but few large news organizations have actually resorted to using them.

Relatedly, Derek Mead examines a recent study in which students evaluated sports recaps written by robots as more trustworthy than those written by humans:

Now, there are some clear caveats to the study, which [researcher Christer] Clerwall notes. First, the sample sizes are small. (Clerwall writes that it’s a pilot.) Its limitation to sports game recaps is the main concern, as they’re largely expected to be formulaic, which means that a human adding a bit of flair might be a negative for readers looking for straight numbers. Asking a computer to sort out Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 is a much taller task, and one that still requires a human journalist’s nose for bullshit.

But that’s the beside the point. Software will only get better, and as it does, it’ll continue to encroach on the role of journalists as aggregators and repackagers of available information. (The day that computers get into actual reporting is the day the robots fully win.) And as it becomes even more widespread, reporting software will continue to highlight the essential tension of journalism today: What’s the role of a reporter?

by Patrick Appel

Hye Yun Park remade last week’s mega-viral video with “with more color, dust, dirt, curves, spark and queer juice”:

http://vimeo.com/89189517

Amanda Hess, who hated on the original, describes Park’s version:

“Ahhhhhhh,” one participant says after she takes off her blindfold and immediately averts her eyes from her kissing partner. “This is very awk—OK, awkwaaaard.” Other icebreakers include, “Do you like, do you, like, um, do you like food,” “I like your, um, sweatshirt,” and “I like Jewish people.” Like Pilieva’s version, Park’s video is overlaid with a romantic pop track, but it’s not loud enough to drown out the disquieting squishy noises. The stilting side-eye that one woman gives her partner when he goes in for the kiss at the 2:15 mark is a video highlight, as is one man’s acknowledgment that he totally has a boner. Then there’s the dude who asks his partner “how deep” she wants it, grazes her boob without warning, then grasps her hand a little too long after the kiss is completed. Pilieva’s version peddled the fantasy that when you sign up to kiss a stranger, you’ll be paired with a gorgeous French model, but let’s be honest—it’s a lot more likely that that guy is gonna show up.

A commenter pushes back:

The first video, despite being an ad, was still really sweet. And the more “honest” and “awkward” video shown here is likewise totally sweet and endearing. Why are you so creeped out? I don’t get it.

Vice also got normal people to kiss. In London, they “went out into the street and found 20 strangers who aren’t models of any description to stick their stiff British upper lips together for £20 (about $33) a pop”: