Tag Archives: magazine

Machine Learning Has Transformed Google Translate

by LaunaGavin587 Posted on December 20, 2016

Mother Jones

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Alex Tabarrok draws my attention to an article in the New York Times Magazine this weekend. It’s about machine learning in general, but it starts out with this:

Late one Friday night in early November, Jun Rekimoto, a distinguished professor of human-computer interaction at the University of Tokyo, was online preparing for a lecture when he began to notice some peculiar posts rolling in on social media. Apparently Google Translate, the company’s popular machine-translation service, had suddenly and almost immeasurably improved. Rekimoto visited Translate himself and began to experiment with it. He was astonished. He had to go to sleep, but Translate refused to relax its grip on his imagination.

That explains it! About a week ago I happened to be clicking some links from somewhere and ended up on a Chinese site. Just for laughs I ran it through Google Translate, and I was surprised at the quality of the text I got. It was much more readable than usual and seemed to be a pretty accurate translation. I chalked it up to either coincidence or the fact that I hadn’t used Google Translate in a while, and went on my way.

But no. Google Translate really has taken a quantum leap:

The Google of the future, CEO Sundar Pichai had said on several occasions, was going to be “A.I. first.” What that meant in theory was complicated and had welcomed much speculation. What it meant in practice, with any luck, was that soon the company’s products would no longer represent the fruits of traditional computer programming, exactly, but “machine learning.”

A rarefied department within the company, Google Brain, was founded five years ago on this very principle: that artificial “neural networks” that acquaint themselves with the world via trial and error, as toddlers do, might in turn develop something like human flexibility…It was only with the refugee crisis, Pichai explained from the lectern, that the company came to reckon with Translate’s geopolitical importance…The team had been steadily adding new languages and features, but gains in quality over the last four years had slowed considerably.

Until today. As of the previous weekend, Translate had been converted to an A.I.-based system for much of its traffic, not just in the United States but in Europe and Asia as well: The rollout included translations between English and Spanish, French, Portuguese, German, Chinese, Japanese, Korean and Turkish. The rest of Translate’s hundred-odd languages were to come, with the aim of eight per month, by the end of next year. The new incarnation, to the pleasant surprise of Google’s own engineers, had been completed in only nine months. The A.I. system had demonstrated overnight improvements roughly equal to the total gains the old one had accrued over its entire lifetime.

The robots are coming. Go ahead and scoff at the fact that some Uber cars ran red lights last week, but that doesn’t change anything. Every technology has hiccups at first, and AI is the biggest, toughest, and most important technology ever attempted. It will provide plenty of laughs over the next decade or two.

Until suddenly it doesn’t and the economy has permanently lost 20 million jobs—with many more to come. We’re not ready for that day, not by a long way. We should get started.

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Machine Learning Has Transformed Google Translate

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See how Earth is fast approaching a red hot mess

by TheoParnell Posted on August 26, 2016

See how Earth is fast approaching a red hot mess | Grist

planet out

See how Earth is fast approaching a red hot mess

By on Aug 26, 2016ShareEd Hawkins

Scientists are getting better at producing visualizations that make climate change, a pretty heady topic, simple enough to take in at a glance. This image charts global temperature changes each year since 1850, using the period from 1961 to 1990 as a baseline. The color scale ranges from dark blue (-2.5 degrees C) to dark red (+2.5 degrees C).

It was created by climate scientist Ed Hawkins, the same person who brought us the popular hypnotic GIF of global temperatures spiraling out of control.

Election Guide ★ 2016Making America Green AgainOur experts weigh in on the real issues at stake in this electionGet Grist in your inbox
Also on Grist

A tip of the hat

7 celebrities we’d like to see #MakeAmericaGreenAgain

This is a crucial election, and the environment is watching.

Training Pays Off

Does anything good come out of the Olympics?

The Olympics bring their host cities new stadiums, trains, and glistening abs — but which of those benefit them in the long run?

Dan on the Street

We asked young voters why they don’t see a big difference between Clinton and Trump on climate

We took to the streets to talk to real live millennials about the election. We even checked their pulses!

Editors’ Picks

Here’s a way to make it easier to sue climate polluters in courtGrover Norquist, conservative anti-tax crusader, goes to Burning Man — againIf you think technology has no place in the national parks, think againRecent Postsloading more stories…The complicated science of organic food, in one awesome podcast

If you eat food, don’t miss the latest episode of Science Vs.


global weirding

The warmer it gets, the more it snows in Antarctica. Huh?

Counterintuitively, a warmer planet means more snow on the Southern Continent. And that’s a good thing.


biosphere the worst

Trump’s campaign chief once ran a major climate research center

Twenty years before campaigning for a climate denier, Stephen Bannon had a different tune.


planet out

See how Earth is fast approaching a red hot mess

This is a terrifyingly clear visualization of our warming planet.


Men Again

Celebrate National Women’s Equality Day by turning down the goddamn A/C

This is your annual reminder that we’re living in a man’s world — and we’re feeling it most at the office.


Bend Grover backwards

Grover Norquist, conservative anti-tax crusader, goes to Burning Man — again

The D.C. insider feels right at home at the countercultural desert festival.


Obama designates world’s largest protected area — it’s underwater

On a big birthday for parks, Obama gives oceans some love, too.


Waiting for the other sue to drop

Here’s a way to make it easier to sue climate polluters in court

But it’ll still be an uphill climb.


Rocky mountain highlight

Colorado aims to slash its climate pollution

The governor is ordering electric utilities to cut their greenhouse gas emissions.

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See how Earth is fast approaching a red hot mess

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Universal Health Care Is Probably No More Popular Now Than It’s Ever Been

by LucilleMickle Posted on May 23, 2016

Mother Jones

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Harold Pollack says that Bernie Sanders has started a political revolution:

Not enough of one to win the Democratic presidential nomination, but enough to put the dream of single-payer health care back on the national political agenda in a way few would have expected five years ago….Just this week, Gallup released a poll indicating that “58% of U.S. adults favor the idea of replacing the Affordable Care Act with a federally funded healthcare system that provides insurance for all Americans.” Politico Magazine reports that Sanders’s health plan “is the most popular of the three remaining candidates.”

I’d be thrilled about this if it were true, but I have my doubts. The problem is that Americans have a long history of supporting things in the abstract but not so much when they become concrete partisan proposals. Take Obamacare. In 2013, a CNBC poll showed 37 percent unfavorability toward the “Affordable Care Act,” but 46 percent toward “Obamacare.” In 2014, a Morning Consult poll showed 71 percent support for offering Medicaid to all adults under the poverty line, but only 62 percent support for expanding Medicaid “as encouraged under the Affordable Care Act.” A Marist poll in Kentucky showed 57 percent disapproval of Obamacare but only 22 percent disapproval of kynect—Kentucky’s version of Obamacare. And of course, we have years of polling showing that lots of people like nearly all the individual elements of Obamacare, but then turn around and insist that they hate Obamacare itself.

As for universal health care, a Harris poll last September found 63 percent approval. A Kaiser poll in December found 58 percent support for Medicare-for-all. Gallup polls going back 15 years show higher support for government guarantees of health care during the Bush years than they do now.

So color me skeptical that Bernie Sanders has really had much effect on the health care debate. Gallup’s poll last week didn’t so much as breathe the word “taxes,” and if it did, support for the universal health care option would sink like a stone. Americans have long had mixed feeling about universal health care, and those feelings are deeply tied up in partisan attitudes and willingness to pay. Unfortunately, Sanders doesn’t seem to have moved the needle on this at all.

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Universal Health Care Is Probably No More Popular Now Than It’s Ever Been

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Welcome to the New Mother Jones

by HeleneAldridge5 Posted on May 16, 2016

Mother Jones

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Forty years ago, operating out of a dingy office above a McDonald’s on San Francisco’s Market Street, a group of writers and editors inspired by Watergate decided to launch the equivalent of a crowd-funded media startup—a spiffy-looking new magazine, devoted to investigative journalism and supported by its readers. From the very first day, Mother Jones has emphasized making in-depth journalism look good, because powerful storytelling shouldn’t feel like homework.

In keeping with that spirit, we’ve decided to celebrate our 40th anniversary with a new design. These days when a magazine overhauls its look, the process normally works something like this: A new editor or creative director walks in, decides whatever came before was crap, hires an outside design firm or three, commissions a custom typeface or maybe 10, gets a team of web designers and app developers to translate that vision to the digital space, and lines up some celebrity buzz, and many, many months later, voilà! A redesign is born.

We did pretty much the opposite. First, except for the inspirational input of Luke Shuman, who helped our brilliant creative director, Ivylise Simones, design our new logo, we did this all in-house. We did it with the resources at hand. We did it in a few all-too-short months, amid our already awesomely hectic jobs. And, though we are over the moon about the new look for both the magazine and the site you are now on, we reverse-engineered the typical process, beginning with article pages on our mobile site and working back up the food chain, as it were, to the home page of MotherJones.com and then on to the print magazine. We did it that way, in part, because for far too long these three “products” looked nothing like each other; they’d each grown uniquely fusty. And we did it that way because every month 9 million people read our journalism—multiple new stories each day—via their desktops, laptops, tablets, and phones.

We wanted to give those 9 million people a better experience; one that was clean, easier on the eyes. We ditched a lot of clutter. Buttons for bygone social networks and services were banished from the page. So were an overwhelming number of links on the home page. We even cut down on the number of ad units per page.

We also wanted to make it easier for you to find our one-of-a-kind coverage about food politics and science and our signature investigative deep-dives. Both now appear on our navigation bar at the top of each page.

A new home page feature, called Exposure, will give you a dose of our commitment to photojournalism (the stunning pictures in our feature on Flint’s toxic water crisis are an excellent example). And for signature stories, we’ll deploy a photographically lush wide format, which will look eye-popping on your laptop and your cellphone.

We are also obsessed with our new favorite color, orange. We’ve used it to make links and other text easier for you to spot. And we are thrilled to be using a new display font called Mallory, from the Frere-Jones Type studio, that, in the words of the designers, “was built to be a reliable tool, readily pairing with other typefaces to organize complex data and fine-tune visual identities.” Our body font is Calluna.

Okay, now back to the “investigative journalism” part. Like most in our trade, we do a lot of things these days. But at the core of what we do, and why you read Mother Jones, is the promise that we’ll rake the muck, that we’ll afflict the comfortable and, as our namesake put it, “fight like hell for the living.” Our dedication to investigative journalism ripped the lid off the Ford Pinto cover-up soon after the magazine launched in 1976, and we exposed Mitt Romney’s “47 percent” remarks during the last election—a story that, though it arguably altered the course of history, notably never took a spin through print.

Today, when a Pandora’s box full of vulgarity, obstructionism, and authoritarianism has been let loose upon the political landscape, when spin has tucked tail in the face of bald-faced lies, when people from every walk of life and every political persuasion feel like the deck has been stacked against them and the dealer is cutting cards to boot, the fight for justice is more important than ever.

We have your back and we hope you have ours. This publication—which might more properly be dubbed a nonprofit, digital-first news organization with a magazine’s secret sauce, if that weren’t such a mouthful—has always relied on reader support. It was readers who pitched in eight years ago when we wanted to expand past a six-times-a-year collection of freelance pieces to become what the PEN American Center recently called “an internationally recognized powerhouse” that often puts “more well-known and deep-pocketed news divisions to shame.” You built this.

We’ve tripled the size of the newsroom and grown our audience twenty­fold, but we’re not done yet. In the coming months we’ll unveil some truly blockbuster investigations as well as our ambitions to be far bigger and better still. We’ll be asking for your help and your input on how to get there. You can read why you should consider joining our community of sustainers here. Let’s fight the good fight, together.

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Welcome to the New Mother Jones

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Hillary Clinton Really Loves Military Intervention

by ClydeBrigstocke Posted on April 21, 2016

Mother Jones

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Here’s what’s in the New York Times Magazine this week:

How Hillary Clinton Became a Hawk

But…no. This piece doesn’t really tell us how Hillary became a hawk—and that’s too bad. It would be genuinely interesting to get some insight into how (or if) her views have evolved over time and what motivates them. Still, even if he doesn’t really tell us why Hillary is so hawkish, Mark Landler makes it very, very clear that she is, indeed, a very sincere hawk:

Clinton’s foreign-policy instincts are bred in the bone — grounded in cold realism about human nature and what one aide calls “a textbook view of American exceptionalism.” It set her apart from her rival-turned-boss, Barack Obama, who avoided military entanglements and tried to reconcile Americans to a world in which the United States was no longer the undisputed hegemon. And it will likely set her apart from the Republican candidate she meets in the general election. For all their bluster about bombing the Islamic State into oblivion, neither Donald J. Trump nor Senator Ted Cruz of Texas have demonstrated anywhere near the appetite for military engagement abroad that Clinton has.

For all intents and purposes, Landler says that Hillary has been the most hawkish person in the room in almost literally every case where she was in the room in the first place. For example:

Adm. Robert Willard, then the Pacific commander, wanted to send the carrier on a more aggressive course, into the Yellow Sea….Clinton strongly seconded it. “We’ve got to run it up the gut!” she had said to her aides a few days earlier.

….After 9/11, Clinton saw Armed Services as better preparation for her future. For a politician looking to hone hard-power credentials — a woman who aspired to be commander in chief — it was the perfect training ground. She dug in like a grunt at boot camp.

….Jack Keane is one of the intellectual architects of the Iraq surge; he is also perhaps the greatest single influence on the way Hillary Clinton thinks about military issues….Keane is the resident hawk on Fox News, where he appears regularly to call for the United States to use greater military force in Iraq, Syria and Afghanistan….The two would meet many times over the next decade, discussing the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, the Iranian nu­clear threat and other flash points in the Middle East.

….Keane, like Clinton, favored more robust intervention in Syria than Obama did….He advocated imposing a no-fly zone over parts of Syria that would neutralize the air power of the Syrian president, Bashar al-Assad, with a goal of forcing him into a political settlement with opposition groups. Six months later, Clinton publicly adopted this position, further distancing herself from Obama.

….The Afghan troop debate….Her unstinting support of General McChrystal’s maximalist recommendation made it harder for Obama to choose a lesser option….“Hillary was adamant in her support for what Stan asked for,” Gates says….“She was, in a way, tougher on the numbers in the surge than I was.”

And Landler doesn’t even mention Libya, perhaps because the Times already investigated her role at length a couple of months ago. It’s hardly necessary, though. Taken as a whole, this is a portrait of a would-be president who (a) fundamentally believes in displays of force, (b) is eager to give the military everything they ask for, and (c) doesn’t believe that military intervention is a last resort, no matter what she might say in public.

If anything worries me about Hillary Clinton, this is it. It’s not so much that she’s more hawkish than me, it’s the fact that events of the past 15 years don’t seem to have affected her views at all. How is that possible? And yet, our failures in Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, Yemen, Syria and elsewhere apparently haven’t given her the slightest pause about the effectiveness of military force in the Middle East. Quite the opposite: the sense I get from Landler’s piece is that she continues to think all of these engagements would have turned out better if only we’d used more military power. I find it hard to understand how an intelligent, well-briefed person could continue to believe this, and that in turn makes me wonder just exactly what motivates Hillary’s worldview.

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Hillary Clinton Really Loves Military Intervention

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Which is More Important: Organic or Non-GMO?

by ChanceHailes Posted on January 22, 2016

While shopping at your local grocery store, youve no doubt come across the labels non-GMO and organic. Many health-conscious people try to avoid genetically modified ingredients, and they also tend to prefer organic goods to conventional ones. However, the two designations are not at all the same. As you make purchasing decisions about natural foods, its important to know the differences between these two labels so that you can determine which products are the best choice for you and your family.

Whats the difference between non-GMO and organic?

Foods that are labelled as non-GMO dont contain any genetically modified ingredients, but they arent necessarily organic. The opposite is true of USDA-certified organic foodsthese items are required by law not to contain any genetically modified ingredients, as well as to be raised orgrown without the use of synthetic pesticides.

Which is more expensive, and why?

Some retailers and food industry professionals have wondered how non-GMO and USDA-certified organic foods impact each others sales. Though many natural-minded consumers prefer non-GMO and organic foods, theyre likely to choose the former over the latter when faced with both options. The reason? Non-GMO foods dont also have to be certified organic, so they are usually less expensive.

“The non-GMO label threatens the USDA Organic label,” director of The Scoular Company Greg Lickteig told Organic Connections Magazine. “Given two products on the grocery store shelf, one being non-GMO and the other organic, the non-GMO product will most certainly be less expensive.”

Are there any major health differences?

The Mayo Clinic notes that while there arent any nutritional differences between organic and conventional foods, there are major differences in pesticide levels and instances of food additives.

On the GMO side of things, many food activists have demanded better research on the long-term consequences of genetic modificationbut there havent been any proven health risks noted yet.

Your personal beliefs about the environment, sustainable agriculture and pesticide risk should guide your decision to buy non-GMO or organic goods. If youre interested in avoiding genetically modified crops and reducing your pesticide exposure, those are good reasons to look for the USDA Organic and non-GMO labels on your food. Just remember that by purchasing non-GMO products, you’re not necessarily getting a certified organic good. If you buy something that’s USDA-certified organic, you can rest assured your food doesn’t contain any genetically modified ingredients.

Disclaimer: The views expressed above are solely those of the author and may not reflect those of Care2, Inc., its employees or advertisers.

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Which is More Important: Organic or Non-GMO?

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Friday Fundraising and Catblogging – 11 December 2015

by WilfordBroger Posted on December 11, 2015

Mother Jones

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Don’t worry: catblogging isn’t being ditched today. But first, I’m going to make you read about our year-end fundraising pitch. Why? Because Monika and Clara have written a piece that breaks down our entire operation in chart form. Be still my heart! As you can see, two-thirds of our operating budget comes from readers:

From our beginning almost 40 years ago, we have made a bet that you would support a newsroom that tells the stories no one else will. And you did. Today, two-thirds of our annual budget comes from readers; some 40,000 of you contribute, more than at any other nonprofit news organization outside public radio and TV.

….Some of you—about 175,000, to be exact—subscribe to our magazine. Another 12,000 folks buy individual issues on the newsstand. About 10 percent of our subscribers also become donors—they tack on an extra $20, $50, or even (hooray!) a five- or six-figure gift. Then there are donations in response to specific appeals: For example, about 6,000 people have pitched in online to help us fight the billionaire who sued us for covering his political giving and anti-gay activism. What’s critical for the long haul is that our base is broad and deep enough to ensure that we’re not dependent on any single check or revenue stream.

Click the link if you want all the gory details of how we operate. Or, if you’re one of the brainy ones and you already get it, just click the button below:

And now for catblogging. Because you guys deserve it. This week is a classic: a cat in a box. Lots of Christmas stuff comes in boxes, and that means the house is full of cat toys this time of year. And cat chew toys, since Hopper likes to gnaw boxes to shreds. She’s no pussycat about it, either. (Wait. Am I allowed to say that?) I tell you, she goes after boxes with a will. Every time she bites off a piece, she spits it out and makes a yucky face, but it doesn’t stop her. She may not like the taste, but she really likes to shred cardboard. She also likes to stick her furry little snout into the camera, which gives you a picture like this—taken early in the week when the box was still relatively intact.

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Friday Fundraising and Catblogging – 11 December 2015

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These Are Either the Best or Worst Political Presents We’ve Ever Seen

by WhitneyClogstoun Posted on November 27, 2015

Mother Jones

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Christmas isn’t just a time to fantasize about going Zero Dark Thirty on a bunch of elves—it’s also a chance to show your friends and family how much you care about them by spoiling them with gifts. The problem is that you’re bad at it. You either get them something they’ll forget about and leave in a closet somewhere for years, only to rediscover it later in life when they’re finally moving out of that run-down apartment and getting a place in the burbs. Or it’s something they’ll mindlessly fold into their daily lives, as if an immersion blender was just something they always had. But not this year. This year you’re getting them something they can’t return. Something that will scar them permanently. You’re getting them some weird political swag you saw on Etsy.

Bernie Sanders Prayer candle

GoSaintYourself/Etsy

Bern your house down with the Bernie Sanders prayer candle! This is perfect for that special someone who loves Bernie Sanders but isn’t really convinced that he’s Jewish. GoSaintYourself will donate $3 from every purchase to Sanders’ campaign.

Jeb Bush brown paper bags

sammo/Etsy

Sad.

“Fuck GQ” Tshirt gentlemen’s quarterly for their article about ben carson for president

BitchinTshirts/Etsy

This oddly specific piece of apparel was inspired by a GQ article by Drew Magary entitled “Fuck Ben Carson,” which Carson supporters considered far more distasteful than Carson’s suggestion that victims of an Oregon mass murder should have stopped the shooter themselves. Available in three colors—but not denim—this is a surprisingly functional T-shirt, perfect not just for Carson supporters, but for anyone who’s ever gotten upset (or will get upset at some point, any point) over the magazine’s depiction of women, overpowering cologne ad inserts, or skinny-suit recs.

Elect troll doll ben carson 2016

MyBestFriendsPillow/Etsy

What is this, a pillow for ants?

Embroidered donald trump quote about john mccain hoop art

varouna/Etsy

Celebrate the fourth (or was it the fifth?) incendiary statement that was going to sink Donald Trump’s campaign but didn’t because pundits are worthless and it turns out a large percentage of Republican primary voters also prefer people who weren’t captured, okay? For $45, we’d prefer at least a few more doves, and maybe some quotation marks. It’s not the most absurd of Trump statements, either, but this one probably reads less offensively to neutral house guests than “Somebody’s doing the raping.” (If you are looking for some less subtle embroidery, there are other options.) You may also enjoy:

celebrity quote novelty wooden wall hanging (donald trump)

ThriftInSpaceTime/Etsy

When he’s right, he’s right.

bernie sanders bouncy bernie dashboard doll

SammAjivArts/Etsy

The hair comes from a feather boa, and according to the seller, “His tie is actually done up in a full-Windsor.” Each doll is shipped via USPS, in solidarity with the pro-Sanders postal workers union, and 10 percent of all proceeds go to the Sanders campaign.

Rick Santorum ceramic party cup

littlechairprinting/Etsy

How about a nice cup of Santorum?

three hillary clinton pantsuit pancake portrait

Dan Lacey/Etsy

So here’s the thing about art: We’re all just pretending it makes sense. Billionaire Bill Koch—of the billionaire Kochs—just sold a Picasso for $67.5 billion. But not, like, one of the really famous ones, where various household objects are split into weird pieces that don’t make sense. It was kind of a low-grade Picasso; he painted it when he was 19, and I mean, you can’t hang that thing just anywhere. You can have this for $10—a steal—and it’s got a nice little post-modern touch, in conversation with themes of modernity, feminism, and notions of identity in the digital age. If you’re looking for something with a little more darkness, we might recommend:

gears of war 3 hillary anya stroud clinton vs hair deep sea lambert leviathan donald trump utilizing chainsaw lancer

(What does this mean?)

Dan Lacey/Etsy

The scene depicted in this painting actually happened. Ben Carson saw it.

donald trump butter stamp

OhCuddles/Etsy

You never know you need a butter stamp until you really need it, and then it’s too late. At that point you will have to engrave the visage of some racist rich dude from Queens into your butter by hand. Be smart. Think ahead. Stay vigilant.

Jeb bush cd clock

DicksClocks/Etsy

Sad.

Lindsey Graham as a troll painting

ogerosity/Etsy

“This is a 18×24 acrylic painting of United States Senator Lindsey Graham as a troll crying a single tear of love for his country.”

Bernie reign of sanders shirt

TheCraftedThreads/Etsy

The Venn diagram of metal fans and Bernie Sanders fans is a circle.

holiday disco party with bernie sanders and elizabeth warren paper ornament

FullSnowMoon/Etsy

Fill your amendment tree with the gift that both embraces late-stage capitalism and destroys it at the same time.

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These Are Either the Best or Worst Political Presents We’ve Ever Seen

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There’s a Big Untapped Market Out There for Insulting Libertarians

by CarmaDja7537 Posted on October 24, 2015

Mother Jones

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Ah, the mysteries of blogging. Over on the right, you’ll notice that a post of mine has been highlighted: “Here’s Why Libertarians Are Mostly Men.” But why? It’s four months old. It’s 200 words long. It probably took about 20 minutes to write. It offers up a theory that I pulled out of my ass.

And it has 161,000 Facebook likes. By contrast, my piece on lead and crime—by far the most important and most popular piece I’ve ever written for the magazine—has 87,000 likes after three years online. This quick post about libertarians is probably the most widely read prose I’ve ever written in my life.

Fine. My public has spoken. Less research, more Trumpesque insults aimed at libertarians. I’ll see what I can do.

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There’s a Big Untapped Market Out There for Insulting Libertarians

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Back to the Führer: This Guy Studies Baby Hitler Time Machine Scenarios

by EstherSweet Posted on October 23, 2015

Mother Jones

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A New York third-grader plays Hitler in a school production, 1942. Marjory Collins/FSA-OWI Collection

This morning, the New York Times Magazine tweeted the results of a survey of readers who were asked if they could bring themselves kill the baby Adolf Hitler. Forty-two percent said they could off the future Führer; 30 percent declined, and 28 percent said they were unsure.

The ensuing Twitter explosion reminded me of Gavriel Rosenfeld’s The World Hitler Never Made: Alternate History and the Memory of Nazism, a fascinatingly comprehensive look at pop culture’s obsession with counterfactual Hitler storylines, including the time-machine-baby-Hitler scenario. Rosenfeld is a professor of history at Fairfield University and the author of the recent book, Hi Hitler! How the Nazi Past is Being Normalized in Contemporary Culture. He also writes about counterfactual history, the study of “what if” events and their consequences.

Rosenfeld, who is not on Twitter, was blissfully unaware of the latest baby Hitler hubbub. But he kindly agreed to talk about why we never get sick of Hitler assassination fantasies and why Nazi references keep popping up in our political discussions.

Mother Jones: When did people start floating this hypothetical idea of, “Hey, if only we could go back in time and kill Hitler, everything would be different”?

Gavriel Rosenfeld: Of course, the notion of killing Hitler and improving history goes back to World War II itself. The idea of going back in time and killing Hitler as a baby is less frequently explored than exploring the possibility of whether Hitler had been assassinated successfully in real life. But what’s interesting is that when you get into the post-war period, many of the narratives in books and movies conclude that if you killed Hitler, you’re actually going to make history worse. So I’m surprised that 42 percent in the Times Magazine survey said they would kill Hitler as a baby. Of the 58 who said they wouldn’t do it, maybe they realize they wouldn’t make history better or they’re just ethically opposed to killing babies. And these are all Americans?

MJ: I don’t know, but I assume they are. They didn’t release any demographic info.

GR: The answers that you get to this question vary quite a bit by nation. British and Americans almost always say that you would make history worse, while German respondents are far and away inclined to say, of course, if you get rid of Hitler you make everything better. And the reason is that the Germans tend to like to blame the Nazi experience on one man who can be scapegoated. If you pile all the blame onto him, you exonerate the German masses from any responsibility. Whereas Americans and British respondents don’t want to let the German people off the hook. They make the case that if you get rid of Hitler, some other leader apart from Hitler would have emerged and, because of the structural constant of German nationalism, would have exploited German national feeling and produce the same kind of events no matter what.

Originally the premise of killing Hitler was fueled by deep traumatic feelings of wishing and fantasizing that if only things had been different, we could have spared ourselves all kinds of suffering. More recently it’s been turned into a comedic trope. As we go forward, tragedy plus time equals comedy, and that is what we’re seeing now.

MJ: In The World Hitler Never Made, you wrote about several books and shows that dealt with the scenario of killing baby Hitler. Do you have a favorite?

GR: My favorite, I suppose, is the British comedian and writer Stephen Fry’s novel Making History. It’s about a grad student in Cambridge who decides not so much to murder Hitler but prevent him from being born by sending, though a time machine, some birth control pills to the well where his mother was fetching water. By that process, his father, Alois Hitler, becomes sterile and Hitler is never born. That leads to a worse Nazi dictator emerging, a fictional guy named Rudolf Gloder. He’s much more rational than Hitler and he gets nuclear weapons and wreaks havoc around the world. He defeats the Soviet Union so there is no Cold War, but there is a cold war between the US and Nazi Germany. The irony is that the grad student then has to go back in time to make sure Hitler is born.

MJ: This baby Hitler moment follows Ben Carson saying the Holocaust could have been prevented if the Jews had been armed and Binyamin Netanyahu saying Hitler got the idea for the Holocaust from the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem. Why do people keep trying to rewrite the history of Nazism and the Holocaust?

GR: We are in a “what if?” moment. In times of uncertainty, we tend to move away from deterministic world views. And when we try to find moral footing for our actions, we compare ourselves to the foil of all foils, the Nazi period. It’s a quest for moral certainty by saying, “Even if we’re not doing great these days, at least we’re not the Third Reich.” Which can be consoling or alarmist. There’s always a present-day agenda behind it.

MJ: As a historian, do you see any good coming from these counterfactuals? Do they result in more people learning the history?

GR: I feel mixed about it. It’s the same as climate change deniers who force scientists to waste their time having to refute nonsensical ideas. On the other hand, it does bring to public attention things that people might not understand. Counterfactual claims make awesome headlines. The first step to get people interested in history is to wonder how things could have been different. Most people experience history as one damn fact after another in high school. But if you can wonder, “Wow, what if the US hadn’t gotten involved in World War II?”, you can become enthralled by the imaginary possibilities. Maybe that’s a way of getting the spoonful of sugar to help the medicine go down. And it’s why Hitler has become a meme. If you’re a website and you want to get attention, you can Hiterlize anything.

MJ: So if you could go back in time and kill baby Hitler, would you?

GR: I would be very tempted, but I wouldn’t have been born if World War II had never happened, which was caused by Adolf Hitler. My mother emigrated from Eastern Europe to America as a result of World War II. So for personal reasons, I would be a little hesitant. But far more broadly, what I have learned from studying counterfactual history is that the law of unintended consequences always kicks in no matter how secure you are in your plan. We have to live with the historical record as it is, like it or not.

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Back to the Führer: This Guy Studies Baby Hitler Time Machine Scenarios

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