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Are We in a New Golden Age of Journalism?

by euro9 Posted on January 21, 2014

Mother Jones

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This story first appeared on the TomDispatch website.

It was 1949. My mother—known in the gossip columns of that era as “New York’s girl caricaturist”—was freelancing theatrical sketches to a number of New York’s newspapers and magazines, including the Brooklyn Eagle. That paper, then more than a century old, had just a few years of life left in it. From 1846 to 1848, its editor had been the poet Walt Whitman. In later years, my mother used to enjoy telling a story about the Eagle editor she dealt with who, on learning that I was being sent to Walt Whitman kindergarten, responded in the classically gruff newspaper manner memorialized in movies like His Girl Friday: “Are they still naming things after that old bastard?”

In my childhood, New York City was, you might say, papered with newspapers. The Daily News, the Daily Mirror, the Herald Tribune, the Wall Street Journal…there were perhaps nine or 10 significant ones on newsstands every day and, though that might bring to mind some golden age of journalism, it’s worth remembering that a number of them were already amalgams. The Journal-American, for instance, had once been the Evening Journal and the American, just as the World-Telegram & Sun had been a threesome, the World, the Evening Telegram, and the Sun. In my own household, we got the New York Times (disappointingly comic-strip-less), the New York Post (then a liberal, not a right-wing, rag that ran Pogo and Herblock’s political cartoons) and sometimes the Journal-American (Believe It or Not and The Phantom).

Then there were always the magazines: in our house, Life, the Saturday Evening Post, Look, the New Yorker—my mother worked for some of them, too—and who knows what else in a roiling mass of print. It was a paper universe all the way to the horizon, though change and competition were in the air. After all, the screen (the TV screen, that is) was entering the American home like gangbusters. Mine arrived in 1953 when the Post assigned my mother to draw the Army-McCarthy hearings, which—something new under the sun—were to be televised live by ABC.

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Are We in a New Golden Age of Journalism?

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Hate Obamacare, Love the Benefits From Mumble-Mumble-Care

by LakeshaDQZ Posted on January 21, 2014

Mother Jones

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In Time this week, Stephen Brill catches up with a couple who had serious health care issues and desperately needed insurance:

When we spoke in October and Stephanie told me she didn’t “think Obamacare will help us,” I suggested that she might be mistaken and that if she was unable to get information from the then sputtering website she should consult an insurance broker. (Insurers pay the brokers’ fees, not consumers.)

“When they came to my office, Stephanie told me right up front, ‘I don’t want any part of Obamacare,’ “ recalls health-insurance agent Barry Cohen. “These were clearly people who don’t like the President. So I kind of let that slide and just asked them for basic information and told them we would go on the Ohio exchange”—which is actually the Ohio section of the federal Obamacare exchange—”and show them what’s available.”

What Stephanie soon discovered, she told me in mid-November, “was a godsend.”

This kind of story is quickly becoming a classic, along the lines of “Keep the government out of my Medicare.” But I still wonder whether, in the end, this is good or bad for Obamacare. Obviously, getting people signed up is good, regardless of how it happens. But how many people who are benefiting from Obamacare will become supporters of Obamacare? You’d think that virtually all of them would, but if they don’t really know they’re benefiting from Obamacare, maybe they won’t.

Then again, maybe it’s all for the best. If Republicans try to cripple Obamacare in some way, the word will quickly go out in all 50 states that Congress is doing something that will damage Kynect or Covered California or Healthy NY or whatever. Maybe that actually makes Obamacare safer than ever.

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Hate Obamacare, Love the Benefits From Mumble-Mumble-Care

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Teen Employment Isn’t Really Very Well Correlated With the Minimum Wage

by AlfredoMoffet Posted on January 21, 2014

Mother Jones

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Via Tyler Cowen, here is a chart from Kevin Erdmann that shows raw teen employment figures during periods after the minimum wage was increased. What it shows, roughly speaking, is that in nearly every case, the trend rate of teen employment declined when a minimum wage hike went into effect. He asks: “Is there any other issue where the data conforms so strongly to basic economic intuition, and yet is widely written off as a coincidence?”

But but but…..what about the long-term trend? Between 1954 and 1970 the minimum wage went up steadily in real terms, and so did teen employment. Since 1980 the minimum wage has been declining steadily, and so has teen employment. Is it really possible that changes in the minimum wage would have immediate effects in one direction but long-term effects in the exact opposite direction?

Sure, maybe. But it doesn’t seem likely. In terms of short-term effects, what I mostly see are employment declines in 1973, 1979, 1990, 2000, and 2007. And guess what? Those are the dates of the last five recessions in the United States. What’s more interesting about this is that teen employment recovered from its immediate decline during the Carter and Clinton years, but didn’t recover during the Reagan and Bush years. (And probably not during the Obama years either, though the final results aren’t in yet.) Why? That’s an intriguing question.

Bottom line: Teen employment has dropped substantially since about 1980. But during that time the real minimum wage has declined from $8 to $6 and then gone back up to a little over $7. Maybe there’s a correlation there, but it sure isn’t easy to see. Whatever’s happening, the minimum wage seems to be a pretty small part of it.

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Teen Employment Isn’t Really Very Well Correlated With the Minimum Wage

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The Standard American Diet in 3 Simple Charts

by BrendaMcKinnon Posted on January 20, 2014

Mother Jones

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US obesity and diabetes rates are among the globe’s very highest. Why? On her blog, the NYU nutritionist and food-politics expert Marion Nestle recently pointed (hat-tip, RealFood.org) to this telling chart on how we spend our grocery money, from the USDA’s Amber Waves publication:

So, we do a pretty good job eating enough potatoes. But the healthier, more brightly colored vegetables like kale and carrots, no so much. We spend four times the amount on refined grains the USDA thinks is proper, and about a fifth of the target expenditure in whole grains. We spend nearly 14 percent of our at-home food budgets on sugar and candies, and another 8 percent on premade frozen and fridge entrees. Whole fruit barley accounts for less than 5 percent of our grocery bill. And so on—a pretty dismal picture.

That chart deals with at-home expenditures. What about our food choices out in the world? The USDA article has more. This chart shows that we’re getting more and more of our sustenance outside of our own kitchens:

And while the article doesn’t offer comparable data to the above at-home chart about expenditures outside the home, it does deliver evidence that our eating out habits are pretty dire as well:

Why do we eat such crap food? The USDA throws up its hands: “Despite the benefits to overall diet quality,” the report states, “it can be difficult to convince consumers to change food preferences.”

But it never pauses top consider the food industry’s vast marketing budget. According to Yale’s Rudd Center, the US fast-food chains like McDonalds, Wendy’s, and Burger King spent $4.6 billion on advertising in 2012. “For context,” Rudd reports, “the biggest advertiser, McDonald’s, spent 2.7 times as much to advertise its products ($972 million) as all fruit, vegetable, bottled water, and milk advertisers combined ($367 million).” I can’t find numbers for the marketing budgets for the gigantic food companies that stock the middle shelves of supermarkets; but according to Advertising Age, Kraft alone spent $683 million on US advertising in 2012.

By contrast, Center for Nutrition Policy and Promotion, the USDA’s sub-agency that “works to improve the health and well-being of Americans by developing and promoting dietary guidance that links scientific research to the nutrition needs of consumers,” had a proposed budget of $8.7 million in 2013.

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The Standard American Diet in 3 Simple Charts

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Ask vs. Ax and the Evolution of the English Language

by SusannaChk Posted on January 19, 2014

Mother Jones

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In the LA Times today, John McWhorter explains why ax is so commonly used by blacks as a nonstandard pronunciation of ask. Long story short, there were several pronunciations of the word in Middle English, but by around the 16th century ask had become standard:

Going forward, “aks” was used primarily by uneducated people, including indentured servants, whom black slaves in America worked alongside and learned English from. So, “aks” is no more a “broken” form of “ask” than “fish” is a “broken” version of ye olde “fisk.” It’s just that “fisk” isn’t around anymore to remind us of how things used to be.

But even knowing that, we can’t help thinking that standard English, even if arbitrary, should be standard. Shouldn’t it be as simple to pick up the modern pronunciation of “ask” as it is to acquire a new slang word?.

….The first thing to understand is that, for black people, “ax” has a different meaning than “ask.” Words are more than sequences of letters, and “ax” is drunk in from childhood. “Ax” is a word indelibly associated not just with asking but with black people asking….”Ax,” then, is as integral a part of being a black American as are subtle aspects of carriage, demeanor, humor and religious practice. “Ax” is a gospel chord in the form of a word, a facet of black being — which is precisely why black people can both make fun of and also regularly use “ax,” even as college graduates.

I can’t think of anything in particular to say about this, but I figured that since I found it interesting, you might too. However, I’m curious about something that McWhorter doesn’t address: different forms of the word. It doesn’t seem like I ever hear axing or axed, only asking and asked. But obviously my experience is severely limited, so maybe those are just as common as ax. Anyone have any insight about that?

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Ask vs. Ax and the Evolution of the English Language

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Study Says Comedians Have Psychotic Personality Traits—Here’s What Some Comedians Have To Say About That

by Bernie MacRos Posted on January 17, 2014

Mother Jones

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If you’ve ever seen footage of comedian Bill Hicks taking on a heckler, you might have thought to yourself, “Wow, that was pretty psychotic.”

Well, according to a recent study published in the British Journal of Psychiatry, you weren’t that far off. For the study, which is titled, “Psychotic traits in comedians,” researchers recruited 523 comedians (404 male and 119 female, most of whom were amateurs) from the United States, Australia, and the United Kingdom. The researchers determined that comedians scored significantly higher on four types of psychotic personality traits compared to a control group of individuals who had non-artistic jobs. The study focuses on two major categories of psychosis—bipolar disorder and schizophrenia—and examines impulsive non-conformity.

“The results of this study substantially confirmed our expectation that comedians would behave like other creative groups in showing a high level of psychotic personality traits,” the authors wrote. “They did so across all the domains sampled by the questionnaire we used, from schizoid and schizophrenic-like characteristics through to manic-depressive features.”

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Study Says Comedians Have Psychotic Personality Traits—Here’s What Some Comedians Have To Say About That

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Pot Grows on Harry Reid

by DallasHargraves Posted on January 17, 2014

Mother Jones

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Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) used to be firmly against legalizing marijuana because of its reputation as a gateway drug. But reputations are just a construct, man. Free your mind.

On Thursday, Reid told the Las Vegas Sun that his views on teenage David Brooks’ favorite baser pleasure have evolved. “If you’d asked me this question a dozen years ago, it would have been easy to answer—I would have said no, because it leads to other stuff, but I can’t say that anymore. I think we need to take a real close look at this. I think that there’s some medical reasons for marijuana.”

Nevada is one of twenty states where medical marijuana is legal, but in September three of its largest cities placed local moratoriums on applications for new dispensaries. Reid’s support could go a long way toward lifting those moratoriums.

Reid, who said he’s never tried marijuana, didn’t go so far as to say that he would endorse full legalization, as in Colorado. (“I don’t know about that. I just think that we need to look at the medical aspects of it.”) But he did acknowledge the neat and groovy point that spending billions of dollars going after pot smokers is irrational. “I guarantee you one thing. We waste a lot of time and law enforcement going after these guys that are smoking marijuana.”

How does this affect you, a (possibly) healthy pot-curious millennial from a state other than Nevada? It doesn’t directly. But it’s yet another sign that the nation’s views towards marijuana may have reached a tipping point. Today, 55 percent of Americans support legalization, up from 43 percent last year, according to CNN/Opinion Research. Colorado and Washington have become the first two states to legalize recreational marijuana, and on Wednesday, New Hampshire’s House of Representatives passed a bill that would see the Granite State become the third. (Though it isn’t expected to survive the Senate.)

So, anyway.

Harry Reid: Hippie.

Marijuana: Likely to be legal in most of the country by 2020.

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Pot Grows on Harry Reid

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"Mitt" the Movie: What’s Not There

by EsmeraldaYarnol Posted on January 17, 2014

Mother Jones

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Forgive me for being parochial, but I was looking for a specific piece of footage in the new Netflix behind-the-scenes documentary on Mitt Romney—simply titled Mitt—that was made by Greg Whiteley, who trailed the GOP candidate for six years through Election Night 2012. I yearned to see Romney’s response to the release of the 47-percent video: how he personally reacted to this revelation and how his campaign planned its public reply. This was a significant moment in Romney’s political life. How he handled it could be quite enlightening. After all, the film does record how Romney dealt with his 2008 loss in the GOP presidential primaries. (In conversations with his family, Romney acknowledges he was branded “the flippin’ Mormon,” and says, “I think I’m a flawed candidate.”) But Whiteley offers us no peek at how the former CEO processed the historic 47-percent moment that did much to define him—or reinforce an existing definition.

In fact, for all the access Whiteley obtained, he serves up little material that will alter the basic story of Mitt. Sure, the viewer will learn that Romney likes to romp in the snow with his grandkids, that he’s happier with a pair of duct-taped gloves than a new set, that he has a somewhat dark sense of humor, that he often thinks of his father, that wife Ann is tightly strung, and that Romney likes to pick up trash from the floors or balconies of hotel rooms during tense moments (say, before he hits the stage for a debate or prior to the announcement of election results). Certainly, Romney comes across as less robotic in these 90-minutes of home-movie-like scenes. But the film offers no insights about the fellow. His faults as a presidential candidate are not examined. What he really believes—other than the notion that the nation is heading off a cliff due to too much taxation and regulation—is left on the cutting room floor. That is, if it was ever captured.

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"Mitt" the Movie: What’s Not There

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Friday Cat Blogging – 17 January 2014

by AngelikaHinder Posted on January 17, 2014

Mother Jones

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Today you get an exciting Domino movie! At first glance, you might think that she’s begging for food. But no. This little song-and-dance routine has one and only one meaning: she wants me to come into the living room, get down on the floor, and rub her belly. So I do. This is an even more elaborately choreographed affair, and maybe someday I’ll make a video of that too.

In other news, check out the handiwork of German design company Goldtatze, which can turn any room in your house into an arboreal cat playground. Very tastefully, too. “The cat-sized architectural additions seem like a year-round dose of summer camp for the curious pets.” Uh huh.

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Friday Cat Blogging – 17 January 2014

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WATCH: Government-Funded Israeli Groups Attack John Kerry With Scatological Parody Video

by UXMAnnetta Posted on January 17, 2014

Mother Jones

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As Secretary of State John Kerry strives to revive the Middle East peace process, while also toiling to craft a nuclear deal with Iran and achieve a resolution to the Syrian conflict, he has come under attack in an unusual manner. An Israeli group funded by the Benjamin Netanyahu-led government is mounting an anti-Kerry campaign by promoting a video that employs a scatological joke to lampoon and deride the United States’ top diplomat.

In the video, which is in Hebrew, an Israeli fellow sitting on a toilet discovers there’s no toilet paper. What to do? But there’s no need for him to worry; Kerry—that is, an actor playing Kerry—is there, and he is holding in his hands the solution to the man’s problem: a porcupine. Yes, Kerry counsels the Israeli to use this small animal as a TP substitute. The man dutifully follows the advice and ends up with a distressed bum. Well, Kerry has the solution to that problem: a pink tutu. “You can walk around the office feeling free and open,” he tells the Israeli, who is next seen strolling awkwardly about his workspace in a tutu. And there’s a new problem: His officemates tease him. And Kerry has a new solution: a resignation letter. You cannot be the object of scorn, he says to the man, “if you’re not here, right?” The next scene shows the Israeli fellow out on the street, apparently jobless. Kerry quips, “We don’t have good solutions, but we have to do something, right?” He then tosses the man a few dollars and says, “Okay, lunch, guys.”

The point: Kerry is a dunce eager to promote stupid solutions that would leave Israelis worse off.

The video is part of campaign being run by the Yesha Council, which represents the Israeli settlements on the West Bank, and another settlers group; both receive regular funding from the government. On its website, the Yesha Council, which has previously mounted efforts to undermine negotiations for a two-state solution, explained this campaign: “The main message: Israel’s deep friendship with the US does not require us to give in to pressures that lead to solutions that threaten our country and its people.” And its tool is mockery. The site these groups set up—John Kerry Solutions Inc.—features the video but also lists everyday questions for Kerry and his supposed answers. Here’s one: “I fell off a ladder while trying to hang a picture and now I’m lying on the floor with a mild concussion and I cannot call for help. What to do?” Kerry’s answer: Hang the picture lower.

It’s unclear whether this anti-Kerry sarcasm, which has drawn Israeli media attention, will have any impact within the contentious world of domestic Israeli politics. Kerry is already a top target for the Israeli right, which has assailed him for both pushing a nuclear deal with Tehran and attempting to kick-start Israeli-Palestinian talks for a two-state solution. (Jewish settlements in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip are generally regarded as a major obstacle to a peace deal.) Earlier this week, Moshe Yaalon, the Israeli defense minister, was quoted by a newspaper calling Kerry “messianic,” just days before Kerry was to visit Israel. He also said that Kerry ought to seek his Nobel Peace Prize elsewhere and “leave us alone.” Yaalon subsequently apologized.

It’s a bit awkward that a US secretary of state is being slammed by groups that receive financial support from the Israeli government, a Washington ally. And the Israeli government is distancing itself from this effort. Asked about the Kerry video, a spokesman for the Israeli Embassy in Washington said, “The Yesha council and Binyamin Regional Council another settlers outfit supporting the anti-Kerry campaign represent a small interest group and this current campaign doesn’t reflect at all the Israeli government positions. We deeply appreciate Secretary Kerry’s commitment to Israel’s security and to helping Israel achieve a lasting and secure peace with the Palestinians.” (There has been debate within the Israeli parliament as to whether regional councils in Israel, including those behind this anti-Kerry project, can use public funds for political messaging). The State Department did not respond to a request for comment.

OneVoice, an international grassroots group that works with Israelis and Palestinians to support a two-state solution, denounced the Kerry video: “It is outrageous that this campaign is funded with public money. Unlike previous campaigns by extreme right-wing movements, this isn’t targeted at protecting settlements but is instead a juvenile and unprecedented attack against the US government and its efforts to bring peace to the region.” It called for the Israeli state comptroller to investigate the use of government funding by these groups.

Criticism of the porcupine video doesn’t seem to be slowing down Kerry’s antagonists in Israel. The Yesha Council this week announced a new campaign with the slogan, “Keep the Country Safe—Don’t Surrender to Kerry.” As one Israeli media report notes, “The people behind the campaign explained that its purpose is to isolate Kerry and support Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu, at least as long as he stands up to Kerry and defends Israel’s interests.”

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WATCH: Government-Funded Israeli Groups Attack John Kerry With Scatological Parody Video

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