America’s big spending on health care doesn’t pay off
AMERICA remains the world’s most profligate spender on health care, according to a report published on November 4th by the OECD, a club of 34 mostly rich countries. In 2013 the United States spent, on average, $8,713 per person—two and a half times as much as the OECD average. Yet the average American dies 1.7 years earlier than the average OECD citizen. This longevity gap has grown by a year since 2003. Americans have the same life expectancy as Chileans, even though Chile spends less than a fifth of what America spends on health care per person.
ISIS AFTER PARIS by Steve Coll - from the New Yorker, November 30, 2015 In the week since the attacks on Paris, there has been a great deal of talk about waging war on the Islamic State, but scant clarity about how such a war might succeed. In a season when the improvisations of Vladimir Putin shape geopolitics, and those of Donald Trump shape American politics (Trump has remarked that Putin is “getting an A” for leadership), it is perhaps unsurprising that public discourse about what comes next has been informed by opportunism and incoherence. Yet even the sober, often stirring rhetoric of the French President, François Hollande, has often elided the main problem, which involves aligning aims with realistic means. “France is at war,” Hollande told his parliament last week, as French jets struck Raqqa, Syria, the Islamic State’s self-declared capital. He vowed to “eradicate” the organization. But how, and how long will it take? In 2004, James D. Fearon, a political scientist at Stanford, published a study, “Why Do Some Civil Wars Last So Much Longer Than Others?,” in which he and a colleague analyzed scores of civil wars fought between 1945 and 1999. Some of the findings were intuitive: civil wars end quickly when one side has a decisive military advantage over the other; poor countries with natural resources to export often have long internal wars, because whoever controls the resources also controls the national treasury. Other findings were novel, such as the fact that wars following coups d’état tend to be short. In another study, “Ethnicity, Insurgency, and Civil War,” Fearon and the political scientist David D. Laitin discovered that even though in nations with exceptional ethnic pluralism, like Syria and Iraq, lines of conflict may be defined by ethnic identity, pluralism itself is not a notable predictor of civil war; poverty is a much more significant factor. Rereading these works in light of the infuriating problem of the Islamic State, two discouraging findings stand out. In 1945, many civil wars were concluded after about two years. By 1999, they lasted, on average, about sixteen years. And conflicts in which a guerrilla group could finance itself—by selling contraband drug crops, or by smuggling oil—might go on for thirty or forty years. The Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, or FARC, has been around since 1964, sustained in no small part by American cocaine consumption. The Islamic State is an oil-funded descendant of Al Qaeda in Iraq, a branch of the original Al Qaeda, which was formed in 1988. According to the C.I.A., ISIS has at least twenty thousand armed fighters; some estimates put the number much higher. It controls large swaths of territory, including major cities, such as Mosul. It is unusually barbarous, and good at Twitter. Its millenarian ideology of hatred and extermination poses a threat across borders. Yet its army and its sanctuary, in Iraq and Syria, are not, in a structural sense, exceptional. From the American intervention in Somalia, in 1992, through the French intervention in Mali, in 2013, industrialized countries have been able to deploy ground forces to take guerrilla-held territory in about sixty days or less. The problem is that if they don’t then leave, to be replaced by more locally credible yet militarily able forces, they invite frustration, and risk unsustainable casualties and political if not military defeat. This has been true even when the guerrilla forces were weak: the Taliban possesses neither planes nor significant anti-aircraft missiles, yet it has fought the United States to a stalemate, and the advantage is now shifting in its favor. If President Obama ordered the Marines into urgent action, they could be waving flags of liberation in Raqqa by New Year’s. But, after taking the region, killing scores of ISIS commanders as well as Syrian civilians, and flushing surviving fighters and international recruits into the broken, ungoverned cities of Syria and Iraq’s Sunni heartland, then what? Without political coöperation from Bashar al-Assad, Russia, Iran, Hezbollah, Iraqi Shiite militias, Turkey, the Al Qaeda ally Al Nusra, Saudi Arabia, the Gulf States, and others, the Marines (and the French or NATO allies that might assist them) would soon become targets for a mind-bogglingly diverse array of opponents. Syrian rebels overwhelmingly regard Assad’s regime as their main enemy, and for good reason: his forces have killed more Syrians than anyone else has. In the absence of a political agreement with Assad or his removal from office, it is impossible to conceive of a Muslim-majority occupation force that would be able and willing to keep the peace after the Marines departed. Some may argue that it would be worthwhile, nonetheless, to wipe out the Islamic State on the ground and deal with the fallout later. After Paris, such an approach may hold emotional appeal. After Afghanistan and Iraq, however, it is not a responsible course of action. Analyses like James Fearon’s suggest that there are perhaps two ways to end, or at least to contain, long wars. One is to accept that success will be a long time coming, and to adopt a posture of military and diplomatic patience and persistence. That may yet lead to the FARC’s disarmament. The other is to negotiate aggressively to form international alliances, which will allow for a rapid, decisive use of force on the ground. The European Union activated a mutual-defense compact after the Paris attacks; NATO could broaden the alliance by invoking Article 5 of its treaty, as it did after 9/11. Such coalitions can be swiftly efective. When Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait, George H. W. Bush and James Baker pulled together an unexpected military alliance to force his retreat. In Afghanistan, George W. Bush overthrew the Taliban with worldwide support. Both actions eliminated the immediate threat, but neither resolved the targeted country’s underlying instability, or assured durable international security. (On Friday, Islamist terrorists staged a murderous raid on a hotel in Mali’s capital, Bamako, almost three years after the French-led intervention in that country.) Barack Obama has all but ruled out a ground intervention in Syria or Iraq. Instead, last week he promised “an intensification” of the strategy he is already pursuing: Special Forces raids, air strikes, and diplomatic conferences to try to resolve the Syrian war, perhaps by declaring ceasefires or insuring Putin’s coöperation. “A political solution is the only way to end the war in Syria and unite the Syrian people and the world” against the Islamic State, the President said. Unfortunately, right now that looks no more realistic than a prolonged American occupation of Raqqa. Obama’s caution in the Middle East since the Arab Spring is a reminder that there are perhaps as many risks attendant upon inaction as upon action. The dilemmas suggested by Fearon’s research won’t evaporate; they will be on the desk of Obama’s successor. —Steve Coll
Half a century ago, William Buckley and Gore Vidal brilliantly castigated each other on air. It’s been downhill ever since.
They came loaded for bear. William F. Buckley and Gore Vidal, representing the political poles in America, sat in front of the ABC News cameras in 1968 and, though hired to discuss the events of each party’s political conventions and their path toward their presidential tickets, these men each arrived with the intention of taking down the other. For the good of the nation.
During the summer 1968 Republican and Democratic conventions, the United States was in turmoil, the chasm between youth culture and the establishment widening as the war in Vietnam dragged on, killing kids, killing civilians, killing hope. In March of that year, two weeks after the My Lai Massacre, President Lyndon Johnson announced he would not seek reelection. Dr. Martin Luther King was assassinated in April. Bobby Kennedy was assassinated two months later. Riots raged across the United States, in cities large and small. Major publications gave serious consideration to the possibility of a new U.S. civil war.
“As far as I’m concerned,” Vidal told him, “the only pro- or crypto-Nazi I can think of is yourself.”
“Now listen, you queer,” Buckley said, “stop calling me a crypto-Nazi or I’ll sock you in you goddamn face and you’ll stay plastered.”
Unlike now, conventions in those days were not a stage play with the outcomes predetermined. In 1968, neither party went in with a clear candidate. Actual politics would be conducted.
For the previous several conventions, the three television networks had made it their journalistic duty to cover the proceedings “gavel-to-gavel,” meaning from late afternoon until whenever business was concluded, usually before midnight, but, if there were a floor fight, well into the night.
Of the three networks—there were only three then, plus the precursor to PBS—ABC was a distant third. It had been founded later, was less funded, had fewer affiliates. It had neither the resources nor the personalities to draw viewership, and, in 1968, the ABC network chiefs decided they couldn’t afford gavel-to-gavel coverage. It wasn’t that live coverage was expensive; rather, they needed the income that their primetime programming would generate. While NBC and CBS would broadcast political speeches, ABC offered instead The Flying Nun, Bewitched, Batman and Land of the Giants (giving a new meaning to TV as escapism). Then, after its regular nightly news, ABC would offer 90 minutes of what it termed “unconventional convention coverage,” a five-segment nightly summation of the day. They’d open with a synopsis of the day’s events and close with an update. In between was “Correspondents’ Caucus,” a roundtable discussion from the leading ABC reporters; “Closeup” an in-depth analysis of the day’s major events; and “A Second Look,” which featured Buckley and Vidal and was described in a press release: “William F. Buckley Jr. and Gore Vidal will ‘discuss,’ in their usually irreverent fashion, the men and issues. Astute and articulate observers of the political scene, the conservative Buckley and outspoken liberal Vidal are expected to disagree occasionally.”
ABC was ridiculed by news organizations from all media for forsaking its journalistic responsibility, but the results of their desperate measure surprised everyone.
***
Both Buckley and Vidal had already developed large public personae, including a renowned dislike for each other. Their first confrontation had been in print in 1961, a series of Associated Press columns, each presenting opposing sides on current affairs. Then in 1962 Vidal, already a favorite guest of TV talk show host Jack Paar, made fun of Buckley and National Review for rejecting Pope John XXIII’s encyclical Mater et Magistra, which called on Catholics to embrace social progress. Buckley learned of this televised insult as he was departing the country and he left a telegram with his office to send to Paar that, according to Buckley, included the line: PLEASE INFORM GORE VIDAL THAT NEITHER I NOR MY FAMILY IS DISPOSED TO RECEIVE LESSONS IN MORALITY FROM A PINK QUEER.
His office did not send it, and instead Buckley demanded time for a response, garnering his first national TV appearance. There he surprised Paar by speaking intelligently and precisely from a conservative viewpoint when Paar was expecting the prejudiced and crude talk associated with the John Birch Society, the group that had long emblematized the political right. But Buckley had been actively re-branding the conservatives, distancing the movement from what he called “the kooks and the anti-Semites,” positioning himself as a spokesman for a thoughtful, reasoned political stance. Buckley handled himself well on television and, like Vidal, understood the power of the medium to reach into broad swaths of America personally, with a message undiluted.
Despite political differences, the two men seemed cut from the same cloth: Their mid-Atlantic speaking accents were haughty, their demeanors were aloof, they exuded breeding and education. However, for each, these airs had been cultured; they were not born into the Eastern establishment, and didn’t have the usual New England prep school backgrounds (though each did attend elite academies, Buckley at Andover and Vidal at Exeter). Vidal came from Oklahoma and Tennessee stock and was raised in the U.S. Senate where his blind grandfather served, developing a political education by reading aloud to him the Congressional Record and other necessary documents. Buckley’s family was wealthy, but nouveau, their Catholicism keeping them outside the WASPish circle of their Connecticut bluebloods neighbors. Tutored from an early age, Bill went on to Yale while Vidal opted not to pursue college—each angling for his own route of attack on the culture’s dominant forces. Vidal published his first book in 1946 but became an enfant terrible with The City and the Pillar in 1948, a novel that dealt unapologetically and sympathetically with a homosexual protagonist. Buckley published his first book three years later, God and Man at Yale, a controversial attack on an institution that he proclaimed was leaning too far left, promulgating communism, and attacking religion. Their positions staked, we can look back and see these polar opposites being slowly drawn toward each other.
As outsiders with atypical establishmentarian backgrounds, they were comfortable moving to television at a time when the boob tube was still disparaged as déclassé. On September 23, 1962, they appeared together on the syndicated David Susskind program, a tête-à-tête that proved them equally matched for wit, though polarized in world views. Apparently neither felt like they’d completed what they set out to do at that meeting, and they appeared again with Susskind on July 15, 1964, from the San Francisco Republican National Convention. There, the sparring continued, an undercurrent of loathing gradually surfacing, and afterward Buckley informed Vidal he wanted to never see him again, the rare statement from Buckley with which Vidal could agree.
Enter ABC and 1968. As the press release reveals, ABC knew that bringing the two together could create friction and that the sparks could attract more viewers. In fact, when Buckley was hired, the network asked him, perhaps slyly, whom he’d like as an opponent from the liberal side, and then asked him for names he’d prefer not to debate. Buckley, as he later recounted in Esquire, said that as a matter of principle he’d not debate a communist, and also not Gore Vidal “because I had had unpleasant experiences with him in the past and did not trust him.” Vidal, who also claimed he was hired first, says he asked not to face Buckley because he didn’t want to lend him any credibility or create opportunity for him to spread his message. Nonetheless, each assented when he learned who his opponent would be, drawn no doubt by the power of the national audience he’d have and also, not insignificantly, by the $10,000 fee (approximately $70,000 in 2015 currency). Their tasks also included filming commentaries inserted into the newscasts prior to the conventions and appearing in November on election night.
Coverage began two days prior to each convention. Within minutes of their first conversation, these high-minded individuals took the low road. After Vidal contemns the Republicans as the party of greed, Buckley turns personal, assaulting Vidal and his most recent novel, Myra Breckinridge, which Vidal once described as about “a man who becomes a woman who becomes a man”—scandalous for its time and quickly a bestseller. Though Buckley was first in shifting from the political to the personal, Vidal had come prepared to do just that, having hired researchers to create a dossier on Buckley and pre-scripting pages of insults to hurl at his opponent. (My favorite is describing Buckley as “the Marie Antoinette of the right-wing.”) Buckley, who had opened a dossier on Vidal in 1965, makes frequent insinuations about Vidal’s homosexuality, saying in the first debate, “We know your tendency is to be feline, Mr. Vidal.”
Not unlike the way exposure to the natural elements destroys old paper and paintings, the national camera and its bright lights serve to degrade wit, erudition and commitment to political thought. Before these debates were over—in the penultimate meeting, as if scripted by a Hollywood writer—Buckley and Vidal were reduced to schoolyard name-calling, an ugly ad hominem attack that had been brewing for years, that night after night the klieg lights had warmed until ready to serve. Vidal called Buckley a “crypto-Nazi.” Buckley called Vidal a queer and threatened physical violence. They each knew the single term that could pierce the other’s psyche.
WaPo Bemoans a Climate Debate It Helped ‘Devolve’
By Peter Hart / Fair.org
The Washington Post editorial page is stepping forward to send a message: Climate change is real, the crisis is urgent, and it’s time to act. But we shouldn’t forget what the paper has done to make addressing climate change more difficult–by regularly publishing climate deniers.
Titled “A Climate for Change,” the Post series started in yesterday’s edition (8/25/14) with the paper making the point that the “national debate on climate change has devolved.” While there was at one point hope that politicians would accept the science and move towards some real solutions, “a faction that rejects the science of global warming dragged the GOP into irresponsible head-in-the-sand-ism.”
All the while, the paper says, the “scientists’ warnings have become more dire.” So the Post explains:
The shape of the climate debate now and through the 2016 election is important. In the coming days we aim to contribute to that debate with a brief series of editorials.
The piece in today’s print edition (8/26/14) includes the subhead, “The Science Is Clear: Humans Have Caused Climate Change.” It tells readers that political leaders “remain divided on the need to curb greenhouse emissions,” which is simply “mind-boggling” to “mainstream scientists.”
The Post explains what exactly is clear–the planet is indeed warming, and the climate crisis is caused by human activity–and says that “most reasonable climate skeptics accept these findings.”
Except for some of the people the Post pays to write columns.
Some of the most high-profile media climate deniers–George Will, Charles Krauthammer and Robert Samuelson–are all Post columnists who have done their part to contribute to the “shape of the climate debate.” Krauthammer most recently (2/20/14) mocked the idea that the science of climate change was “settled,” and wrote that scientists who warn of the disastrous effects of climate change are “white-coated propagandists.” Krauthammer went on TV this year to mock climate change science as “superstition.”
Will has a long record of distorting climate science; in 2009 he wrote that warming was “allegedly occurring,” and in a 2012 TV appearance scoffed that people were confusing warming for a hot summer: “Get over it.”
Samuelson used to pooh-pooh climate change: “It’s politically incorrect to question whether this is a serious problem that serious people ought to take seriously,” he wrote in the 1990s (7/9/97), and he praised George W. Bush for rejecting the Kyoto accords (6/21/01). Lately (5/11/14) he seems more equivocal: “There’s enormous uncertainty about how much warming will occur, what changes (for good or ill) it will bring and how easily (or not) we can adapt. (He seems to have become one of those “reasonable climate skeptics” the Post editorialists were referring to.)
In 2009 (12/9/09), the paper’s op-ed page rather famously turned to noted climate expert Sarah Palin for a piece about how “we can’t say with assurance that man’s activities cause weather changes.”
So if this series is a sign that the Washington Post has truly shifted on climate change, that’s a good thing. But if we’re to take them seriously about “the shape of the climate debate,” perhaps they would like to offer some thoughts about what their paper’s columnists have done to warp that discussion. Whatever the case, the Post isn’t going to stop running anti-science op-eds. As editorial page editor Fred Hiatt told Joe Strupp of Media Matters (8/26/14), “I’m more inclined to take op-eds that challenge our editorials than just kind of join the chorus.”
John Oliver’s recent interview with Edward Snowden reveals both the weakness of our media and the lies Snowden has made himself believe.
The media team and intelligence handlers around Edward Snowden finally committed a major blunder. After fawning tributes, softball interviews, and an Oscar coronation for his celluloid enablers, they made a decision they should have known would go wrong.
They let Ed talk to John Oliver.
[This is an appropriate moment to add a visual aid to Elroy's Homework: the interview and segment itself.]
This is nothing short of amazing, and suggests either that the Russian spooks now in control of Snowden’s life don’t watch Oliver’s show, or that they were led to believe Oliver is just another liberal journalist who would allow Snowden to run his usual All-American Kid act. Either way, they had to be disappointed. Oliver, for all of his attempts to be serious, couldn’t help but shove Snowden around, and the interview showed just how uncomfortable someone like Snowden is—and likely has been his whole life—around Cool Kids like John Oliver.
So, Snowden’s socially awkward, and Oliver is hilarious. This we knew already. But what else did we learn from this interview, and what does it tell us about the Snowden affair in general?
Edward Snowden’s Handlers Are Losing Their Touch
One observation right off the bat is that both the Russians and Snowden’s other advisers are losing their touch. The people around Snowden have played an expert game for the past two years, especially given the limited material (that is, Snowden himself) they’ve had to work with. They’ve done some good staging, exploited the cooperation of credulous journalists, and avoided hard questions. It is a testimony both to the fecklessness of the media and the competence of the Snowden team that Oliver was the first time Ed’s done anything even close to a real interview.
Why did the Russians even allow this? Seriously, did Snowden’s handlers think that Oliver, who exudes the perfect combination of mock cowardice and blustery fearlessness that is the mark of a professional smart-ass, wouldn’t open the window and point out that the meeting place was across the street from the headquarters of the Russian intelligence service? Do they not get HBO in Russia? Didn’t anyone do some homework here?
Snowden himself came prepared, at least initially. (I would love to see the full, unedited version of this one, which I assume is both wildly funny and wincingly uncomfortable.) Right at the start, however, Oliver wasn’t having any of Snowden’s pretentious and practiced responses, and when Oliver decided to have some fun, that’s when we learned more about three important things: the role of Snowden’s ego, the recklessness of Snowden’s actions, and the actual limits on programs Snowden has claimed are nearly omnipotent.
I’m A Hero, I Really Am!
Like all defectors, Snowden’s ego is heavily invested in his own heroism. Consider the look on Snowden’s face when Oliver deflated Ed’s bloated claims about how his betrayal wasn’t for his own glory, but instead to allow benighted Americans to decide these issues for ourselves. Oliver showed Snowden one clip after another of people in Times Square who had literally zero awareness of the Snowden debacle or of Snowden himself. He then said: “On the plus side, you might be able to go home, because it seems like no one knows who the f*** you are or what the f*** you did.”
Snowden was visibly distressed. (As Wired wrote the next morning: “Snowden’s face as he watches registers amusement, surprise, and then frank horror.”) This was not what Ed expected, and whether it was something Snowden knew already or only suspected, he didn’t like having it shoved in his face.
Of course, the right answer at that point, if Snowden were a man polished by repeated interviews and confident in his own actions, would be to smile and say: “John, that’s disturbing, and I’m glad you’re here so we can talk and get the message out more clearly.” Instead, the insecure little boy in Snowden took over: looking away, mumbling, and groping for words. (Here’s a helpful tip, Ed: both gamblers and intelligence analysts know that constantly looking down and away while speaking in a conversation is a “tell.” You should stop doing it.)
If this had been Snowden’s first week in Moscow, these might have been more understandable reactions. But he’s been doing these dog and pony shows from Russia for nearly two years. Has he really been inside a bubble so thick that no one has told him he’s over in America?
It’s Not Clear Edward Snowden Has Thought This Through
Oliver, for his part, was just getting started. For the first time, a journalist actually confronted Snowden with the recklessness of his own actions. Others have asked similar questions, and meekly accepted Snowden’s platitudes (or as we could also call them, “lies”) about how he protected the information he stole. Oliver instead did the unthinkable and asked Snowden a direct yes-or-no question: did you read all the documents you handed to others?
Snowden’s weaselly answer—“I do understand what I turned over”—didn’t fly with Oliver. He cornered Snowden on camera like the captain of a good college debate squad tearing apart the hapless nerd who’d been asked to sub for some guy on the other team. “There’s a difference between understanding what’s in the documents and reading what’s in the documents,” Oliver said. He then added, with deadpan sarcasm: “Because when you’re handing over thousands of NSA documents the last thing you’d want to do is read them.”
Oliver then pointed out that Snowden’s revelations, fumbled by the New York Times, had done actual damage to U.S. overseas operations. Snowden’s answer? “In journalism we have to accept that some mistakes will be made.” In other words, freedom means risk; you have to break a few eggs to make an omelet. Without a trace of irony about his current situation, Snowden added that one is only truly secure in a prison.
But wait. Isn’t that exactly the same answer that proponents of national surveillance programs give? That freedom isn’t perfect, that human beings are fallible? Why is that answer good enough for Snowden’s friends at the New York Times, who’ve done demonstrable harm, but not for the National Security Agency, where the accusations of harm from Snowden and his enablers are—even by Snowden’s own admission to Oliver—entirely notional?
Hypothetical Versus Real Surveillance Threats
Oliver didn’t pursue this. He does have a comedy show to do, after all, so he instead encouraged Snowden to understand that Americans do not care about foreign surveillance, but rather care only about the security of images of their own genitalia. Snowden eventually got into the spirit of the thing, but he was uncomfortable. Grandiose heroes, after all, do not talk about pictures of men’s penises, especially when Oliver has just shoved a picture of his own penis into their hands.
When Snowden finally got back to his comfort zone, however, his explanations of how the government might get pictures of your “junk” (to use Ed’s term) actually defeated his own point. Snowden—accurately, for the most part—explained how pictures of one’s, er, John Thomas transiting the global information highways could theoretically get caught up in metadata collection. Having delivered several gut punches already, Oliver this time gamely played along, noting that Americans would be horrified if they knew this was happening.
Except, of course, there is no evidence (as Snowden admits) that this is actually happening.
Snowden’s explanation showed how far the government would have to go, and how much data it would have to sift, to find such pictures, read texts, and match phone calls. His entire case rests, as it has always rested, on what could happen if someone with evil intent were to try to seize control of a massive bureaucracy and bend it to the goal of finding out whether a random guy in New York sent his girlfriend a picture of Mr. Happy. (Which, as a random guy in New York admitted to Oliver on camera, he did.) In trying to generate more outrage, Snowden inadvertently made the case for calming down.
Edward Snowden Is a Lost Boy
In the end, what we saw from Moscow was the real Snowden: full of self-regard, fueled by delusions of his own importance, and unwilling—as perpetual adolescents always are—to accept responsibility for the damage his reckless actions caused. Oliver didn’t press Snowden as hard as he could have, to be sure. But when it comes to interviews with defectors, we have to take what we can get.
Still, even this brief look at Snowden under even the tiniest bit of journalistic pressure should end any pretenses about the inflated claims of a silly young manwho once claimed he was torture-proof. Snowden is a lost boy, in over his head in a dangerous place after doing something he himself didn’t quite understand. If Snowden can’t handle Oliver, you can be quite sure he couldn’t handle his Russian security service interrogators.
In the end, the Oliver interview is so far the most important addition to what we might call The Snowden Archive. Until now, Snowden’s image has been mediated through mostly useless things like puff pieces from Barton Gellman, cheerleading by Glenn Greenwald, and a make-believe interview with Brian Williams. He has been able to say what he wants to say without fear of contradiction. Oliver may not have intended to pants Snowden in front of millions of people, but sometimes, the Cool Kids can’t help themselves. Good for Oliver, and good for us, now that we’ve had our first glimpse of the real Edward Snowden.
[Tom Nichols is a professor of national security affairs at the U.S. Naval War College and an adjunct professor in the Harvard Extension School. Views expressed here are his own.]
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LA TIMES
John Oliver turns Edward Snowden interview around, talks nudie pics
By PATRICK KEVIN DAY April 6, 2015
Since its debut nearly a year ago, "Last Week Tonight With John Oliver" has been steadily gaining awareness among viewers for going "The Daily Show" one better by taking complex subjects and tackling them in a comedic way. But on Sunday's show, Oliver seems to have taken the show to the next level, both in comedy and audience respect with his surprise interview with NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden.
The longer episode, at 45 minutes, included a 33-minute discussion of the upcoming renewal of the Patriot Act and its implications for the American public. It turns out, at least according to Oliver's random sampling of Americans in New York City's Times Square, that the public is ill informed about the controversy surrounding Snowden and the implications of the information that he leaked.
Snowden, the subject of the Oscar-winning documentary "Citizenfour" is in Russia, so Oliver traveled to Moscow to sit down with the computer specialist and explain to him, with video assist, that the American public has no real idea who he is or what he's trying to tell them.
Oliver also demonstrated the problem with a clip from MSNBC in which host Andrea Mitchell interrupted a congresswoman discussing a key part of the Patriot Act to bring viewers "breaking news" on Justin Bieber's arrest.
Oliver's interview with Snowden was not a comedy puffball. Though he started off with jokes about Hot Pockets, he quickly began pressing Snowden about his responsibilty for some of the more sensitive information he leaked getting mishandled by the media.
And when Snowden tried to argue his points about unchecked government surveillance, Oliver brusquely waved him off, the same way people would get bored by an IT guy droning on about computer stuff.
Instead, Oliver gave Snowden an easily graspable way for the public at large to understand the things he's talking about. Forget surveillance of charities or overseas phone calls. Can the government look at our own private nudie pics?
The answer, not surprisingly, is yes. And Snowden discussed all the various ways the government could access our nudie pics, all while sitting with a folder containing a nudie pic of Oliver himself on his lap.
The interview walked a tightrope between comedy and actual journalism; the reaction on Twitter has been overwhelmingly positive.
With the public's privacy fears boiled down to just one subject very close to home, it seems as if Snowden's message may start to resonate.
As one viewer wrote, "That's the sound of somebody uncorking a bottle in the White House, because John Oliver."
"Sinister" screenwriter C. Robert Cargill put it this way: "So in just 18 minutes, the guy who played the drunk professor on COMMUNITY got Snowden to explain the NSA programs in plain English. Woah."
A Florida law student applauded Oliver's aggression in the interview, commenting, "I love the John Oliver actually challenges Snowden on some of the negative repercussions and takes him to task on those issues."
The Magicband wields access to the park, replacing virtually every transaction you'd make inside. BOB CROSLIN
IF YOU WANT to imagine how the world will look in just a few years, once our cell phones become the keepers of both our money and identity, skip Silicon Valley and book a ticket to Orlando. Go to Disney World. Then, reserve a meal at a restaurant called Be Our Guest, using the Disney World app to order your food in advance.
The restaurant lies beyond a gate of huge fiberglass boulders, painstakingly airbrushed to look like crumbling remnants of the past. Crossing a cartoon-like drawbridge, you see the parapets of a castle rising beyond a snow-dusted ridge, both rendered in miniature to appear far away. The Gothic-styled entrance is teensy. Such pint-sized intimacy is a psychological hack invented by Walt Disney himself to make visitors feel larger than their everyday selves. It works. You feel like you’re stepping across the pages of a storybook.
If you’re wearing your Disney MagicBand and you’ve made a reservation, a host will greet you at the drawbridge and already know your name—Welcome Mr. Tanner! She’ll be followed by another smiling person—Sit anywhere you like! Neither will mention that, by some mysterious power, your food will find you.
“It’s like magic!” a woman says to her family as they sit. “How do they find our table?” The dining hall, inspired by Beauty and the Beast, features Baroque details but feels like a large, orderly cafeteria. The couple’s young son flits around the table. After a few minutes, he settles into his chair without actually sitting down, as kids often do. Soon, their food arrives exactly as promised, delivered by a smiling young man pushing an ornately carved serving cart that resembles a display case at an old museum.
It’s surprising how the woman’s sensible question immediately fades, unanswered, in the rising aroma of French onion soup and roast beef sandwiches. This is by design. The family entered a matrix of technology the moment it crossed the moat, one geared toward anticipating their whims without offering the slightest clue how.
How do they find our table? The answer is around their wrists.
Their MagicBands, tech-studded wristbands available to every visitor to the Magic Kingdom, feature a long-range radio that can transmit more than 40 feet in every direction. The hostess, on her modified iPhone, received a signal when the family was just a few paces away. Tanner family inbound! The kitchen also queued up: Two French onion soups, two roast beef sandwiches! When they sat down, a radio receiver in the table picked up the signals from their MagicBands and triangulated their location using another receiver in the ceiling. The server—as in waitperson, not computer array—knew what they ordered before they even approached the restaurant and knew where they were sitting.
And it all worked seamlessly, like magic.
No matter how often we say we’re creeped out by technology, we tend to acclimate quickly if it delivers what we want before we want it. This is particularly true of context-aware technology. Just consider how little anyone seems to mind now that the Google Maps app mines your Gmail. Today, Google Maps is studded with your location searches, events you’ve arranged with friends, and landmarks you’ve chatted about. It’s delightful, and it took hold faster than the goosebumps could. The utility seems so obvious, your consent has simply been assumed.
The same idea is taking hold at Disney World: How did they find our table?
A Friction-Free World
WALT DISNEY BORROWED against his own life insurance to pay for Disneyland’s original design, and according to friends and family, he never seemed happier. It was his sandbox. “You will find yourself in the land of yesterday, tomorrow, and fantasy,” he crowed in early brochures for the park. “Nothing of the present exists.” The expansion of Disney’s empire brought Disney World to life in 1971, and within that world, Epcot was to be the Experimental Prototype Community of Tomorrow. Disney wanted people to move in and live with technologies the rest of us could barely imagine. In a way, the MagicBands and their online platform, MyMagicPlus, realize that dream. But not in the way he imagined.
The design of the bands themselves teach users how they work. Access points have an encircled Mickey logo which matches that of the bands, showing that they can be touched together for access. MATT STROSHANE/DISNEY
The MagicBands look like simple, stylish rubber wristbands offered in cheery shades of grey, blue, green, pink, yellow, orange and red. Inside each is an RFID chip and a radio like those in a 2.4-GHz cordless phone. The wristband has enough battery to last two years. It may look unpretentious, but the band connects you to a vast and powerful system of sensors within the park. And yet, when you visit Disney World, the most remarkable thing about the MagicBands is that they don’t feel remarkable at all. They’re as ubiquitous as sunburns and giant frozen lemonades. Despite their futuristic intentions, they’re already invisible.
Part of the trick lies in the clever way Disney teaches you to use them—and, by extension, how to use the park. It begins when you book your ticket online and pick your favorite rides. Disney’s servers crunch your preferences, then neatly package them into an itinerary calculated to keep the route between stops from being a slog—or a frustrating zig-zag back and forth across the park. Then, in the weeks before your trip, the wristband arrives in the mail, etched with your name—I’m yours, try me on. For kids, the MagicBand is akin to a Christmas present tucked under the tree, perfumed with the spice of anticipation. For parents, it’s a modest kind of superpower that wields access to the park.
If you sign up in advance for the so-called “Magical Express,” the MagicBand replaces all of the details and hassles of paper once you touch-down in Orlando. Express users can board a park-bound shuttle, and check into the hotel. They don’t have to mind their luggage, because each piece gets tagged at your home airport, so that it can follow you to your hotel, then your room. Once you arrive at the park, there are no tickets to hand over. Just tap your MagicBand at the gate and swipe onto the rides you’ve already reserved. If you’ve opted in on the web, the MagicBand is the only thing you need.
It’s amazing how much friction Disney has engineered away: There’s no need to rent a car or waste time at the baggage carousel. You don’t need to carry cash, because the MagicBand is linked to your credit card. You don’t need to wait in long lines. You don’t even have to go to the trouble of taking out your wallet when your kid grabs a stuffed Olaf, looks up at you, and promises to be good if you’ll just let them have this one thing, please.
This is just what the experience looks like to you, the visitor. For Disney, the MagicBands, the thousands of sensors they talk with, and the 100 systems linked together to create MyMagicPlus turn the park into a giant computer—streaming real-time data about where guests are, what they’re doing, and what they want. It’s designed to anticipate your desires.
Which makes it exactly the type of thing Apple, Facebook, and Google are trying to build. Except Disney World isn’t just an app or a phone—it’s both, wrapped in an idealized vision of life that’s as safely self-contained as a snow globe. Disney is thus granted permission to explore services that might seem invasive anywhere else. But then, that’s the trick: Every new experience with technology tends to gently nudge our notions of what we’re comfortable with.
The Magicband sports RFID and a radio inside, which allows sensors to locate its wearer. ADAM VOORHES
Designing the Experience
DISNEY SHROUDS ITS creative process in secrecy. This is both strategic and cultural: The company doesn’t want its magic tainted by the messy realities behind the curtain. That’s particularly true of the MagicBands. Piecing together their origin required more than two dozen interviews with executives at Disney and with designers and engineers who worked on the project but could speak only anonymously due to non-disclosure agreements.
Though the team behind this sprawling platform eventually swelled to more than 1,000 people, the idea started years ago with a handful of insiders. People jokingly called them the Fab Five—an almost sacrilegious reference to Mickey, Minnie, Donald, Goofy and Pluto. In 2008, Meg Crofton, then president of Walt Disney World Resort, told them to root out all the friction within the Disney World experience. “We were looking for pain points,” she says. “What are the barriers to getting into the experience faster?” The Fab Five were not just Imagineers, the demigods of fun who create Disney’s attractions. They also included high-level veterans of the company’s sprawling operations division, executives intimately familiar with the gnarly realities of running the park—from catching people trying to scam the ride-reservation system to making sure parents are reunited with lost kids.
But the Fab Five’s workaday roles belied a grand vision for Disney’s future. “They came back with a drawing of the Magic Kingdom without turnstiles,” Crofton says. But, she adds, there was a “domino effect in making one decision. Everything was wound together.” No one knew this better than John Padgett. He was the project’s most forceful advocate, and his name appears first on more than a dozen patents associated with MyMagicPlus. Within the company, this cascade of new technologies, and the dream of overhauling the park, thrilled some and threatened others, who fretted over the sheer complexity of it all.
The Fab Five drew particular inspiration from the then-nascent wearables market. The possibilities seemed nearly endless. They were especially intrigued by the Nike SportBand, a FuelBand predecessor that synced with a heart rate monitor and a pedometer in your shoe and fed data to a wrist-mounted display. Nike was using it in virtual events like the Human Race, a global, virtual 10K run that used wearers’ pedometer data. What if Disney did something like that, the Fab Five thought. What if a band could be the key that unlocked everything at Disney World?
They assembled Frankenstein-like mock-ups using spare parts cribbed from hardware catalogs and torn-down gadgets. The team debated whether visitors would unlock the experience with a band, a lanyard, or even a Mickey Mouse hat. Their vision finally began lurching off the workbench in the first months of 2010, in a decommissioned theater that once hosted the Mouseketeers Live Show. “That lab became the place to showcase the vision,” says Nick Franklin, who with Crofton oversaw the team. “It became the blueprint for the development teams.”
The Fab Five were stationed in an area of the park designed to evoke a studio backlot. The building itself looked a bit like a small-town movie house in the 1950s, complete with a marquee framed in bright lights. It was fronted with broad windows that had been blacked out, and the place appeared to be closed. The benches out front offered a quiet place where harried parents could rest for a moment, then yell at pouting children: We came 3,000 miles to get here, and you will have a good time!
Tucked away in a vestibule behind the glass, within earshot of those unsuspecting visitors, were 30 or so designers and engineers arrayed at makeshift desks, highly stressed and occasionally hung over from a night spent drowning their frustrations. “It was just weeks and weeks of long days and traveling to Orlando,” says one consultant who worked on the project. “At the end of day, the only thing to do was drink with the team.” The oblivious families wandering past offered one of the few diversions from their grueling work schedule.
The room they shared was maddeningly cold because they couldn’t turn off the AC. Everyone suspected it was part of the same system cooling guests at Toy Story Mania next door. And messing with thatthermostat was tantamount to sending a cash cow to the slaughterhouse. So to make up for it, Disney staffers offered mountains of sweatshirts and blankets and gloves from the park’s many gift shops. Despite the conditions, the work inched forward. Great swathes of MyMagicPlus—the MagicBands and their readers, along with pieces of the web portal for making ride reservations—already worked. The bands themselves had been designed, as had the kiosks that would light up with a pleasing chime anytime you swiped.
That already represented a slew of feats, chief among them the MagicBand’s novel tear-away design that ensured they’d fit nearly every wrist on the planet. The band looks simple enough: a colorful center panel surrounded by a dove-gray border. But if the band is meant for a child, a parent simply peels away that gray outer edge. Adults can wear it as is, intact. “We had models ranging from what we called the Shaq wrist to that of a child, and everything in between,” says another designer. Disney was adamant that the band’s design reinforce two key values: Everyone is equal in the park, and everyone is welcome.
An illustration of the passes, cards, and maps that the system replaces. KENT PHILLIPS
It took one engineer six months to get the tear-away channel just right: It had to be easy to tear, but it couldn’t inadvertently come apart. Meanwhile, the readers had to be intuitive enough for people to instantly know how to use them. The design has a novel and clever cue: Simply touch the circled Mickey icon on the band to the circled Mickey icon on the reader. When everything works, the reader flashes green and emits a pleasing tone; if something goes wrong, it glows blue—never red. Red lights are forbidden at Disney, as they imply something bad happened. Nothing bad can happen at Disney World.
Beyond the vestibule, through a set of double doors, was a sound stage with a full-scale demo of the revamped Disney World experience. It was a cavernous space covering 8,000 square feet, with 50-foot ceilings. By 2012 it had been divided into a dozen or so “rooms,” using enormous black curtains that hung from the ceiling. Each room stood in for a stage in a visitor’s trip, from the living room where the family might reserve its rides online to the hotel’s shuttle bus to the hotel check-in to the lines for Space Mountain to the futuristic restaurant-booking system they’d invented. “We were using the interfaces and technologies that would ultimately get deployed,” Franklin says. This was an x-ray version of the Disney World experience—a view directly into the bones of the park’s commercial infrastructure.
All these vignettes playing out on the soundstage were a way of getting Disney’s board of directors to sign off on the $1 billion cost of deploying the full system. The dress rehearsal worked. People like CEO Bob Iger and Pixar board-member John Lasseter, who was new to Disney and on a path toward reinventing its animation studio, were led through a two-hour tour that unfurled according to a fastidious, continuously refined script. They loved it.
What followed was two years of grinding work transforming a scripted prototype into a real-world performance, then another 18 months rolling it out in the park. The soundstage became a training ground for Disney’s employees, who are called cast members. Today the soundstage has been disassembled. There are few photos documenting what happened there, due to the secrecy of the project and Disney’s mandate to never show the mess behind the magic.
By the summer of 2013, when MagicBands first trickled into public tests, they would change almost every detail of the meticulously plotted choreography that rules Disney World itself.
The Era of Invisible Design
TOM STAGGS HAS the ramrod posture, trapezoidal jaw, and friendly face of a former varsity star you encounter at your high school reunion. When we meet in a teleconference, he’s at Disney’s corporate headquarters in Burbank, California, and I’m in a large room hidden within the support wings of Disney World, a continent away. I’m surrounded by charts and graphs, projected onto the wall, displaying all the information constantly flowing in from the park. Here, beneath a speckled drop ceiling, at a long folding table, in a room that looks like its been set for a PTA meeting, you can imagine the park breathing in people in, breathing out data.
Staggs, now the chief operating officer of the Walt Disney Company as a whole and until recently the chairman of Walt Disney Parks and Resorts, is widely thought to be in line to become Disney’s next CEO. He was the one who had to sell Iger and the Disney board on MagicBand. Like many corporate bigwigs, he has a talent for hiding radical ideas in a cloak of suave common sense calibrated to calm Wall Street. But every sentence he utters seems to be a koan that encapsulates years of teeth-gnashing about the ever-expanding borders of high technology.
Staggs couches Disney’s goals for the MagicBand system in an old saw from Arthur C. Clarke. “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic,” he says. “That’s how we think of it. If we can get out of the way, our guests can create more memories.” He offers a story about how a program called Fast Passes once guaranteed a ride time at premier attractions like Space Mountain. It used to be that those passes were issued at the rides themselves, and stamped with a designated return time. You had to be there when it opened, because passes went quickly and unless you were a scheduling savant, it was hard to hold passes for more than one ride at a time. You’d see families waiting outside for the park to open, then fathers sprinting for a kiosk to get enough passes for everyone in the family. “I used to be that sprinter,” Staggs says.
You can see why he—and Disney—would be so keen on the bands. Instead of telling your kid that you’ll try to meet Elsa or ride It’s a Small World, Franklin says, “you get to be the hero, promising a ride or a meet-and-greet up front. Then you can be freer to experience the park more broadly. You’re freed to take advantage of more rides.” There is an elegant business logic here. By getting people exploring beyond the park’s top attractions, overall use of the park goes up. People spend less time in line. They’re doing more, which means they’re spending more and remembering more. “The whole system gave Disney a way of understanding the business,” says Franklin, who stepped down last July as Disney’s executive vice president of next-generation experience. “Knowing we need more food here, how people are flowing through the park, how people are consuming the experiential product.”
It also allows Disney to optimize employees. The goal was to create a system that would essentially replace the time spent fiddling with payments and tickets for moments of personal interactions with visitors. The MagicBands and MyMagicPlus allow employees to “move past transactions, into an interactive space, where they can personalize the experience,” Crofton says. What started as a grand technology platform has inevitably changed the texture of the experience.
Meanwhile, the digital world—and the ease with which we carry it around in our phones—has filled our lives with new expectations and endless entertainment options. “I can’t think of a business that isn’t affected by more choice and more access to information and an increasing desire for personalization,” says Staggs. So if you’re a theme park, you have a strange dilemma that echoes the dilemmas we face in our digital lives. “Walt Disney World is vast. There’s more to do than you could do in a month,” Staggs says. “That choice is overwhelming.”
The access points glow green when things go as planned, but blue if there’s an exception. You won’t find any alarming shades of red in the Magic Kingdom. MATT STROSHANE/DISNEY
In fact, it’s called the paradox of choice: You make people happier not by giving them more options but by stripping away as many as you can. The redesigned Disney World experience constrains choices by dispersing them, beginning long before the trip is under way. “There are missions in a vacation,” Staggs says. In other words, Disney knows that parents arrive to its parks thinking: We have to have tea with Cinderella, and where the hell is that Buzz Lightyear thing, anyway? In that way, the park isn’t a playground so much as a videogame, with bosses to be conquered at every level. The MagicBands let you simply set an agenda and let everything else flow around what you’ve selected. “It lets people’s vacations unfold naturally,” Staggs says. “The ability to plan and personalize has given way to spontaneity.” And that feeling of ease, and whatever flows from it, just might make you more apt to come back.
Will the world at large ever become something akin to Disney World, loaded with sensors attuned to our every move, designed to free us? There are signs. It’s already starting to appear on Disney cruise ships, and Staggs says airlines, sports leagues, and sports teams have asked about the technology. “We’re just at the beginning of understanding what to do with this,” he says. What Staggs doesn’t share, but what former team members do, is that Disney already has conceived, designed, and engineered many more features that seem to border on science fiction—features even more ambitious than delivering your food to you without your having to ask.
The MagicBand contains sensors that let guests swipe onto rides and allow Disney to pinpoint their location. At Be Our Guest, they’re what enable the radios in the table and ceiling to triangulate your location so your server can find you. If Disney decides to install those sensors throughout the park, a new world of data opens up. They could have Mickey and Snow White find you. They might use the park’s myriad cameras to capture candid moments of your family—enjoying rides, meeting Snow White—and stitch them together into a personalized film. (The product teams called this the Story Engine.) But they might also know when you’ve waited too long in line and email you a coupon for free ice cream or a pass to another ride. And with that, they’ll have hooked the white whale of customer service: Turning a negative experience into a positive one. It recasts your memories of a place—that’s why casinos comp you drinks and shows when you lose at the tables.
Though Franklin wouldn’t comment on the particulars of these possibilities, he did offer an intriguing summary of them. “What people call the Internet of Things is just a technological underpinning that misses the point, ” he says. “This is about the experiential Internet. The guest doesn’t need to know how it happened. It’s about the magic of the food arriving.”
These are the experiences that many more designers will soon be striving for: invisible, everywhere, and, in a word, mundane. Which is its own kind of magic.
MATT STROSHANE/DISNEY
