On the afternoon of November 1, 2010, Julian Assange, the Australian-born founder of WikiLeaks.org, marched with his lawyer into the London office of Alan Rusbridger, the editor of The Guardian. Assange was pallid and sweaty, his thin frame racked by a cough that had been plaguing him for weeks. He was also angry, and his message was simple: he would sue the newspaper if it went ahead and published stories based on the quarter of a million documents that he had handed over to The Guardian just three months earlier. The encounter was one among many twists and turns in the collaboration between WikiLeaks—a four-year-old nonprofit that accepts anonymous submissions of previously secret material and publishes them on its Web site—and some of the world’s most respected newspapers. The collaboration was unprecedented, and brought global attention to a cache of confidential documents—embarrassing when not disturbing—about American military and diplomatic activity around the world. But the partnership was also troubled from the start.
“The Washington Generals always lose: to begin with. There is no doubt whatsoever about that. They lose on indoor basketball courts and outdoor courts. They lose on ships, they lose on aircraft carriers, they lose in prisons and they lose on the back of trucks. … This must be distinctly understood, or nothing wonderful can come from the story I’m about to relate. If we were to believe that the Generals mostly lost to the Harlem Globetrotters, or almost always lost, or even won only as rarely as the Detroit Lions, then there would be nothing more remarkable about that day 40 years ago than a Lions upset victory over one of the unlucky three or four or five teams most years who happen to haplessly run into it.”
They ignored the signs: 100,000 fish floating belly-up in an Arkansas River, 5,000 blackbirds falling out of the sky. Please feel free leave your cat with me when the rapture comes. Until then, enjoy these three longreads about animals and their uncanny behavior.
Mac Tonnies’s digital afterlife stands as a kind of best-case scenario for preserving something of an online life, but even his case hasn’t worked out perfectly. His “Pro” account on the photo-sharing service Flickr allowed him to upload many — possibly thousands — of images. But since that account has lapsed, the vast majority can no longer be viewed. Some were likely gathered in Plattner’s backup of Tonnies’s blog; others may exist somewhere on his laptop, though Dana Tonnies still isn’t sure where to look for them.
“Going digital” was supposed to be an environmentally conscious way for governments to cut costs while improving efficiency. But it hasn’t quite worked out that way yet. Storage capacity is increasing, but the volume of data is also increasing, perhaps just as quickly. Over the next decade, the world will produce the informational equivalent of nearly 100 million Libraries of Congress per year, according to Cisco’s Internet Business Solutions Group. Most of what the government stores are public records, which means that by law they must be made available to anyone who requests them. But while there are ambitious efforts underway to improve storage methods, the sheer bulk of information is alarming.
However much the book was revised, it should have been revised more. The opening may have been reworked, as Gedin says, but it still features an episode—somebody telling somebody else at length (twelve pages!) about a series of financial crimes peripheral to the main plot—that, by wide consensus, is staggeringly boring. Elsewhere, there are blatant violations of logic and consistency. Loose ends dangle. There are vast dumps of unnecessary detail. When Lisbeth goes to IKEA, we get a list of every single thing she buys. The jokes aren’t funny. The dialogue could not be worse. The phrasing and the vocabulary are consistently banal.
When I asked these skeptics about the future, even their most conservative visions were unsettling: a future in which people boost their brains with enhancing drugs, for example, or have sophisticated computers implanted in their skulls for life. While we may never be able to upload our minds into a computer, we may still be able to build computers based on the layout of the human brain. I can report I have not drunk the Singularity Kool-Aid, but I have taken a sip.
F. Scott Fitzgerald was right when he declared the rich different from you and me. But today’s super-rich are also different from yesterday’s: more hardworking and meritocratic, but less connected to the nations that granted them opportunity—and the countrymen they are leaving ever further behind.
IF YOU HAPPENED to be watching NBC on the first Sunday morning in August last summer, you would have seen something curious. There, on the set of Meet the Press, the host, David Gregory, was interviewing a guest who made a forceful case that the U.S. economy had become “very distorted.” In the wake of the recession, this guest explained, high-income individuals, large banks, and major corporations had experienced a “significant recovery”; the rest of the economy, by contrast—including small businesses and “a very significant amount of the labor force”—was stuck and still struggling. What we were seeing, he argued, was not a single economy at all, but rather “fundamentally two separate types of economy,” increasingly distinct and divergent.
This diagnosis, though alarming, was hardly unique: drawing attention to the divide between the wealthy and everyone else has long been standard fare on the left. (The idea of “two Americas” was a central theme of John Edwards’s 2004 and 2008 presidential runs.) What made the argument striking in this instance was that it was being offered by none other than the former five-term Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan: iconic libertarian, preeminent defender of the free market, and (at least until recently) the nation’s foremost devotee of Ayn Rand. When the high priest of capitalism himself is declaring the growth in economic inequality a national crisis, something has gone very, very wrong.
Read the full article here. Read more articles from the January/Feburary 2011 issue of The Atlantic here.
“As an example, she described a conversation with a couple at a Manhattan dinner party: ‘They started saying, “If you’re going to buy all this stuff, life starts getting really expensive. If you’re going to do the NetJet thing”’—this is a service offering ‘fractional aircraft ownership’ for those who do not wish to buy outright—‘“and if you’re going to have four houses, and you’re going to run the four houses, it’s like you start spending some money.”’
“The clincher, Peterson says, came from the wife: ‘She turns to me and she goes, “You know, the thing about 20″’—by this, she meant $20 million a year—‘“is 20 is only 10 after taxes.” And everyone at the table is nodding.’”
Tamim also turned out to be extremely media-savvy. He presided over well-planned press conferences, carefully doling out information in a manner guaranteed to keep viewers—especially in the Arab world—coming back for more. He publicly called for the arrest of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and of Meir Dagan, whom he challenged to “be a man” and take responsibility for the assassination. More realistically, perhaps, he called for international arrest warrants for all members of the hit squad, which caused considerable diplomatic embarrassment for Israel. When asked by an interviewer what the hit team’s biggest mistake was, Tamim answered that the presence of two men waiting for hours in the lobby in tennis gear with uncovered rackets was so bizarre that it instantly raised suspicion.
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