Salon.com > Social http://www.salon.com Fri, 03 May 2013 03:47:40 +0000 en hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=3.2.1 Send her your sexts http://www.salon.com/2013/05/02/send_her_your_sexts/ http://www.salon.com/2013/05/02/send_her_your_sexts/#comments Thu, 02 May 2013 21:16:00 +0000 http://www.railrode.net/?p=13287973 If you've ever sent a nudie pic to your significant other, and you've wondered what the grainy image would look like in the hands of a master portraitist -- a da Vinci, say, or a Caravaggio -- performance artist Karen Finley is about to make your kinky art history nerd dreams come true. From May 23 to May 26, the artist is asking the public to send her their personal sexts, which she will reproduce as a series of paintings in an installation at the New Museum.

The process works like this: for a fee ($200 for a work on paper, $500 for an oil on canvas), the exhibitionistically inclined can arrange brief private sittings with Finley. They'll be given the artist's private phone number and can snap away. Once Finley has received the photos, she'll translate them into a series of paintings to be publicly displayed in the New Museum lobby. After the exhibition closes on May 26, the subjects can take home their work to be stored as a memento of free-spirited youth, or hung in the living room to the chagrin of friends and family.

Finley, a professor at New York University's Tisch School of the Arts, has never shied away from controversy. In 1990, she was one of four artists whose NEA grants were revoked on the grounds that their work was obscene. "Sext Me If You Can" is presented by NE 4 In Residence, which revisits the four grant recipients' work.

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]]> http://www.salon.com/2013/05/02/send_her_your_sexts/feed/ 1 Are millennials delusional? http://www.salon.com/2013/05/02/study_millennials_are_lazy_have_unrealistic_expectations_partner/ http://www.salon.com/2013/05/02/study_millennials_are_lazy_have_unrealistic_expectations_partner/#comments Thu, 02 May 2013 18:25:00 +0000 http://www.railrode.net/?p=13287757 Pacific StandardYoung people coming of age over the past decade or so have been referred to as Millennials, or, in a nod to their individualistic nature, Generation Me.

Newly published research suggests they could also be called the generation with unrealistic expectations.

An analysis of the values and ambitions of American 12th graders finds “a growing discrepancy between the desire for material rewards and the willingness to do the work usually required to earn them.” Psychologists Jean Twenge of San Diego State University and Tim Kasser of Knox College report that, for high school seniors in 2005, 2006, and 2007, materialism remained at historically high levels, even as commitment to hard work declined.

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]]> http://www.salon.com/2013/05/02/study_millennials_are_lazy_have_unrealistic_expectations_partner/feed/ 180 Chris Broussard doesn’t matter http://www.salon.com/2013/05/02/chris_broussard_does_not_matter_partner/ http://www.salon.com/2013/05/02/chris_broussard_does_not_matter_partner/#comments Thu, 02 May 2013 16:55:00 +0000 http://www.railrode.net/?p=13287717 The ClassicalEarlier today, Jim Cavan made the case that Chris Broussard's (very unpopular) opinion on Jason Collins' decision to come out as gay does, in fact, matter. This is a mostly ad hominem (towards Broussard, not Cavan) counterpoint to that.

Brendan Flynn: Everyone's all mad at Chris Broussard. Evidently unwilling to Embrace Debate.

David Roth: And Tim Brando! No one wants to hear his truth because he's white and old and successful, and that's not worth a damn thing these days. I've always thought the big issue with regard to how gay athletes was how it made random television guys feel. Are they proud? Are they angry? We need to know about this, it's the most important thing.

Brendan: Really interesting to hear Broussard's thoughts on adultery and children out of wedlock as it relates to gays. Really looking forward to his #TruthToPower moment on all the other sinners he's covered.

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]]> http://www.salon.com/2013/05/02/chris_broussard_does_not_matter_partner/feed/ 4 U.S. citizen sentenced to 15 years hard labor in North Korea http://www.salon.com/2013/05/02/us_citizen_sentenced_to_15_years_hard_labor_in_north_korea_partner/ http://www.salon.com/2013/05/02/us_citizen_sentenced_to_15_years_hard_labor_in_north_korea_partner/#comments Thu, 02 May 2013 15:47:00 +0000 http://www.railrode.net/?p=13287692 North Korea has sentenced American citizen Kenneth Bae to 15 years' forced labor for unspecified crimes against the regime.

Bae, also known as Pae Jun Ho, is accused of attempting to "topple" North Korea, according to state-run media. He has supposedly admitted the charges.

"The Supreme Court sentenced him to 15 years of compulsory labour for this crime," North Korea's official news agency announced Thursday.

Bae, 44, was detained in the northeast city of Rason on Nov. 3 after entering North Korea on a tourist visa.

According to reports, he is a Korean-American who runs a travel company and was in the country to lead a tour group. A devout Christian, he had made several previous trips to North Korea to do humanitarian work, friends told the Associated Press.

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]]> http://www.salon.com/2013/05/02/us_citizen_sentenced_to_15_years_hard_labor_in_north_korea_partner/feed/ 2 Beanie Baby manufacturer’s corrupt labor practices http://www.salon.com/2013/04/30/beanie_babies_manufacturer_accused_of_shady_labor_practices_partner/ http://www.salon.com/2013/04/30/beanie_babies_manufacturer_accused_of_shady_labor_practices_partner/#comments Tue, 30 Apr 2013 21:56:00 +0000 http://www.railrode.net/?p=13285911 ProPublicaCHICAGO — Ty Inc. became one of the world's largest manufacturers of stuffed animals thanks to the Beanie Babies craze in the 1990s.

But it has stayed on top partly by using an underworld of labor brokers known as raiteros, who pick up workers from Chicago's street corners and shuttle them to Ty's warehouse on behalf of one of the nation's largest temp agencies.

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]]> http://www.salon.com/2013/04/30/beanie_babies_manufacturer_accused_of_shady_labor_practices_partner/feed/ 3 I cried when Jason Collins came out http://www.salon.com/2013/04/30/i_cried_when_jason_collins_came_out_partner/ http://www.salon.com/2013/04/30/i_cried_when_jason_collins_came_out_partner/#comments Tue, 30 Apr 2013 20:45:00 +0000 http://www.railrode.net/?p=13286012 Outsports

I'm not afraid to admit it: I cried Monday. A couple times.

It's not that the coming out of Jason Collins is somehow the answer to all of our prayers or that those who continue to perpetuate homophobia in sports will now silence their quieting roar. I just kept getting emotional thinking about how far we'd come -- those of us who've been fighting this battle for so many years -- to now see something that many thought was impossible.

I thought about Dave Kopay. The former NFL player was the first former professional athlete to come out publicly when he shared his story in 1975. At the time, he expected a wave of athletes to follow, yet he hasn't even seen a trickle of men take his lead.

I thought about Pat Griffin and Helen Carroll and Sue Rankin and all the women who have pushed the sports world for so many years, long before I even came out, to accept them for who they are.

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]]> http://www.salon.com/2013/04/30/i_cried_when_jason_collins_came_out_partner/feed/ 1 How “Life of Pi” anticipated 9/11 http://www.salon.com/2013/04/28/a_boy_a_boat_and_a_tiger_life_of_pi_as_contemporary_fable_partner/ http://www.salon.com/2013/04/28/a_boy_a_boat_and_a_tiger_life_of_pi_as_contemporary_fable_partner/#comments Sun, 28 Apr 2013 19:00:00 +0000 http://www.railrode.net/?p=13283310 Los
Angeles Review of Books
PERHAPS THE BIGGEST SURPRISE at the 2013 Oscar ceremony was that Ang Lee beat out Steven Spielberg for Best Director with his adaptation of Yann Martel’s novel Life of Pi. Martel’s novel was itself a surprising Man Booker Prize award winner in 2002. You may remember that a controversy followed: according to some, Martel’s book, about a boy in a lifeboat with a tiger, was suspiciously similar to that of Brazilian author Moacyr Scliar’s 1981 novella Max and the Cats, about a man in a lifeboat with a jaguar. In a short essay titled “How I Wrote Life of Pi,” Martel has accounted for the influence that Scliar’s novel — or rather, what he recalls as John Updike’s negative review of the novel in The New York Times Book Review — had on him. (In fact, Updike never seems to have reviewed the book at all, and the only review that ran in The Times was positive.) Martel — who claims he only read Max and the Cats after the accusations of plagiarism surfaced in 2002 — borrowed Scliar’s basic premise, trying to turn it into a novel that was more successful than the one Updike had allegedly reviewed:

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]]> http://www.salon.com/2013/04/28/a_boy_a_boat_and_a_tiger_life_of_pi_as_contemporary_fable_partner/feed/ 6 Terrence Malick, divine director http://www.salon.com/2013/04/28/keeping_the_faith_with_malicks_to_the_wonder_partner/ http://www.salon.com/2013/04/28/keeping_the_faith_with_malicks_to_the_wonder_partner/#comments Sun, 28 Apr 2013 17:00:00 +0000 http://www.railrode.net/?p=13283286 Religion Dispatches“Show, don’t tell,” is common advice to screenwriters and fiction writers. In contrast to primarily non-fictioners like yours truly, those who compose films and novels and stories are rightly encouraged to avoid didacticism, to let the story speak for itself, never to make the meanings and morals too obvious.

Terrence Malick’s typically beautiful new film, To the Wonder, does exactly that, yet its depiction of the divine love/human love parallel is so elliptical as to flirt with inscrutability.

To be sure, Malick’s screenplay does telegraph the main theme of the work explicitly, usually in voiceovers (there are a lot of voiceovers) by a doubt-ridden priest played by Javier Bardem. Bardem’s priest wonders why we fall in and out of love with God, as we watch a couple played by Ben Affleck and Olga Kurylenko fall in and out of love with each other. If the parallelism were not clear enough, Bardem’s priest—played with brilliant understatement by an actor who often goes for the jugular—tells us how human love can serve as a gateway to divine love. Which (metaphysical spoiler alert) is roughly the final resolution of the film.

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]]> http://www.salon.com/2013/04/28/keeping_the_faith_with_malicks_to_the_wonder_partner/feed/ 9 When Derrida discovered Marx http://www.salon.com/2013/04/28/grappling_with_specters_of_marx_partner/ http://www.salon.com/2013/04/28/grappling_with_specters_of_marx_partner/#comments Sun, 28 Apr 2013 15:00:00 +0000 http://www.railrode.net/?p=13283127 Los
Angeles Review of Books ON THE OCCASION of the 20th anniversary of the “Whither Marxism?” conference conceived by Stephen Cullenberg and Bernd Magnus and organized by the Center for Ideas and Society at the University of California, Riverside, we asked Peggy Kamuf to reflect on the lecture that Jacques Derrida delivered there: “Specters of Marx.” The lecture was eventually published as a book, translated into English by Kamuf, and subtitled The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning, and the New International. It stands as a landmark text in Derrida’s oeuvre.

¤

“I meant to read Marx my way when the time came.” So Jacques Derrida declared in an interview with Michael Sprinker in 1989. Four years later, the conference “Whither Marxism?” was going to give him the occasion to do just that: read Marx his way. That was also the year, of course, the Berlin Wall fell, and then the dominoes continued to fall all over the former Communist bloc. So — in the ruins of Marxism, on the grave (good riddance!) of Marxist-Leninist-Stalinism, or whatever name is finally settled upon for the monstrous construction that had just fallen apart — the time had finally come to read Marx.

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]]> http://www.salon.com/2013/04/28/grappling_with_specters_of_marx_partner/feed/ 34 Could regulators have prevented the Texas fertilizer plant explosion? http://www.salon.com/2013/04/28/where_were_the_regulators_before_the_texas_fertilizer_plant_explosion_partner/ http://www.salon.com/2013/04/28/where_were_the_regulators_before_the_texas_fertilizer_plant_explosion_partner/#comments Sun, 28 Apr 2013 14:00:00 +0000 http://www.railrode.net/?p=13283181 ProPublicaA week after a blast at a Texas fertilizer plant killed at least 15 people and hurt more than 200, authorities still don’t know exactly why the West Chemical and Fertilizer Company plant exploded.

Here’s what we do know: The fertilizer plant hadn’t been inspected by the Occupational Safety and Health Administration since 1985. Its owners do not seem to have told the Department of Homeland Security that they were storing large quantities of potentially explosive fertilizer, as regulations require. And the most recent partial safety inspection of the facility in 2011 led to $5,250 in fines.

We’ve laid out which agencies were in charge of regulating the plant and who’s investigating the explosion now.

What happened, exactly?

Around 7:30 p.m. on April 17, a fire broke out at the West Chemical and Fertilizer Company plant in West, Texas, a small town of about 2,800 people 75 miles south of Dallas. Twenty minutes later, it blew up. The explosion shook houses 50 miles away and was so powerful that the United States Geological Survey registered it as a 2.1-magnitude earthquake. It flattened homes within a five-block radius and destroyed a nursing home, an apartment complex, and a nearby middle school.  According to the New York Times, the blast left a crater 93 feet wide and 10 feet deep, and the fire “burned with such intensity that railroad tracks were fused.”

The blast killed at least 15 people, most of them firefighters and other first responders.

Have fertilizer plants ever exploded before?

Yes. A plant in Sergeant Bluff, Iowa, that manufactured ammonium nitrate fertilizer — the same explosive chemical stored in West — exploded on Dec. 13, 1994, killing four people and injuring 18.

But fertilizer plants are safer now, said Stephen Slater, the Iowa administrator of the Occupational Safety and Health Administration. “All kinds of technologies have had huge improvements,” he told the Des Moines Register. “And we haven’t had any bad experiences at the plants in the 20 years since [the accident]. I’m knocking on wood.” (Slater didn’t respond to our requests for comment.)

Who regulates these fertilizer plants?

At least seven different state and federal agencies can regulate Texas fertilizer plants like the one in West: OSHA, the Environmental Protection Agency, the Department of Homeland Security, the U.S. Pipeline and Hazardous Materials Safety Administration, the Texas Department of State Health Services, the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality and the Texas Feed and Fertilizer Control Service.

Some of the agencies don’t appear to have shared information before the blast.

Fertilizer plants that hold more than 400 pounds of ammonium nitrate, for instance, are required to notify the Department of Homeland Security. (Ammonium nitrate can be used to make bombs. It’s what Timothy McVeigh used to blow up the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City in 1995.) The West plant held 270 tons — yes, tons — of the chemical last year, according to a report it filed with the Texas Department of State Health Services, but the plant didn’t tell Homeland Security.

Carrie Williams, a Department of State Health Services spokeswoman, told ProPublica that the agency isn’t required to pass that information — which is also sent to local authorities — on to Homeland Security.

While the exact cause of the explosion is unknown, a federal official told the New York Times that investigators believed it was caused by the ammonium nitrate. The blast crater is in the area of the plant where the chemical was stored.

The plant also filed a “worst-case release scenario” report with the EPA and local officials stating there was no risk of a fire or an explosion. The scenario described an anhydrous ammonia leak that wouldn’t hurt anyone.

Did any of these agencies fail to inspect the plant when they should have?

It’s unclear. OSHA conducted the last full safety inspection of the plant in 1985. “Since then,” the Huffington Post reported, “regulators from other agencies have been inside the plant, but they looked only at certain aspects of plant operations, such as whether the facility was abiding by labeling rules when packaging its fertilizer for sale.”

You can view the full OSHA report here. Since 2011, OSHA has carried out inspections based in part on the level of risk that plants like the one in West reported to the EPA. Since the West plant had told the EPA there was no risk of a fire or an explosion, it wasn’t a priority. The plant also may have been exempt from some inspections as a small employer. An OSHA spokesman told ProPublica that the agency would be investigating whether the plant had such an exemption.

As the Huffington Post also noted, the most recent federal safety inspection of the plant, in 2011, resulted in a $5,250 fine for failing to draft a safety plan for pressured canisters of anhydrous ammonia, among other infractions. (There’s no evidence that anhydrous ammonia played any role in the explosion.)

Why was a plant that stored explosive chemicals allowed to be located so close to a school?

The EPA and other federal agencies actually don’t regulate how close such plants can be to schools, nursing homes and population centers. In Texas, the decision is left up to the local zoning authorities.

A Dallas Morning News investigation in 2008 found that Dallas County residents were “at risk of a toxic disaster because outdated and haphazard zoning has allowed homes, apartments and schools to be built within blocks — in some cases even across the street — from sites that use dangerous chemicals.”

Ed Sykora, who owns a Ford dealership in West and spent a dozen years on the school board and the city council, told the Huffington Post he couldn’t recall the town discussing whether it was a good idea to build houses and the school so close to the plant, which has been there since 1962. "The land was available out there that way; they could get sewer and other stuff that way without building a bunch of new lines," Sykora said. "There never was any thought about it. Maybe that was wrong."

Who’s investigating what happened?

OSHA, the EPA and the U.S. Chemical Safety Board are all investigating. But don’t hold your breath waiting for the Chemical Safety Board’s conclusions. The agency is still investigating a blast that killed seven workers at an oil refinery in Washington State three years ago, as well as the Deepwater Horizon oil rig explosion that killed 11 workers in 2010 and sent oil flowing into the Gulf of Mexico for months.

A Center for Public Integrity investigation found that the number of accident reports completed by the Chemical Safety Board had declined dramatically since 2006. Daniel Horowitz, the agency’s managing director, said that the agency was stretched thin and had been asking for more investigators for years.

“Going forward, the owners and employees of Adair Grain and West Fertilizer Co. are working closely with investigating agencies,” Donald Adair, the plant’s owner and a West resident, said in a statement last Friday. “We are presenting all employees for interviews and will assist in the fact finding to whatever degree possible.”

Has Congress introduced any new regulation legislation?

Yes, but it would roll back regulations rather than strengthen them. Eleven representatives — one Democrat and 10 Republicans — sponsored a bill in February that would limit the EPA’s regulatory authority over fertilizer plants. It has been endorsed by industry groups such as the Fertilizer Institute. Kathy Mathers, a spokeswoman for the Fertilizer Institute, told ProPublica that the group supports the bill because it would more clearly spell out how the EPA can regulate the industry.

Correction: An earlier version of this story mistakenly stated two different figures for the number of people killed in the blast. It is at least 15 people.

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]]> http://www.salon.com/2013/04/28/where_were_the_regulators_before_the_texas_fertilizer_plant_explosion_partner/feed/ 32 Mass murder vs. terrorism http://www.salon.com/2013/04/28/is_dzohkhar_tsarnaev_a_suspected_murderer_or_terrorist_partner/ http://www.salon.com/2013/04/28/is_dzohkhar_tsarnaev_a_suspected_murderer_or_terrorist_partner/#comments Sun, 28 Apr 2013 12:00:00 +0000 http://www.railrode.net/?p=13283219 Jacobin

For critics of American foreign policy, it’s all but axiomatic that the designation of a violent act as “terrorism” says as much about the accuser as it does about the accused. The U.S. government itself can’t decide on a single working definition of the term, but a standard one denotes unlawful politically-motivated violence designed to intimidate a government or civilian population. Put pressure on any part of this definition and it starts to buckle.

“Unlawful”? Why can’t terrorists — as per the word’s original meaning — be state actors? “Civilian population”? The category becomes meaningless if individuals can be retroactively subtracted from it for the crime of being struck by an American drone.

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]]> http://www.salon.com/2013/04/28/is_dzohkhar_tsarnaev_a_suspected_murderer_or_terrorist_partner/feed/ 17 ExxonMobil sued for allegedly brutalizing Indonesians http://www.salon.com/2013/04/26/exxonmobil_sued_for_allegedly_brutalizing_indonesians_partner/ http://www.salon.com/2013/04/26/exxonmobil_sued_for_allegedly_brutalizing_indonesians_partner/#comments Fri, 26 Apr 2013 17:06:00 +0000 http://www.railrode.net/?p=13282972 LHOKSEUMAWE, Aceh — Syukri A-Wahap still bears scars from the two days he spent tied to a chair at a military checkpoint here in northern Indonesia in 2003.
Global Post
Indonesian soldiers who suspected he was aiding separatist rebels used their guns to try and beat a confession out of him. With the butt of an SS1 rifle they cracked his skull and busted his lower lip.

Syukri says he now suffers from short-term memory loss, pointing to a zigzag scar beneath a shock of thick, black hair.

“I didn’t feel anything,” he said, recalling the lengthy interrogations. “It felt like I was already dead.”

His story is one of thousands involving kidnap, torture, rape and murder at the hands of the Indonesian military, which some victims here say was aided by US oil giant ExxonMobil.

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]]> http://www.salon.com/2013/04/26/exxonmobil_sued_for_allegedly_brutalizing_indonesians_partner/feed/ 1 “Parks and Recreation”: TV’s most progressive show http://www.salon.com/2013/04/25/is_parks_and_recreation_secretly_socialist_partner/ http://www.salon.com/2013/04/25/is_parks_and_recreation_secretly_socialist_partner/#comments Thu, 25 Apr 2013 20:38:00 +0000 http://www.railrode.net/?p=13282008 Los
Angeles Review of Books NBC’s PARKS AND RECREATION, never shying from political controversy, examines current beltway tensions in ways one might expect from a more overtly political program. This season more than ever, the tendentious questions of American governance have become the show's lifeblood, its fictive small town of Pawnee, Indiana, struggling with political tribulations closely mirroring those on the national stage — and proposing some bold solutions.

The season’s first episode follows the lead character, Amy Poehler's Leslie Knope, to Washington DC, where she met real political figures such as Joe Biden (her hero), Olympia Snowe, Barbara Boxer, and John McCain. Recent episodes have been titled "Soda Tax" and "How a Bill Becomes a Law" and highlight the nitty-gritty — if comically histrionic — details about local politics. In addition, the show's constant use of innuendo surrounding current political events, reenactment of debates concerning economics and governance, and tongue-in-cheek references to the increasing conservatism of American politics have made Parks and Rec more a comedic primer in American politics than a primetime comedy.

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]]> http://www.salon.com/2013/04/25/is_parks_and_recreation_secretly_socialist_partner/feed/ 18 Bill Clinton joins Twitter http://www.salon.com/2013/04/25/bill_clinton_joins_twitter_partner/ http://www.salon.com/2013/04/25/bill_clinton_joins_twitter_partner/#comments Thu, 25 Apr 2013 17:00:00 +0000 http://www.railrode.net/?p=13281900 The Daily Dot Stephen Colbert might be feeling pretty disappointed with Bill Clinton right now.

The former U.S. president has joined Twitter, though opted not to adopt the handle Colbert picked out for him two weeks ago. Colbert registered @PrezBillyJeff for Clinton and sent a tweet Clinton dictated to him.

That handle was a little too informal for Clinton, it seems, who eventually switched the handle to plain ol' @BillClinton and started tweeting Wednesday.

The account was quickly verified, and Clinton already has more than 288,000 followers. In his first few tweets, Clinton told Colbert he was ready to start his "Twitter lessons."

Colbert seemed pleased that Clinton decided to take the plunge, though appeared dismayed that the former president failed to turn up to his Game of Thrones party.

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]]> http://www.salon.com/2013/04/25/bill_clinton_joins_twitter_partner/feed/ 3 Why are terrorists so often men? http://www.salon.com/2013/04/25/why_are_terrorists_so_often_men/ http://www.salon.com/2013/04/25/why_are_terrorists_so_often_men/#comments Thu, 25 Apr 2013 11:45:00 +0000 http://www.railrode.net/?p=13281267 "Losers" was what their uncle called them, and based on what we've learned since, it was Tamerlan Tsarnaev who fit society's measure for being one. Not that he didn't try to suggest otherwise. According to the Boston Globe, though "the older brother liked to look like a man of means, once posing for a photo in front of a gleaming Mercedes sporting a long wool scarf and white leather slip-on shoes," it was all an act. And anyway, it was his wife Katherine's long hours as a home healthcare aide that kept the family afloat, not Tamerlan's boxing prowess or the odd jobs he occasionally worked.

We don't know why Tamerlan and his brother blew up the Boston Marathon -- we may never really know -- but we do know that in doing so, they were performing a kind of masculinity that took control of the city through public destruction.

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]]> http://www.salon.com/2013/04/25/why_are_terrorists_so_often_men/feed/ 161 How a Twitter hack sent the market plummeting http://www.salon.com/2013/04/24/how_a_twitter_hack_sent_the_market_plummeting_ap/ http://www.salon.com/2013/04/24/how_a_twitter_hack_sent_the_market_plummeting_ap/#comments Wed, 24 Apr 2013 23:16:00 +0000 http://www.railrode.net/?p=13281363 NEW YORK (AP) -- For a few surreal minutes, a mere 12 words on Twitter caused the world's mightiest stock market to tremble.

No sooner did hackers send a false Associated Press tweet reporting explosions at the White House on Tuesday than investors started dumping stocks - eventually unloading $134 billion worth. Turns out, some investors are not only gullible, they're impossibly fast stock traders.

Except most of the investors weren't human. They were computers, selling on autopilot beyond the control of humans, like a scene from a sci-fi horror film.

"Before you could blink, it was over," said Joe Saluzzi, co-founder of Themis Trading and an outspoken critic of high-speed computerized trading. "With people, you wouldn't have this type of reaction."

For decades, computers have been sorting through data and news to help investment funds decide whether to buy or sell. But that's old school. Now "algorithmic" trading programs sift through data, news, even tweets, and execute trades by themselves in fractions of a second, without slowpoke humans getting in the way. More than half of stock trading every day is done this way.

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]]> http://www.salon.com/2013/04/24/how_a_twitter_hack_sent_the_market_plummeting_ap/feed/ 7 Religion’s media persecution complex http://www.salon.com/2013/04/23/there_is_not_nor_has_there_ever_been_a_media_conspiracy_against_religion_partner/ http://www.salon.com/2013/04/23/there_is_not_nor_has_there_ever_been_a_media_conspiracy_against_religion_partner/#comments Tue, 23 Apr 2013 22:01:00 +0000 http://www.railrode.net/?p=13280155 Carl M. Cannon bemoans the current state of religion reporting as if there was a time when the press provided smart, in-depth, contextualized coverage of religious leaders, issues, ideas, and communities. Religion Dispatches

How did I miss that?

That Golden Era wasn’t in the 1980s when reporters treated evangelicals as bumblers and missed the significance of the conservatives’ takeover of the Southern Baptist Convention. And it surely wasn’t during the late 1940s and 1950s when, according to Debra Mason, “the abundance of syndicated religion content says more about demand for such content than it does about the quality of religion beat reporting, given its lack of originality and its low level of journalistic skill.”

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]]> http://www.salon.com/2013/04/23/there_is_not_nor_has_there_ever_been_a_media_conspiracy_against_religion_partner/feed/ 15 Religious right architect dies at 72 http://www.salon.com/2013/04/23/howard_phillips_architect_of_the_religious_right_dies_at_72_partner/ http://www.salon.com/2013/04/23/howard_phillips_architect_of_the_religious_right_dies_at_72_partner/#comments Tue, 23 Apr 2013 18:20:00 +0000 http://www.railrode.net/?p=13279853 Howard Phillips, one of the main architects of the Moral Majority and, more generally, the American religious right, died Saturday at the age of 72. According to the Christian News Network, he had been suffering from dementia.
The Southern Poverty Law Center

Phillips had a long history in conservative and right-wing movements, including three runs as a third-party presidential candidate. He sat on the board of Young Americans for Freedom (YAF) and worked on Barry Goldwater’s unsuccessful 1964 presidential campaign. He then went on to get involved in the administration of Richard Nixon, who appointed him head of the Office of Economic Opportunity (OEO).

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]]> http://www.salon.com/2013/04/23/howard_phillips_architect_of_the_religious_right_dies_at_72_partner/feed/ 19 Hackers compromise AP Twitter account http://www.salon.com/2013/04/23/hackers_compromise_ap_twitter_account_2_ap/ http://www.salon.com/2013/04/23/hackers_compromise_ap_twitter_account_2_ap/#comments Tue, 23 Apr 2013 18:13:00 +0000 http://www.railrode.net/?p=13279909 LONDON (AP) — Hackers compromised Twitter accounts of The Associated Press on Tuesday, sending out an erroneous tweet about an attack at the White House.

The tweet said that there had been two explosions at the White House and President Barack Obama was injured. The attack on AP's Twitter account and AP Mobile Twitter account was preceded by a phishing attempt on AP's corporate network.

The AP confirmed that its Twitter account had been suspended following a hack and said it was working to correct the issue.

The tweet put out by hackers briefly sent the Dow Jones Industrial Average sharply lower.

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]]> http://www.salon.com/2013/04/23/hackers_compromise_ap_twitter_account_2_ap/feed/ 2 Does “Downton Abbey” perpetuate gay stereotypes? http://www.salon.com/2013/04/21/downton_abbeys_gay_valet_subtly_subversive_or_walking_cliche_partner/ http://www.salon.com/2013/04/21/downton_abbeys_gay_valet_subtly_subversive_or_walking_cliche_partner/#comments Sun, 21 Apr 2013 17:00:00 +0000 http://www.railrode.net/?p=13276512 IT WAS A SEASON OF SADNESS, a season of tsuris; the anti-Passover, I guess, as at the last minute the Angel of Death, that occasional writing partner of Julian Fellowes, stopped at Downton Abbey after all. Yes, Season Three of the most successful drama in PBS history ended with both a death and a birth, as Fellowes is a generous host. If you didn’t watch, you can read on without fear; here be no spoilers. I’ll just say that we were left with a Major Character dead on a country road, blood leaking from (gender unspecified’s) mouth. Season Four, which we won’t get for a year, will pick up six months after the Sadness. Maggie Smith, in the role of Maggie Smith, will once more in her Don-Rickles-with-a-title mode trot out the zingers, his Lordship will disapprove of something or other, and Lady Edith will defy the example set by her late sister Sybil that Girls With Ideas come to early ends. Shit may, as they say, happen at Downton, but Fellowes believes that just getting on with it is the best revenge, a worldview that helps him infallibly locate and dramatize the perfect balance between what needs to change, and what must never change, with the latter given the weight.
Los Angeles Review of Books

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