Salon.com > David Futrelle

Salon.com > David Futrelle http://www.salon.com Sun, 27 May 2012 00:00:00 +0000 en hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=3.2.1 Song of Roland http://www.salon.com/1999/08/31/rebirth/ http://www.salon.com/1999/08/31/rebirth/#comments Tue, 31 Aug 1999 16:00:00 +0000 http://www.salon.com/technology/feature/1999/08/31/rebirth Wing Poon found his way to the Propellerhead Web site entirely by accident -- and discovered software there that answered questions he hadn't even asked. "I thought I'd look up some info on the band Propellerheads," he tells me, "and stumbled upon this software that was exactly what I wanted." Today, the 25-year-old software engineer from Sydney, Australia, runs a Web page devoted in part to the "highly addictive software" he found there.

Instead of the retro dance grooves of the British band Propellerheads, Poon had come across a Swedish company called Propellerhead Software that has created an ingeniously crafted software emulation of three classic music machines -- two drum machines and a bass synthesizer -- that virtually define the techno sound.

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]]> http://www.salon.com/1999/08/31/rebirth/feed/ 0 Steal This Dream http://www.salon.com/1998/08/03/sneaks_132/ http://www.salon.com/1998/08/03/sneaks_132/#comments Mon, 03 Aug 1998 19:00:00 +0000 http://www.salon.com/books/review/1998/08/03/sneaks Abbie Hoffman careened through life like a force of nature, so it's no surprise that "Steal This Dream," a sprawling oral biography, looks like debris left in the wake of a tornado. In his strange and convoluted career, Hoffman was a hippie, a Yippie, a political provocateur, an author, a drug dealer, a phone phreak, a community activist, a stand-up comedian -- sometimes all at once. When he took his own life in 1989, America lost one of its true originals.

Larry Sloman, a former National Lampoon and High Times editor who collaborated with Howard Stern on his two bestselling books, has clearly done his research. "Steal This Dream," which covers Hoffman's life from his childhood through the glory years of the 1960s and the less-than-glorious years of the '70s and '80s, is constructed of thousands of excerpts from interviews with more than 200 of Hoffman's friends, ex-friends and acquaintances.

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]]> http://www.salon.com/1998/08/03/sneaks_132/feed/ 0 Scorpion Tongues http://www.salon.com/1998/04/08/sneaks_113/ http://www.salon.com/1998/04/08/sneaks_113/#comments Wed, 08 Apr 1998 19:00:00 +0000 http://www.salon.com/books/review/1998/04/08/sneaks A few weeks ago, in an interview that sent cyberlibertarians everywhere scrambling to their keyboards, Hillary Rodham Clinton suggested that we might want to "rethink" the whole Internet thing -- in light of the way certain would-be journalists were exploiting the medium to spread mean rumors about her and her husband.

If Hillary thinks Matt Drudge is rough, she might want to take a look in the archives of the Chicago Tribune from a little over a century ago. Contrasting the moral character of two Indiana presidential aspirants, the Trib made its choice rather clear in its headline: "Hendricks a man of the purest social relations, but Morton a foe to society, a seducer and a libertine." The article went on to relate "a few of the hellish liaisons of, and attempted seductions by, Indiana's favorite stud-horse."

Hillary could find this story, along with many others, reported in Gail Collins' new book, "Scorpion Tongues" -- an often entertaining account of political gossip in American history, collecting an ample supply of "facts and near-facts about the great and near-great" from Thomas Jefferson to William Jefferson Clinton. It's not hot dish exactly -- since many of the stories are at least several decades old -- but it's tasty dish nonetheless.

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]]> http://www.salon.com/1998/04/08/sneaks_113/feed/ 0 Tricks of the trade http://www.salon.com/1998/03/27/review_155/ http://www.salon.com/1998/03/27/review_155/#comments Fri, 27 Mar 1998 19:47:00 +0000 http://www.salon.com/technology/review/1998/03/27/review When I was a kid in the '70s, I imagined the world of the future as a pristine suburban mall writ large -- a mixture of Bucky Fuller and "Logan's Run." It never would have occurred to me that, just a few short years from the magical date of 2001, I might find the advance guard of the future sitting in the blue-gray glow of a computer screen, idly exchanging notes and comments on the best way to market naked pictures on the Net.

But there you have it. I have seen the future -- for better or worse -- and his name is Sharky.

Leave it to the adult webmasters -- who've pioneered the use of streaming audio and video and other kinds of interactive entertainment on the Web -- to get to the future before the rest of us. "Sharky Live," webcast from the offices of the Web site Cybererotica, is a twice-weekly, real-time, radio-style talk show devoted to the ins and outs (as it were) of the Internet porn industry. It is, as Sharky himself explains at the start of every show, "the Internet's premier RealAudio show dead mmpphh that'll help you get a feet on the pulse of the adult Web."

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]]> http://www.salon.com/1998/03/27/review_155/feed/ 0 Babel off http://www.salon.com/1998/03/03/review_151/ http://www.salon.com/1998/03/03/review_151/#comments Tue, 03 Mar 1998 12:54:00 +0000 http://www.salon.com/technology/review/1998/03/03/review I struggled with Russian for three years in high school, learning little more from the exquisitely painful process than the Russian terms for "I don't know" and "I don't understand." Hence I was never quite able to suspend my disbelief about "Star Trek's" Universal Translator -- the show's technological fix to the old Tower of Babel problem, an unobtrusive box that managed to convert even the strangest alien grunts into perfect (if at times somewhat melodramatic) English. I had no trouble, mind you, accepting phasers, transporters and warp-speed space travel -- but the idea that a little language box could accomplish more in an instant than I could manage in three awful years was somehow harder to take.

So when I first stumbled on to AltaVista's Translation Assistant, I had a little trouble believing it was real. The Translation Assistant does for Web surfing what "Star Trek's" translator did for deep-space exploration, translating Web pages (or simply swatches of text) from French (or German or Spanish or Portuguese or Italian) into English and vice versa. The service is quick, free and painless, and though the software is still in beta (as the AltaVistans are quick to point out), the results are nothing short of magical.

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]]> http://www.salon.com/1998/03/03/review_151/feed/ 0 Always In Pursuit http://www.salon.com/1998/02/25/review_48/ http://www.salon.com/1998/02/25/review_48/#comments Wed, 25 Feb 1998 20:00:00 +0000 http://www.salon.com/books/review/1998/02/25/review Stanley Crouch has made his reputation as a sort of literary bruiser, both literally and figuratively. He's known for his savage, slashing assaults on celebrities both highbrow and low -- particularly those fellow African-Americans who, in Crouch's view, take too seriously the pieties of political correctness and multiculturalism. And, like many New York intellectuals of old, Crouch doesn't always make a clear distinction between writin' and fightin'. In the jazz world -- where Crouch's often controversial opinions carry a great deal of weight -- more than a few of his remarks have led to fisticuffs.

It's not hard to understand why. Crouch is, if nothing else, blunt in his insults. In the past, he's dismissed critic bell hooks as a "terrier" and compared novelist Toni Morrison to P.T. Barnum. In his latest collection of essays, "Always in Pursuit," Crouch -- a contributing editor at the New Republic and a columnist for the New York Daily News -- takes on everyone and everything from the bland pop of Michael Jackson ("The King of Narcissism") to the raw comedy of Richard Pryor and Def Comedy Jam ("minstrelsy with dirty words, Uncle Tom cursing his way to the bank"); from Phil Donahue ("irritating ... smug ... sanctimonious") to Malcolm X (a "saber-rattling black nationalist ... rabble rouser").

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]]> http://www.salon.com/1998/02/25/review_48/feed/ 0 The Beast in the Nursery http://www.salon.com/1998/02/11/11review/ http://www.salon.com/1998/02/11/11review/#comments Wed, 11 Feb 1998 19:00:00 +0000 http://www.salon.com/books/review/1998/02/11/11review "The Beast In the Nursery" is not, despite its gently lurid title, a horror story. Or perhaps it is. The beast Adam Phillips refers to is not a dastardly child-snatcher but in fact the child himself, an imperious creature who will not be ignored. The real child-snatchers in this story are Sigmund Freud and his followers. The central story of psychoanalysis is the story of the beastly child -- and the story of adults putting away childish things, rejecting infantile fantasies of omnipotence, accepting their inevitable defeat in the Oedipal struggle. In many ways, Phillips notes in his new collection of essays, contemporary psychoanalysis is a profession devoted to disenchantment.

Phillips (author of "Kissing, Tickling, and Being Bored" and "Monogamy") understands all too well the dangers of narcissistic fantasy. But at the same time he wonders if, in curing us from our overactive imaginations, contemporary psychoanalysts aren't also making life a little grayer. And so Phillips gently nudges us toward a more expansive view of human possibility -- rejecting the "kitsch seriousness" of many of his colleagues and offering "two cheers for what psychoanalysts call 'omnipotence.'"

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]]> http://www.salon.com/1998/02/11/11review/feed/ 0 Now and Then: From Coney Island to Here http://www.salon.com/1998/02/02/02review_2/ http://www.salon.com/1998/02/02/02review_2/#comments Mon, 02 Feb 1998 20:00:00 +0000 http://www.salon.com/books/review/1998/02/02/02review Marguerite Oswald, the loquacious and vaguely lunatic mother of Lee Harvey Oswald, once announced her intention to write a memoir with the title "This and That," a title suggestive of the scattered contents of her always-busy mind.

Now, Joseph Heller is no Mother Oswald -- thank heaven for that -- but reading his new memoir, "Now and Then," I couldn't help thinking that he should have filched Oswald's unused title for his own. For Heller, the author of the bitterly funny "Catch-22" and several other less winsome novels, has filled the pages of this disorderly memoir with a collection of remembrances that have no more logic to them than a dream. Heller, at least, seems aware of his tendency to ramble: His fifth chapter is titled "On and On," which is followed by chapters with the evocative titles "And On and On" and "And On and On and On."

Still, Heller is Heller, and even the most jumbled segments of this generally affable memoir have their share of insightful observations and amusing asides. Heller's memories of his Coney Island childhood are laced with sardonic humor and bathed in a warm glow of nostalgia. He tells of his first (and last) ride on the Cyclone at Luna Park (as a returning Air Force airman with 60 missions under his belt); of street games of "punchball" (a sort of stickball without the stick); of swims out to the bell buoy at Coney Island Beach -- which he only now recognizes were exceedingly dangerous ventures.

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]]> http://www.salon.com/1998/02/02/02review_2/feed/ 0 For Shame http://www.salon.com/1997/12/24/23review_2/ http://www.salon.com/1997/12/24/23review_2/#comments Wed, 24 Dec 1997 20:00:00 +0000 http://www.salon.com/books/review/1997/12/24/24review In one early episode of "Seinfeld," Jerry wakes up on the subway, after a brief unscheduled nap, to find himself staring at a gargantuan naked man. "I'm not ashamed of my body," the man informs him. "That's your problem exactly," Jerry replies: "You should be ashamed." This, in a nutshell, is the argument of James B. Twitchell's "For Shame," an occasionally stimulating but mostly irritating inquiry into "the loss of common decency in American culture." Americans, Twitchell argues, have been too quick to divest themselves of what our pop psychologists like to call "toxic shame." We need to remember, as Twitchell puts it, that "feeling bad is often the basis of a general good."

Twitchell, an English professor at the University of Florida and the author of several previous diatribes on the decline of American civilization (the most recent being "AdCult USA," an antagonistic history of advertising), writes with energy and (occasionally) with some wit on this important and difficult topic. But in the end his book does more to obscure the debate than to illuminate it.

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]]> http://www.salon.com/1997/12/24/23review_2/feed/ 0 Media Circus: Totally naked book wrestling http://www.salon.com/1997/12/22/media_19/ http://www.salon.com/1997/12/22/media_19/#comments Mon, 22 Dec 1997 20:00:00 +0000 http://www.salon.com/media/circus/1997/12/22/media He's back! The last time we heard from Jerry Springer, you may recall, he was retreating, tail between his legs, from a short-lived second job as news commentator on a Chicago station, an embarrassing episode that left him, at least for a few days, the most hated man in the Windy City. But he survived this temporary setback -- and he's returned stronger than ever.

Springer's show, after punching up its already-sleazy guest list (and inspiring its already-sleazy guests to punch up each other) is now getting its best ratings ever. "While other gab shows talk about cleaning up their respective acts, Springer's ... program -- notorious for an endless parade of brawling, big-chested strippers, naughty nudists and brazen adulterers -- has actually become more outrageous than ever this season," noted Josef Adalian in the New York Post. "The result: ... a stunning ratings surge." Springer's new, even tawdrier show closed in fast on Oprah Winfrey during the October sweeps, and actually beat Oprah for the week ending Nov. 30, leaving the Jerrmeister standing briefly atop the talk-show ratings world.

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]]> http://www.salon.com/1997/12/22/media_19/feed/ 0 Thrift Score http://www.salon.com/1997/12/19/review_29/ http://www.salon.com/1997/12/19/review_29/#comments Fri, 19 Dec 1997 20:00:00 +0000 http://www.salon.com/books/review/1997/12/19/review I used to think I could live, somehow, outside of consumer culture. A grad student, bereft of funds and only partially cognizant of the exigencies of style, I bought only what was absolutely necessary, taking furniture from dumpsters and replenishing my wardrobe only on those occasions when, once or twice a year, I went to visit my parents and their charge cards. The only shops I spent more than a minute in were used book stores, and I told myself that my book purchases were academic necessities. I could even withstand the annual onslaught of Christmas -- often holding out until (quite literally) the night before Christmas before stepping gingerly into the consumer maelstrom to snatch up a few (cheap, crappy) last-minute gifts.

Then I discovered thrift stores, and my latent consumerist cravings emerged with a vengeance. From my first big score (a set of useful mugs and an original oil painting based on the "Love is ..." comic strip, all for $1.29) I was hooked. "The smart shopper shops often," the sign in my local thrift proclaimed, and by this peculiar standard I was a genius. I bought shirts; I bought pants; I bought file cabinets. I bought black velvet paintings of kitties. I bought hideous ceramic figurines. I bought more than 100 novels about nurses.

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]]> http://www.salon.com/1997/12/19/review_29/feed/ 0 Buy Buy Love http://www.salon.com/1997/11/14/media_45/ http://www.salon.com/1997/11/14/media_45/#comments Fri, 14 Nov 1997 19:00:00 +0000 http://www.salon.com/media/circus/1997/11/14/media Like former MTV veejay Nina Blackwood, who was last sighted pimping a collection of "retro" hits on late-night TV, the readers of the Robb Report for the Affluent Lifestyle have squatted down in the midst of the 1980s and refused to leave. Each issue of the fat, slick monthly assures its readers -- some 300,000 of them, mostly male, with an average household income of $755,000, according to advertising director Rick Sedler -- that in the circles that really matter, gratuitous displays of wealth and cheesiness will never go out of style.

Blackwood's '80s are the decade of Culture Club and Flock of Seagulls; the Robb Report, by contrast, harks back to the decade of Dynasty and Donald Trump. Indeed, a recent Robb feature celebrated the triumphant "return" of this most flamboyant '80s icon. "The Donald is back," the editors croon -- and, it goes without saying, he's badder than ever (as is his hair). Writer Linda Marx defines for her readers the essence of Trump: "a fascination with flamboyance, an obsession with opulence -- he is a man who believes his own braggadocio. Hyperbole, chutzpah, and singing superlatives are all hallmarks of the Trump personality that translate well to his casino hotels and yachts and planes and luxury apartments."

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]]> http://www.salon.com/1997/11/14/media_45/feed/ 0 SALON Daily Clicks: Newsreal http://www.salon.com/1997/09/22/news_427/ http://www.salon.com/1997/09/22/news_427/#comments Mon, 22 Sep 1997 19:00:00 +0000 http://www.salon.com/news/feature/1997/09/22/news back in the heroic days of rocket science -- long before Challenger, long before environmental impact statements -- scientists thought big. Big and crazy. Like in 1958, when Ted Taylor, a theoretical physicist and atomic bomb designer, went to the government's Advanced Research Projects Agency with the following idea: Why rely on costly, bulky solid fuel to send tiny payloads into orbit, when a ready source of nearly endless energy was at hand? Why not use atomic bombs to propel our spaceships?

All you needed to do was to detonate a specially designed bomb underneath a giant metal shock-absorber at the base of the ship. The ship would rise up into the air; another bomb would be dropped, and with a series of carefully controlled explosions you could send a ship the size of a 16-story office building rocketing out of our atmosphere on a direct route to the moon or Mars.

Like many postwar nuclear fantasies, the Orion project, as it was called, didn't make it past the drawing board. But space scientists never gave up on the idea of nuclear-powered flight. In fact, they're going to launch one next month. It's called the Cassini probe, a plutonium-laden exploration that is scheduled to rendezvous with Saturn in 2004. To some, it's akin to launching a doomsday machine.

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]]> http://www.salon.com/1997/09/22/news_427/feed/ 0 star chamber http://www.salon.com/1997/09/18/media_199/ http://www.salon.com/1997/09/18/media_199/#comments Thu, 18 Sep 1997 19:00:00 +0000 http://www.salon.com/media/circus/1997/09/18/media | It would be a marriage made in, well, the heavens. The Bride: a once-hip, now obviously tired MTV show documenting the allegedly real lives of strikingly attractive if irritating twentysomething roommates. The Groom: an ungracefully aging former communist space program limping from disaster to disaster.

I present to you a programming concept that could revolutionize television AND space exploration all at once: MTV's "The Real World: MIR." Two not-so-great tastes that would taste great together.

The idea is simplicity itself: send the MIR's current crew home for some much-needed rest. Send in their place a cast of seven strangers -- seven self-absorbed twentysomething narcissists, some Russian, some American, all of them cute as the dickens. And find out what happens, as they say at MTV, when people stop being polite and start getting REAL.

Lord knows the Russian space program could use some fresh blood. The MIR itself is already more than six years past its official expiration date (when it was launched in 1986, it was supposed to last only five years). This year alone, the ship's inhabitants have endured flaming oxygen canisters, oxygen generator breakdowns, leaky cooling pipes, numerous computer failures and a crash with an unmanned spaceship. Earlier this week, the ship's computer went down again -- for the fourth time since July. (They must be running Netscape.)

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]]> http://www.salon.com/1997/09/18/media_199/feed/ 0 Media Circus http://www.salon.com/1997/08/21/media_213/ http://www.salon.com/1997/08/21/media_213/#comments Thu, 21 Aug 1997 19:00:00 +0000 http://www.salon.com/media/circus/1997/08/21/media so I read in the paper that the National Geographic, that stolid, anachronistic remnant from our imperialist past, is about to go commercial in a big way. Oh, sure, the magazine has already made a few baby steps into the new media world -- it does, after all, have its own Web site. But with the magazine slipping from the hands of its founding family at last, eager upstarts at the society want to stride even more boldly into the next century -- launching cable ventures and feature films and even more elaborate CD-ROMs, making deals with Columbia Tristar and Rupert Murdoch, selling stuffed animals and T-shirts in Disney-style stores. And the magazine itself is scheduled to get snappier as well, with shorter articles and less emphasis on ivory tower arcana. The company's new president, Reg Murphy, tells the New York Times he's "the least scholarly person you know."

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]]> http://www.salon.com/1997/08/21/media_213/feed/ 0 All About Mensch http://www.salon.com/1997/07/29/media_230/ http://www.salon.com/1997/07/29/media_230/#comments Tue, 29 Jul 1997 19:00:00 +0000 http://www.salon.com/media/circus/1997/07/29/media for the first time in my life, I felt like a Cosmo Girl. Braving the evident disapproval of the sullen clerk at my local White Hen, I had just purchased a copy of Cosmopolitan: All About Men, the legendary gal mag's annual guide to real guys. Opening the magazine, I felt like a voyeur at some secret all-gal sleepover. "Here are 90 awesome available men," the editors gushed. "We'll take you inside their heads, inside their hearts and yes, inside their pants, which isn't such a bad place to spend the summer."

Unlike, say, Playboy's Playmates or Esquire's Women We Love -- expert creations of plastic surgery, photo-retouching and more-or-less unbridled male fantasy -- Cosmo's guys are actual human beings, with real jobs and addresses and everything. Now, I had no great interest in getting into any of these guys' mailboxes, much less their pants. But the magazine seemed to offer me something even more valuable than that: the chance to see the masculine ideal in the flesh. I've always wanted to know what women are looking for when they give guys the once over twice. Cosmo's All About Men promised me an answer to that old question -- I think it was one of Freud's: "What do Cosmo Girls want?"

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]]> http://www.salon.com/1997/07/29/media_230/feed/ 0 Let The Dogs Bark http://www.salon.com/1997/07/14/media_36/ http://www.salon.com/1997/07/14/media_36/#comments Mon, 14 Jul 1997 19:00:00 +0000 http://www.salon.com/media/circus/1997/07/14/media when Robert Helms started his zine back in the spring of 1996, he intended it to be a more or less clandestine resource guide for fellow members of his lowly profession -- a place where those who made their living as human research subjects could share with one another the "strange humor (and) special cares" of their careers in medicine.

"The goal of this 'zine' is to give guinea pigs a forum wherein information and thoughts can be shared away from the ears and eyeballs of a medical staff," Helms wrote in an opening editorial in the first issue of Guinea Pig Zero. "As Don Corleone so aptly put it, 'Never tell anyone outside the family what you're thinking.'"

Well, Guinea Pig Zero is no longer simply a family affair. Earlier this summer, the zine -- or more precisely, excerpts of the zine that ran in Harper's magazine -- caught the eye of some medical officials (and their lawyers). Now Helms is facing a libel suit.

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]]> http://www.salon.com/1997/07/14/media_36/feed/ 0 Media Circus http://www.salon.com/1997/07/04/media_50/ http://www.salon.com/1997/07/04/media_50/#comments Fri, 04 Jul 1997 19:00:00 +0000 http://www.salon.com/media/circus/1997/07/04/media given all the controversy about sex crimes and misdemeanors in the armed forces of late, it was only a matter of time before it happened: General Halftrack has been sent to sensitivity training. The one-star general, not an actual human being but rather a character in Mort Walker's flaccid, antediluvian comic strip, "Beetle Bailey," is being prodded to mend his lecherous ways. After several decades spent unapologetically ogling the forever-young Miss Buxley, the Washington Times reports, the old goat is actually going to apologize for his impolitic lapses. "It's just that I grew up with certain words and attitudes I thought were OK," the general will explain. "I'm sorry."

Is this the sign that the military has finally "gotten it," as they say, on the question of arms and the woman? Don't bet on it. Walker has made it clear he's "gotten it" only under duress. And while military officials publicly mouth the correct platitudes when talking of the second sex, many of the old boys (and some of the new) are making it clear not only that they don't get it, but that they aren't planning to get it any time soon. Many in the military are digging in for a long siege -- and some of the more gung-ho have begun to plan a kind of cultural counterattack.

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]]> http://www.salon.com/1997/07/04/media_50/feed/ 0 Media Circus – Information, please! http://www.salon.com/1997/06/27/media_55/ http://www.salon.com/1997/06/27/media_55/#comments Fri, 27 Jun 1997 19:00:00 +0000 http://www.salon.com/media/circus/1997/06/27/media You want information? I've got information. True, I don't exactly know what to do with it, I can't find it when I need it and I don't physically have room for it in my apartment. But I've got it, and unless something drastic happens to me or to the world, I'm going to keep on accumulating more of it. A rough inventory: I have, oh, perhaps 4,000 news articles stashed away on various disks and my hard drive, some 50 megabytes of sheer information -- very little of which I've actually bothered to do more than skim. I have several thousand books, all sorts, stacked two-deep on shelves and stuffed into cupboards and boxes. I have more magazine subscriptions than I can afford, and more old magazines and newspapers and clippings and printouts than I can even imagine how to count. My TV is on 10 or 12 hours a day, sometimes with the radio on as well -- and as far as I can tell, in my info-addled state, it's sending vast chunks of what the technically minded call data my way. (Admittedly, some of this data involves shouting matches between miniskirted grandmas and their mortified grandchildren on the Jerry Springer show, but it's still data of a sort.)

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]]> http://www.salon.com/1997/06/27/media_55/feed/ 0 Smoke and mirrors http://www.salon.com/1997/06/24/news_334/ http://www.salon.com/1997/06/24/news_334/#comments Tue, 24 Jun 1997 19:00:00 +0000 http://www.salon.com/news/feature/1997/06/24/news "in essence," explained Florida Attorney General Robert Butterworth in a strange burst of public-health lyricism, "the Marlboro Man will be riding into the sunset on Joe Camel."

It's a comforting image: Joe Camel, the cartoon trickster who's lured a generation of youngsters to long and expensive deaths, will be tamed at last. But the $370 billion tobacco settlement announced last Friday is -- like Camels themselves -- a triumph of packaging over substance. More specifically, the deal is a public-relations triumph but a real-world disaster because it focuses on packaging, not substance.

True, to rescue itself from public opprobrium, Food and Drug Administration regulation and the prospect of nearly endless litigation, the tobacco industry has made some real-world concessions. In return for immunity from class-action and other lawsuits, the industry has agreed to pay out nearly $370 billion over a quarter of a century; some of this money will go to fund health insurance for children; some $60 billion will go into a fund as "punishment for the industry's past actions."

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