The Internet's Own Monster

Every generation creates its own monsters. Folk tales tell of witches and wyrms in the woods, my TV-infused generation feared Jaws in lakes and Bloody Mary in the mirror. This generation gets its monsters from the Internet.

Slenderman is a pure product of electronic media. He appears in places we rarely frequent, these days â€" abandoned, crumbling halls, deep woods, a playground with a rickety steel jungle gyms. He is a suburban ghoul with his own history and his own methodology and, of late, he has become the object of controversy due to an attack in Wisconsin during which two girls stabbed another in order to appease Slenderman’s dark needs. It was a horrible story and it underlies how little we understand about the psychology of a generation weaned on the Internet and how images can morph from fiction to fact in the course of half a decade.

Slenderman’s origin is surprisingly clear. Unlike most urban legends, we can trace his provenance with absolute certainty. He was born on June 8, 2009, on a forum site frequented by Photoshop pranksters. He belongs to a guy in Florida named Eric Knudsen who has a young daughter and is surprised as much as anything that his demon hasn’t yet been thrown onto the slag heap of forgotten memes. An entire history, an entire corpus, has grown up around him in a way that would have been impossible a decade ago.

He is the first pure product of the Internet, a demon spawned not out of a specific place but out of bits. Here’s some of his story.

Slenderman first appeared on the SomethingAwful forums under a thread titled “Create Paranormal Images.” One user, Slidebite, said “You just know a couple of the good ones are going to eventually make it to paranormal websites and be used as genuine.” He was right. The first image of Slenderman- of a tall, out-of-focus figure, next to a tree â€" was accompanied by a bit of text that sounds like the dialogue from a badly-translated horror game.

“One of two recovered photographs from the Stirling City Library blaze. Notable for being taken the day which fourteen children vanished and for what is referred to as “The Slender Man”. Deformities cited as film defects by officials. Fire at library occurred one week later. Actual photograph confiscated as evidence.”
â€" 1986, photographer: Mary Thomas, missing since June 13th, 1986.

Other posters added their own interpretations of the material, creating a backstory that stretched out to 16th-century Germany and even to 5000 BC. The creator, Victor Surge, added a few more photos, while other visitors created their own. One particularly clever image is a modified woodcut. In the original, a skeleton takes a child from its parents, perhaps into death. In the modified version, the skeleton has long arms and legs and its misshapen skull is hidden by the eaves of the house.

Over the intervening months, SomethingAwful posters and fan fiction enthusiasts added to the corpus. He gained a specific definition, courtesy of a poster on Yahoo Answers in 2011, two years after the original posts:

The Slender Man is a supernatural creature that is described as appearing as a normal human being but he is described as being 8 feet tall and he has vectors or extra appendages that are described to be as sharp as swords. The creature is known to stalk humans and cause many disappearances. He is described as a shadow creature that has missing a face. The creature fits into many mythologies in legends from nations such as germany and celts which brings up the possibility that he could be real. A man named victor Surge found this legend and made his own version of it which he called slender man. The slender man is not exactly evil according to mythology but victor Surge’s version shows him as an evil creature that stalks humans to kill. In mythology he was actually trying to save you from a painful death by taking you to the under world early.

Slenderman is a product of this century. He appears and havoc follows. He murders in undescribed ways or he compels others to murder. He is a dark god in an age of digital media and he fills the empty place between the news and the unknown.

Interestingly, Slenderman was born of the previous generation’s boogeymen. From a long interview with Slenderman’s creator, Knudsen AKA Victor Surge.

: I was mostly influenced by H.P Lovecraft, Stephan King (specifically his short stories), the surreal imaginings of William S. Burroughs, and couple games of the survival horror genre; Silent Hill and Resident Evil. I feel the most direct influences were Zack Parsons’s “That Insidious Beast”, the Steven King short story “The Mist”, the SA tale regarding “The Rake”, reports of so-called shadow people, Mothman, and the Mad Gasser of Mattoon. I used these to formulate asomething whose motivations can barely be comprehended and causes general unease and terror in a general population.

The key word there is terror. Slenderman does not directly kill his victims. Instead, he encourages others to in order to please him. Interestingly, the places he haunts are all but gone now. Thanks to breathless news coverage of murder and mayhem, children are rarely allowed to wander in woods alone or play in abandoned buildings. In fact, that he exists at all is a testament to the eerie pull of these places. He’s the ghost in the parking lot patrolled by bored guards and CCTV cameras. He’s the story that keeps you up at night in the center of a city full of 8 million people. He’s not Osama bin Laden or your father’s PTSD but is instead something far easier to understand. In a world that no longer harbors nameless dread, in which every monster has a name and GPS coordinates, he is a welcome refuge into the imagination.

One popular video game created around the mythos involves walking through a darkened forest surrounded by chain-link fence. All you have to do is find eight pieces of paper tacked to nearby trees. As you find the papers, the buzzing of crickets and the rustling of the photorealistic trees changes to a steady pounding. Slenderman is afoot. He doesn’t kill you. You simply disappear in a cloud of electronic snow.

Forums and video series were filled with fan fiction and content. The quality varies widely but it has grown oddly popular. One popular web series, MarbleHornets, is described as found footage of a man haunted by Slenderman. Most of the footage is mundane b-roll of woods and country roads. Then, every so often, Slenderman appears by fuzzing out the screen or pushing one of the characters into a violent coughing fit. There are no demons screaming “Gotcha.” Instead, you get an endless, nameless dread.

Wanting to find out the draw, I asked on the forums and chat rooms for input on the phenomenon. One Reddit fan, MLPTTM, wrote:

I like him because most creepypastas try to scare you with blood, gore, and if you’re lucky hyper-realistic blood. Slenderman scared me with psychological horror; making me scared of fields, trees, and sometimes nothing. He has made me as paranoid as I’ve been in my life and I love the thrill. His design is simple and terrifying because it can make him visible in a field or invisible in a forest. His humanoid figure makes him seem real like him stalking you can happen. I think the biggest thing that makes him interesting is that nobody has any full idea what happens when he gets you.

Another poster said they liked Slenderman because he was relentless:

Slender hunts you, but he doesn’t bang on your door, claw at your walls or howl at the moon. He’s just there, standing, waiting in the corner of your eyes. It’s bogus, you know it. You’re just seeing things ’cause you’re tried as shit. Or it’s Jake, pulling your leg.
Then it gets real, you have to get away. Despite your best efforts, Slender is still there. Always standing, always waiting, always watching.

Sadly, he’s also taken on a life of his own.

To understand what Slenderman has become of late all you have to do is watch a Twitter stream of mentions. In 2014, Slenderman is now Slendy, a quasi-comical, quasi-serious figure that has taken on a life of its own. The feed is full of game walkthroughs and links to creepypasta â€" essentially fan fiction â€" as well as bits of doggerel that sound like early Eminem lyrics passed through Hogwarts:

Slendy is a sort of goblin that posters use to scare themselves. Sadly, he’s also become a focal point for madness.

On May 31, two 12-year-old girls in Waukesha, Wisconsin stabbed a third girl nearly to death. The girls, who called their plot “Stabby, stab, stab” said it was intended as a sacrifice to Slenderman. Authorities are trying the pair as adults pending a mental evaluation. The tragedy here is that all the girl’s lives are damaged now â€" even potentially ruined.

The girls believed Slendy would appear to them if they killed in his name. They also believed he had threatened them and their families and could read their minds. Girls have always had fanciful flights of imagination. These claims sound much like the Salem witch hunts of the 1690s when young girls accused each other of riding with the devil. The resulting panics led to countless false confessions and over 20 executions. The same could probably happen here.

Then a few days later, around the anniversary of Slenderman’s creation, a teen in Cincinnati attacked her mother. The teen, who had a history of mental illness, was obsessed with the character. The lack of detail in this and the previous case points more towards mental illness than anything else. Slenderman, then, became the a focus for a mania that forced these girls to act out violently.

Thus far, no more reports of Slenderman-related violence have surfaced. The creators and maintainers of the mythos are adamant about their disapproval. “We are not teaching children to believe in a fictional monster, nor are we teaching them to be violent,” wrote Creepypasta moderator David Morales.

“I am deeply saddened by the tragedy in Wisconsin and my heart goes out to the families of those affected by this terrible act,” said Slenderman creator Eric Knudsen. I attempted to contact him for this story, to no avail.

Where the Slenderman mythos goes from here is anyone’s guess. He is a new villain, a new scapegoat, and a new demon. He won’t be the last of his kind but he is the first pure product of the Internet, a digital demon that haunts websites and sometimes spills over into the real world. Thankfully, no one has yet been killed in his honor. The 12-year-old Wisconsin victim is recovering and doing well.

In a statement, the girl’s parents wrote:

“Our family would like to thank everyone who has supported our daughter on her miraculous road to recovery … Our little girl has received thousands of purple hearts from numerous countries and from most continents. We simply cannot put into words how grateful we are for the prayers, packages and heartfelt messages. We are overwhelmed by the outpouring of love and support.”

They added: “Together as a family, we continue to adjust to our ‘new normal.’ Though many days consist of medical appointments and rehabilitation, recently she and her father enjoyed a ‘daddy-daughter night at the movies’ and thoroughly enjoyed a Disney film. It also included (after much persistence) a stop for a much-deserved treat in the snack area.”

Knudsen, for his part, stopped development of the character a few years ago. “I don’t spend a lot of active time on the Internet since I usually have a lot of real-life stuff going on,” he said.

IMAGE BY Bryce Durbin

Read More

Why Women Aren't People (But Corporations Are)

Earlier today, five men agreed that closely held corporations with anti-birth control religious beliefs cannot be required to provide contraceptive coverage to female employees. Corporations are people, my friend. Women? Not so much.

The decision to declare women Unpeople was a narrow one; the five men agreed that corporations (people) shouldn't be able to use Sebelius v. Hobby Lobby to justify discriminating against anyone except women (lesser people-ish entities), and won't be able to use it to deny other health care besides contraception. The same religious exemption to the Affordable Care Act that applies to nonprofit organizations also applies to for-profit companies controlled by a small group of people who think birth control is black magic. This ruling applies to whore pills only. Not to blood transfusions, AIDS retrovirals, vaccines, treating infections caused by getting a SATAN RULES tattoo with an infected needle at an unsafe tattoo parlor, antibiotics purchased to fight off a nasty case of the clap caught while raw dogging a stranger in a bar bathroom. Just birth control. No matter why a woman needs it.

The five men also agreed that their ruling only applies to corporations (people) with "sincerely held" religious beliefs. You know, the kind of religious beliefs that are so sincerely anti-birth control that they invest in and profit from companies that manufacture birth control. The kind of religious beliefs that cite as justification for their beliefs a series of religious texts written before Western Medicine as we know it existed.

If corporations are people then why can't I punch one in the fucking face?

Today, five men on the Supreme Court said that women's reproductive health care is less important than a woman's boss's superstition-based prudery and moral trepidation about fornication for female pleasure. They ruled that it doesn't matter if birth control actually causes abortions; it only matters if business owners sincerely believe that birth control causes abortions. They ruled that it's okay for a corporate person to discriminate against a female semi-person and dictate that she not spend her compensation on stuff that might possibly be enabling sex without consequences, if they believe that God thinks they should. Female semi-persons who work for these company-persons can simply obtain their birth control directly through the government, say the five men of the Supreme Court, the same way female employees of religious-based nonprofits are supposed to (religious-based nonprofits, by the way, have mounted challenges to signing a piece of paper indicating that they object to birth control, because that objection would indirectly sanction their whoreployees' birth control by admitting that they weren't getting it through work. So we've got that legal clusterfuck to look forward to, now).

The five men of the Supreme Court made pains to specify that this only applies to bosses who specifically object to women who want to use a portion of their compensation to obtain a pharmaceutical that will help them not get pregnant. But the actual women of the Supreme Court â€" each of whom joined in dissenting from the majority Five Man Opinion â€" see things differently.

In a dissent I'm bound by SCOTUS commentary tradition to call "blistering," Ruth Bader Ginsburg said that the decision "of startling breadth" that could unleash "havoc" on American society (in fact, Mother Jones surmises that 90% of all American businesses fit the criteria to be classified as "closely-held corporations," so, gird your loins, ladies. Literally). She wrote that for-profit companies, unlike nonprofits, don't exist to further an agenda beyond money making and therefore cannot be said to have religious beliefs, and points out that one of the forms of birth control objected to by the fact-ignoring folks at Conestoga Wood and Hobby Lobby is the IUD, which, if purchased and installed without the help of insurance, would cost about as much as a woman earning minimum wage would make in a month. "The court, I fear, has ventured into a minefield," she wrote.

The Supreme Court ruled in favor of Hobby Lobby (and its all-female legal team) today, I suspect, because there simply aren't enough women in positions of power to counter the latest attack on contraception from the right. There aren't enough people in government â€" or on the Court â€" who know personally what it feels like to be a low-income woman who does not want to become pregnant.

None of the five men behind the majority ruling have have ever suffered from endometriosis, painful periods, dangerous pregnancies, or simply risked becoming pregnant at a time that they weren't mentally, fiscally, or physically prepared for a pregnancy. They bought Hobby Lobby's "RELIGIOUS LIBERTY!" argument despite the fact that Hobby Lobby doesn't personally object to covering vasectomies for men; their religion only applies slut panic to women. The Court won't classify Hobby Lobby's woman-only scientifically illiterate objections to contraception as "discrimination" against women. But it would be discrimination if Hobby Lobby's religious objections applied to black people or gay people. Are you following? Me neither.

Who would have guessed five schlubby law nerds would be capable of such a stunning display of mental gymnastics?

For years, it seems that the men who run things in this country have been dancing around the implication that women aren't people, at least when put up against other, more important things like men, corporations, zygotes, and male feelings. But now, finally, in the year 2014, two generations removed from the first Supreme Court case that established that states can't make it illegal to purchase contraception, five dudes on the highest court in the land have put this in writing. It's not that women don't matter, it's that they matter measurably less than a corporation's "conscience."

But everything isn't bleak doom and gloom. Not yet, at least. Women are lucky that they have Justices Beyer, Sotomayor, Kagan, and Bader Ginsburg in their corner (NEVER DIE, RUTH BADER GINSBURG!). Some pundits are speculating that this legal clusterfuck serves to further justify permanently decoupling health care coverage with employment at some point down the road. Others are hopeful that this case, the judicial abortion that I sincerely believe that it is, will galvanize women (and men) who don't like their bosses all up in their shit to actually vote this November.

Your boss can't stop you from doing that.

Read More

The Unraveling Of An American Life

“You’re my husband. I’m supposed to just let go?”

Madina Salaty

whose husband is being deported

LAWRENCE, KAN.â€"Each ordinary moment now seemed worthy of preservation, so Madina Salaty, 45, turned on her cellphone camera and hit record.

“Four days left,” she said, her voice and the video both shaky as her husband leashed the dog and headed toward their front door. He walked past the framed picture of their wedding in 2011, past the University of Kansas flag on their porch, past the perennials they had planted together in the garden. He led the dog onto the wide sidewalks and manicured lawns of downtown Lawrence, where the lampposts were painted red, white and blue.

“We are going on a walk,” Salaty said, narrating the video, focusing the camera on her husband, Zunu Zunaid, 37. He turned back to her and smiled.

“Hi, baby,” she said.

For the past five months, she had been documenting the gradual unravelling of their lives, in moments both mundane and monumental: the first visit to their home by immigration officers, the delivery of Zunaid’s deportation orders, his final trips to eat American ice cream and watch American basketball.

Now only four days remained before he would be sent off to Bangladesh, a deportation that would upend not just one life but two. Zunaid would be forcibly separated from the United States after 20 years; his wife, an American citizen, would be forcibly separated from her husband.

Related stories at thestar.com:

It is the latter of those separations that has increasingly become the focus of attempts to overhaul the country’s immigration policies, since more than 100,000 American citizens lose a spouse or parent to deportation each year.

President Barack Obama has asked the Department of Homeland Security to review the “humanity” of its deportation procedures. At a time when nearly 25 per cent of undocumented immigrants have children or spouses who are citizens, the government now faces a choice between two priorities: Deport undocumented immigrants who have broken the law? Or protect the citizens those immigrants so often provide for?

“When you’re gone, I will look at this video and pretend I’m on a walk with you,” Salaty said now, still filming, as they turned onto a cobblestone street. “We’re going to miss you.”

“Try to be strong, baby,” Zunaid said.

“I am trying,” she said.

Zunaid came to Kansas on a student visa in 1994 to study petroleum engineering and stayed illegally for more than 15 years after his visa expired. He had been making an annual salary of nearly $60,000 as the manager of a Best Buy when he was pulled over for a DUI in 2009, which began his slow procession toward deportation.

Now he was relearning Bengali, scheduling immunizations against common Third World diseases and searching for a place to live with relatives in Dhaka, many of whom he hadn’t spoken to for decades.

What he worried about most was his wife, a preschool teacher. She had been diagnosed with acute insomnia and situational anxiety, and she kept a book on her nightstand called Full Catastrophe Living. She was seeing a therapist and had started taking an anti-anxiety medication and an antidepressant, neither of which had halted the anxiety rashes spreading across her hands and arms.

Salaty had started documenting their last months together at the suggestion of the therapist, after Zunaid’s deportation became all but certain during the last days of 2013. “Immigration Nightmare,” she had titled a new journal, because even though she had seen nothing of Bangladesh beyond the photos of rickshaws and textile factories in their coffee-table book, this deportation felt at least half hers.

She had met Zunaid late one night at her favourite bar in Lawrence. He was tall and handsome and called everybody “buddy.” She was talkative and emphasized her points by touching his shoulder. He told her he was undocumented and facing deportation, but she said that didn’t matter. “We can deal with it,” she told him, and she surprised him at their wedding by arriving in a sari with henna tattoos. She helped him quit smoking; he volunteered to do yardwork for her 71-year-old mother. They were just beginning to research adoption when he learned his final appeal had been denied.

She tried explaining Zunaid’s case to five lawyers, spending $10,000 on legal fees, only to learn there was nothing left to do. A 1996 change to immigration law had made it so that marriage to a U.S. citizen no longer cancelled out many kinds of immigration violations. She tried talking with her congresswoman, meeting immigration activists and working with a lobbying group called American Families United.

When none of that worked, she started approaching strangers at the grocery store to enlist their help, telling them not only her story but about all of the families with children who had it so much worse. She asked so many people to email their politicians that Zunaid finally pleaded with her to stop.

“Let these people live their lives,” he told her, with two days left. “You will drive yourself crazy. I need you to be OK or we will both come apart.”

“You’re my husband,” she said. “I’m supposed to just let go?”

She had thought about moving to Bangladesh with Zunaid, but what about the fact that she was a born-and-raised Kansan who spoke no Bengali, with an aging mother nearby, a sister, nieces, a job that she loved and a house with her name on the deed? A few friends had suggested that Zunaid could go into hiding, but how long would that last? He already had been given a 10-year ban before he would be allowed to re-enter the United States, and Salaty had hired a lawyer to file waivers and appeals in an effort to bring him back much sooner.

“There are no guarantees,” the lawyer had told them before correcting himself: If Zunaid failed to show up for his scheduled deportation flight, the lawyer said, he was certain to be banned for life.

Zunaid preferred to think of his deportation not in the terms of radical change but instead as a compilation of logistics, a to-do list on the refrigerator. “Pack.” “Research international cellphone.” “Set up Skype.”

It was only when his mind wandered beyond the list into his uncertain future that a wave of nausea began to rise from his stomach to his throat. Dhaka. Tomorrow. How many people lived there now, anyway? Five million? Fifteen? Could he get an Internet connection at home so he could communicate with his wife? Who would hire a recent deportee with no local knowledge and rusty Bengali? Would his family accept him back after 20 years away?

Twenty-eight people had taken him to the airport when he left Dhaka for the United States, a goodbye celebration befitting an only son who had aced his math placement tests and earned a chance at a college degree. But during Zunaid’s junior year, his father ran out of money and stopped making tuition payments, and Zunaid dropped out of school and started working at Best Buy. He stopped calling home and drank hard on the weekends. When his father died, he didn’t find out until a few months later, via email.

Now he was going back to Bangladesh with no degree and less than $2,000 in cash, leaving the rest with Salaty. Deported from one country and a disappointment in another â€" that was how he sometimes felt. “What is happening with you?” his mother had asked, but the answer was complicated, and he no longer possessed the energy or the Bengali to give it.

“I cancelled the car insurance today,” he told Salaty, going once more through the checklist in his head.

“I deposited my last paycheque,” he said. “You should have enough to pay the mortgage for at least three months.”

“The tomatoes are planted and good to go,” he said. “The gutters are cleaned. Your Skype is set up.”

The only item remaining on his list was to buy presents for relatives, so they drove to Best Buy to use his employee discount. “Do these things even work over there?” Zunaid wondered, picking out a Bluetooth headset for his uncle. “Will they understand this?” he said, choosing a DVD for the nieces and nephews he had yet to meet. He put the items into a bag and brought the bag home, stuffing it into his suitcase. His flight was scheduled to leave in 10 hours.

“Well, I guess I’m ready,” he said.

He awoke at 3 a.m., and she awoke at 4. He rolled back into the pillow and tried to quiet his thoughts. She turned on her phone and her mind started spinning. She logged into her support group, took an anxiety pill, emailed a lawyer, put on makeup, considered a second anxiety pill and checked her congresswoman’s daily schedule. “Do you think I could somehow talk to her today?” she asked Zunaid as they walked to the car for their trip to the airport.

“I think you should try to slow down,” he told her before they got in. “Maybe I should drive.”

He said goodbye to the dog, and she took out her camera to record a video. He loaded his suitcase into the trunk, and she recorded it. He stopped at McDonald’s for coffee, and she recorded that, too. “This is actually happening,” she said, and for the next 35 minutes she continued to narrate.

“We need another Rosa Parks-type figure for immigration,” she said as Zunaid reached over for her hand and squeezed it.

They parked at the airport, and he brought his luggage to the counter, 20 years divided into three suitcases.

He checked in for his flight, and Salaty paced the terminal. She took a picture of his gate and rechecked his flight time on the airport monitor. An hour left. Thirty minutes. Twenty. “It’s time,” he said, finally, and she took out her camera to film again.

“Look at me,” he told her, and so she put the camera down. For a moment there was nothing to do and no one to see other than her husband, leaning down to rest his forehead against hers. She grabbed the strap of his backpack, holding on.

“We will be OK,” he told her. “I want you to say it.”

“We will be OK,” she repeated.

“We will be OK,” he said, slower this time.

“We will be OK,” she said.

She waved to him as he walked through security, watching until he turned a corner and disappeared from her view. She stood for a few moments longer, not sure what to do, until eventually a text message arrived on her phone.

By then he was on the plane, in a seat near the back. He pressed his head against the window as the plane gained altitude, picking out the places that were familiar to him: a park, a soccer stadium, the river, some big-box stores, the cornfields outside Kansas City. “Twenty years,” he said as the plane continued to climb.

He would go first to Washington, then to Dubai and finally into Dhaka, where his mother had said she would be waiting. “I hope she recognizes me,” he said.

Read More

Can Path Come Back From The Dead?

In 2012, Dave Morin was a tech industry celebrity.

His start-up firm, Path, was nearing the top of the iTunes App Store charts. Britney Spears and other A-listers occasionally stopped by his company’s San Francisco office in a black-glassed business tower in the city’s South of Market neighborhood.

Outside the office, Mr. Morin, a slim 33-year-old who often wears a peacoat, even indoors, was spending his weekends skiing with his buddy and staunch Path evangelist, the actor and part-time tech investor Ashton Kutcher. And Mr. Morin, a former Facebook executive, was profiled in Fortune magazine.

The attention helped Path close a $30 million round of financing from some of Silicon Valley’s biggest venture firms and a few business titans, like Richard Branson. To date, the company has raised an estimated $77 million.

But once Ms. Spears left the building, the hard work of building a company began. And that’s where Mr. Morin still is â€" trying to build on that early promise. And it’s a promise that has changed many times over.

Path was originally supposed to be a site for sharing photos shot on a mobile device, a lot like Instagram. And then it was supposed to be an “all-in-one mobile journal.” (I’m still trying to understand what that description means.) Now Path is trying for the latest buzz concept â€" so-called ephemeral messaging, mobile messages that quickly disappear, as they do on Snapchat or Facebook’s new Slingshot service.

“We’ve tried a lot of things in this personal messaging realm; we’ve made a lot of mistakes,” Mr. Morin said in an interview in his office last week. “But we’ve done stuff right, too.” Path was a pioneer in early mobile app design, creating a beautiful user interface for smartphones long before Facebook and others.

In recent months, the company has been so low on the iTunes App charts that it isn’t even listed in the United States listings on AppAnnie, an app ranking site. Mr. Kutcher and Ms. Spears haven’t shared links from Path on Twitter in almost a year. And that start-up buzziness is gone from the SoMa offices.

It’s easy to pick on Path because of all that earlier attention and because it hasn’t turned into the next Twitter or Facebook, or for that matter, the next Instagram or Snapchat.

And it is easier still to mock Mr. Morin because he had a habit of playing the full-of-himself tech executive stereotype: He once told Vanity Fair that to ensure that he never found himself with an uncharged phone, he had two, “One for day and one for the night. When the day phone runs out, the night phone takes over.”

But credit him with persistence and grit. If, perhaps, not originality.

In its latest pivot (one of those overused tech industry buzzwords), Path acquired a start-up called TalkTo, which lets people send a text message to a store or restaurant. TalkTo is beloved by its users, so this could lead â€" maybe â€" to another Path transition, focusing more on consumer-to-business relationships rather than human ones.

“That fusion of information and commerce is where we’re most excited,” Mr. Morin said about the company’s next stage.

From the outside, it may seem that everyone who comes to San Francisco and Silicon Valley finds giant nuggets of gold. But the reality is most people aren’t going to make it. No matter how hard they try. No matter how many people they know. No matter how great their idea is.

Shikhar Ghosh, a senior lecturer at Harvard Business School, reported in a 2012 study that of venture-backed start-ups from 2004 to 2010, roughly 75 percent failed. Of the 25 percent that did succeed, only a smidgen succeeded at an enormous scale. Other recent studies about venture money estimate that as many as 90 percent of tech start-ups fail.

“I think the rate of success is probably identical from 20 years ago as it is today,” said Narendra Rocherolle, an entrepreneur who has built and sold several start-ups over the last 20 years. “It might seem like people hit it big more frequently, but that’s simply not the case.”

Mr. Rocherolle noted that every few years a company like Facebook, eBay or Twitter comes along and strikes gold. Then, he said, there are 20 or 30 smaller start-ups that get acquired by those companies. The rest, including the competitors, wither away.

Over the last few years, I have visited Path’s offices a half-dozen times.

Three years ago, Mr. Morin took me to a conference room in the back of the office to show me the company’s latest app. I remember looking at a large white wall in the room, seeing notes scribbled in marker that said things like “Growth” and “Sharing.” Charts were visible that slashed upward and showed the path Mr. Morin would take to the top of the tech world.

Last week, in the same conference room, in the same office, tens of millions of dollars â€" and a few layoffs â€" later, Mr. Morin explained to me the latest reinvention of the company, which now has 45 employees.

When I glanced over to the white wall, there were no charts pointing upward. Instead, there was a single word written in blue marker with a sharp underline: “Ephemeral.”

For most start-ups, that’s exactly right.

Read More

100 Years Later, Paper Admits It Blew Coverage Of Outbreak Of WWI

Archduke Franz Ferdinand and his pregnant wife Sophie moments before they were assassinated in Sarajevo on 28 June 1914. Photograph: Popperfoto

"It is not to be supposed," wrote a correspondent for the Manchester Guardian analysing the significance of the assassination 100 years ago on Saturday, "that the death of the Archduke Francis Ferdinand will have any immediate or salient effect on the politics of Europe."

Thirty-seven days later, Britain declared war on Germany and Europe was plunged into a worldwide conflict in which more than 16 million people died in four years.

But it is hardly surprising that the Guardian did not predict the unimaginable horror to come. The newspaper's editorial of 29 June 1914, the day after the assassination, dwelt on the archduke's personality and on the narrow implications it might have for the internal politics of the Austro-Hungarian empire.

"What its motives may have been we do not know, nor do they greatly matter," it advised its readers. "It is a difficult and at present an ungracious task to speculate on what influence the crime of yesterday may have on Austrian politics."

The archduke, the editorial noted, was "a great gardener", adding that "in England, under other conditions of life, he would have been an ideal country squire". Franz Ferdinand was described as "a simple and amiable man, but very passionate and, in anger, uncalculable".

The Manchester Guardian, then edited by the legendary CP Scott, was far from alone in playing down the significance of the death of the archduke, shot by the young radical Bosnian Serb, Gavrilo Princip, in Sarajevo. The Sleepwalkers, historian Christopher Clark's seminal work on how Europe went to war in 1914, reflects the mixture of complacency and rhetoric Europe indulged in.

Gavrilo Princip, the Bosnian-Serb nationalist who assassinated archduke. Photograph: Charlie Riedel/AP

But the Guardian did devote the bulk of its main news page, illustrated by a small map and family tree of the Austrian royal house, to the shooting.

Reports from correspondents of the news agency Reuters in Sarajevo and Vienna detailed the circumstances surrounding the assassination and described an earlier attempt shortly before Princip fired the shots that killed the archduke and his wife.

The assassins were "almost lynched by the infuriated crowds … many people wept", Reuters reported.

The next day, 30 June 1914, a Guardian headline read "World's Sympathy with Aged Emperor". The paper noted that the archduke and his wife had recently visited London and, his uncle, emperor Franz Joseph, held the title of a British field marshal.

The article added: "Comments on the crime, all expressing friendly feelings for the Emperor, are made by all the European papers, most of them, as is natural while the shock is still fresh, attaching an over-importance to the political consequences."

Though the newspaper's first analysis â€" headlined What the Murders May Mean â€" played down the "immediate or salient" effect on European politics, it did warn of the dangers of increased hostility between Austria and Serbia. It also warned of "the more serious danger of a Russian attack" on Austria in defence of its Slavic ally.

The Guardian opposed British intervention right up to the declaration of war. "We care as little for Belgrade as Belgrade for Manchester," it told its readers on 30 July. On 1 August, CP Scott argued that intervention would "violate dozens of promises made to our own people, promises to seek peace, to protect the poor, to husband the resources of the country, to promote peaceful progress".

Four days later, after Britain declared war on Germany, the Guardian said: "All controversy therefore is now at an end. Our front is united."

But, the newspaper added: "A little more knowledge, a little more time on this side, more patience, and a sounder political principle on the other side would have saved us from the greatest calamity that anyone living has known.

"It will be a war in which we risk almost everything of which we are proud, and in which we stand to gain nothing."

Read More

Astro-Matic Baseball

The meeting drew to a close at 11:40 a.m. “All right, it’s a good group,” Luhnow said to his 39-man brain trust. “Flip a coin now, or later?”

“If we take one of the high school pitchers, we have to be really [convinced] that this guy is the guy, and that’s not real easy to settle on,” Elias said later. “Especially when you’ve got other good options.” The Astros’ decision engine had one more day to make its choice.

The Astros anticipated backlash against the rebuilding effort they planned to conduct with a purity that to their knowledge had never before been attempted. They have received it. It came most fiercely at the end of last season, after they had traded away the last of their mature assets in closer Jose Veras, outfielder Justin Maxwell and starter Bud Norris. They finished out the season with a 15-game losing streak. Their record, 51â€"111, tied for the majors’ worst in a decade.

Before the season they’d hired a manager they felt was the right man to guide their players through such a stretch. Bo Porter understands the necessity of losing, or at least he professes to. “We had to go through that,” says Porter, who is 41. “The biggest mistake organizations can make is the misevaluation of their own players. Had we not gone through what we went through last year, we wouldn’t be where we’re at today, because we’d still be trying to figure out who can we move forward with, who do we need to cut ties with. ”

Even though Luhnow intellectually understands why his Astros must lose, he maintains that doesn’t make it any easier. “The hardest part for me is when people think we don’t care,” he says. “We desperately care. Would I prefer to be able to do this with losing 70 games a year instead of 100? No question about it. Do I think it’s possible? I really don’t.”

As for concerns about the payroll, “we feel we’re going to have the resources we need to add the appropriate players to complement what we have to win when we need to win,” Luhnow says.

Though Luhnow understands why his Astros must lose, he maintains that doesn’t make it any easier. “The hardest part for me is when people think we don’t care,” he says. “We desperately care.”

Other criticisms have surfaced more recently. In an article published in the Houston Chronicle on May 25â€"the day, as it turned out, the Astros began a seven-game winning streakâ€"beat writer Evan Drellich detailed the ways in which, as the headline read, radical ways paint astros as ‘outcast.’ “They are definitely the outcast of major league baseball right now, and it’s kind of frustrating for everyone else to have to watch it,” Norris, who was traded to the Orioles last July 31, told Drellich. “When you talk to agents, when you talk to other players and you talk amongst the league, yeah, there’s going to be some opinions about it, and they’re not always pretty.”

The criticisms fell into two categories. The first was that the Astros’ analytics-based approach dehumanizes players. “It was a difficult thing for me to read, because I spend so much time personally getting to know our players, and so does our staff,” says Luhnow. “There is a perception that anybody who is doing analytics in a serious way is doing that at the expense of the human element. It’s just not true, in our case.”

Adds Mejdal, “We realize these are human beings, not widgets. As far as assigning a number to a personâ€"well, I assume you get a salary? Do you feel dehumanized because your boss has put a number on you?”

The Astros’ leadership bristles at the notion that it thinks it knows how to operate better than anyone else. All it knows is what it believes to represent best long-term practices, based on the information it has acquired and processed.

The other criticism stemmed from the Astros’ use of new competitive tactics, such as a heavy reliance on extreme defensive shifts. The club’s proprietary databaseâ€"christened Ground Control by Elias’s wife, Alexandraâ€"contains not just projections of the future value of every player but also spray charts for every hitter on every count against every type of pitch thrown by every type of pitcher, as well as the probabilistically optimal way to position defenders in each scenario. This sometimes leads to shifts in which, say, the Astros’ second baseman plays well to the left of second base against a pull-happy righthanded hitterâ€"a violation of traditional baseball norms, though one that’s becoming more common across the game.

Mejdal puts the Astros’ tactics into perspective. “A year ago, with the defensive positioning that was going on, we were in the top half dozen, and there was tremendous pushback,” he says. “Well, the rate at which we shifted last year, that would be below average in the major leagues now. Innovation, by definition, suggests change will be taking place. If there’s change taking place, it’s not likely going to feel right at first. If it felt right, it would have been done a long time ago.”

The Astros’ leadership bristles at the notion that it thinks it knows how to operate better than anyone else. All it knows is what it believes to represent best long-term practices, based on the information it has acquired and processed. “We’re far from perfect,” Mejdal says. Even what they believe to be optimal decisions often don’t work out. Sometimes a righthanded pull hitter goes the other way. Sometimes players they discard, or decline to draft, turn into stars. “Sometimes you hit on a 16,” Mejdal says, “and if you stayed, you would have won.”

As 6 P.M. Central approached on the evening of Thursday, June 5, the majority of the Astros’ scouting and analytics staff milled around the club’s draft room. The metal walls were covered with magnets, each bearing the name of an amateur player. The staffers were waiting, like the rest of the baseball world, to see who the team’s leadership would pick one-one. The day before they had dressed in khakis and oxford shirts, but now they wore suits and ties. If there was any need to remind them of the caliber of player they hoped to draft, there was the dinner they had just been served: Nolan Ryan Beef Brisket and Nolan Ryan Jalapeño Sausages.

Finally, at 6:05, Elias emerged from Luhnow’s office, where he had been huddling with the GM, Stearns and Mejdal. He nonchalantly slapped the magnet bearing their pick’s name at the top of the draft board. Minutes later commissioner Bud Selig announced the pick from the MLB Network studios in Secaucus, N.J. On the fuzzy big-screen TV mounted at the front of the room the Astros’ scouts watched as the player, whose reaction the network’s cameras were covering live from his home, buried his face in his hands.

Read More

America’s Floating Prisons

The U.S. Navy has taken on a curious new counterterrorism role.

The USS San Antonio (James DeAngio/U.S. Navy)

Right now, a suspected terrorist is sitting in the bowels of a U.S. Navy warship somewhere between the Mediterranean Sea and Washington, D.C. Ahmed Abu Khattala, the alleged leader of the September 2012 attack on the U.S. embassy in Benghazi, Libya, is imprisoned aboard the USS New York, likely in a bare cell normally reserved for U.S. military personnel facing disciplinary action at sea. En route to the United States for more than a week, he’s being questioned by military and civilian interrogators looking for critical bits of intelligence before he’s read his Miranda rights, formally arrested, and transferred to the U.S. District Court in Washington, where he’ll face trial. Meanwhile, the sailors aboard are going about the daily business of operating an amphibious transport shipâ€"even as the ship’s mission has been redefined by the new passenger in their midst.

This isn’t the first time the Navy has played such a critical, curious, and largely under-reported role in U.S. counterterrorism efforts. In 2011, Ahmed Abdulkadir Warsame, a military commander for the Somali terrorist group al-Shabab, was captured aboard a fishing boat in the Gulf of Aden and detained by the Navy, on the high seas, for two months. In 2013, Abu Anas al-Libi, the alleged mastermind of the 1998 terrorist attacks on American embassies in Kenya and Tanzania, was held aboard the USS San Antonioâ€"an identical ship to the one being used this week.  Both men were interrogated at sea before being flown to the United States to face criminal charges in federal courts. Warsame eventually pleaded guilty to nine counts, including providing material support to al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula and teaching other terrorists how to make explosives. Al-Libi pleaded not guilty to terrorism-related charges, and his case is ongoing.

In many ways, it’s not surprising that the U.S. government has been turning Navy assets into floating prisons for these dangerous men. Taking the slow route back to the United States offers interrogators the time and space to gather crucial intelligence from high-value sources like al-Qaeda-linked operatives. During the two months that Warsame was at sea, a select team of FBI, CIA, and Defense Department officials, part of the Obama administration’s High-Value Detainee Interrogation Group, questioned the Somali terrorist on “all but a daily basis.” He was cooperative throughout and some reports suggest that subsequent U.S. counterterrorism operations, including a drone attack in Somalia shortly after his capture, were a direct result of intelligence Warsame provided to authorities. While al-Libi was only detained at sea for about a weekâ€"a chronic medical condition prevented him from being held on a ship for an extended periodâ€"reports suggest that similar intelligence-collection efforts were underway in his case as well.

The U.S. government has also embraced the approach because it has limited options for holding and interrogating men like Abu Khattala after capture. The Obama administration remains committed to ending detention operations at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba. While the facility is still home to almost 150 alleged terrorists, the United States has not sent any new detainees there since March 2008. Detaining suspected terrorists at other overseas facilities is likewise not an option. For a time, U.S.-run prisons in Afghanistan were a possibility. But the detention facility in Parwan is now an Afghan-run prison, and using facilities in other countries would raise a host of legal, operational, and humanitarian concerns. Even if U.S. officials were willing to forgo the opportunity to question Abu Khattala before he’s arraigned in federal court and provided with a lawyer, flying alleged terrorists to the United States immediately presents its own set of problems. Seemingly small operational and political considerations about the ways in which the United States transports terrorists captured abroad have major strategic implications, particularly given lingering questions about U.S. rendition efforts under the Bush administration. In this context, the Navy has taken on the role of high-seas prison warden, even as lawyers continue to debate whether and what international legal rules apply to terrorists captured abroad and detained, temporarily, on a ship.

Two years ago, I stood on another U.S. warship as it pulled into the Arabian Sea, similarly tasked with holding dangerous men no one else wanted to hold. The brig below had just been cleared of approximately a dozen alleged pirates who, like Warsame, al-Libi, and Abu Khattala, had yet to stand trial. They had been captured a few weeks earlier, in the midst of attacking a cargo ship, but it was still unclear who couldâ€"and wouldâ€"prosecute them. In the interim, the Navy had imprisoned them in the carrier’s brigâ€"a barren room with a dozen bunk beds and matching small lockers, its gray walls devoid of any marks indicating where on the ship they were located. Like the guards at Guantánamo, the ship’s burly master-at-arms removed his name tag while the pirates were on board so that they couldn’t identify him. He told me that his men weren’t quite sure what to feed the pirates, or what to give them to read to pass time during their weeks in custody at sea. At least, he noted, the detainees seemed to like getting fresh air on the ship’s flight deckâ€"and the cigarettes and candy bars his sailors provided when the pirates followed the rules. Even more curious was the impact holding these dangerous men had on the carrier as a whole. As one former Navy officer explained to me, “We ended up driving [our] ships up and down the coasts, to keep them [in international waters]. . . . Our operations were driven by having to hold onto these knuckleheads.”

Somali pirates are usually let go if no country is willing and able to prosecute them. In these situations, the Navy has no choice but to put them in life jackets and shuttle them close to the coast on small boats, where they are set free and wade to shore. The alleged orchestrator of the Benghazi attack, on the other hand, will soon face trial in a U.S. federal court. Until then, the USS New York steams west from the Mediterranean. Abu Khattala undergoes questioning. And a Navy sailor wonders what to make a Libyan terrorist for dinner.

Read More

The Worst Party In Asia

KOH PHANGAN, Thailandâ€"

“HELLOOO, FULL MOON PARTY!” the touts holler.

Welcome to Koh Phangan… I guess. The host of tuk-tuk drivers and solicitors who await the tourist ferry-load arriving every hour make no mention of the actual island. It’s all about the party. Or rather, parties. Every night.

The next greeting is a giant billboard that warns, “MARIJUANA AND MAGIC MUSHROOMS ARE ILLEGAL IN THAILAND.” Bottom-right is a photograph intended to terrify anyone fresh off the boat: a white-haired foreigner, eyes blacked out, seated before a bunch of cops. Oddly, one policeman flashes a sinister grin.

Minutes later, our minivan filled with backpackers bounces down the 10-kilometer road toward Haad Rin, where the party happens. Most passengers are carrying coffin-sized luggage and look weary. Where’s a copy of the Daily Mail with the latest about some dead Brit? These kids surely need to be warned.

A sign greeting tourists fresh off the boat warns against drug use. Photo by Robert Foyle Hunwick.

Koh Phangan’s Full Moon Party long ago lost its original innocence, devolving into a mess of drunken foreigners cramming onto a once-beautiful beach to celebrate nothing more than the party itself. But in recent years, things have gotten much worse. There have been rapes, fatal accidents, suicides, and gang-related murders. “In the nine months I lived there, one guy I admired hung himself, while another died drunk-driving his motorbike,” a former expat told me. Meanwhile, the local environment has been decimated. In fact, one’s first taste of the island pleasures that await can be found in the water itself, which glistens with oil and plastic.

Yet most visitors are blasé about it. “If you’re a girl walking down the beach, you get this all the time,” a British voice in the minivan drawls to her Danish companion, making a firm, pinching motion. “My friend gets drunk and throws up… then she’s fine again,” another brays cheerfully.

It’s nearly 3 o’clock in the afternoon, hours before action time, where I might find, as a disgusted Mail reported, “naked couples bobbing up and down in the water,” a “sordid scene… lit by a beautiful, white full moon,” “a sign saying ‘F*** me,’ ” and “[h]ard drugs.”

This, supposedly, is the best party in Asia.

On an island where nothing much happened for hundreds of years, the culture soon celebrated any excuse for a bacchanal

It wasn’t always like this. The origins of the Full Moon Party on Koh Phangan, which is about 90 percent dense jungle with some gorgeous beaches, are unclear. “The Full-Moon Party started in 1987 or 1988, nobody really knows,” the island’s official guidebook unhelpfully notes, and almost everyone on Koh Phangan has an equally vague explanation for why 30,000 people converge here every month.

The myth is that a farewell party for a dozen tourists somehow mutated into a phenomenon that’s now the island’s virtual raison d’être. The facts are less tidy, but more interesting. They reach back to the end of the Cold War, where on a remote island, flower-power idealists with Indian monikers muttered about Shiva over some bongos. The waves then were said to sparkle with phosphorescence under a blue moonlight. (Thirty years later, phosphorescence sells for a buck a bottle and no one cares about Vishnu.)

Electricity hadn’t arrived when the Berlin Wall fell in 1989. Instead, on idyllic Koh Samui, just 13 kilometers from Koh Phangan, the waxing moon brought respite from the ferocious packs of feral dogs and knife-toting muggers who otherwise roamed the darkness. According to Colin Hinshelwood, a Scot who attended the original gatherings, the arrival of power changed everything. For Samui’s foreign collective, electricity was more colonialist expansionism. They looked across the Thai Gulf to a dark, unknown bay where people could continue living unfettered by capitalism: Haad Rin.

Back then, there was “[n]ot much alcohol at all; certainly no buckets,” Hinshelwood writes. Instead, hed kee kwaiâ€"buffalo-dung mushroomsâ€"were chewed around the bonfire and nights ended with naked dancing and free love. Soon, Swedish organizers were selling acid to the new arrivals and it was just a few more months before “a gang of Phangan locals chased them off the beach with machetes, after stealing their drugs, of course.”

Later came Ecstasy and electro, Lonely Planet, and what friends back in England called gap-year “wow-yeahs”â€"Trustafarian types who couldn’t stop muttering about “the experience.” Around Haad Rin, though, local fishermen were experiencing getting strong-armed off their land by mafia-backed mainlanders with a nose for exploitation. On an island where nothing much happened for hundreds of years, the culture soon absorbed nearly everything and everyone, celebrating any excuse for a bacchanalâ€"Half Moon Party, Jungle Party, Midnight Party, Waterfall Party, Boat Party, Solstice Party. The economy, meanwhile has become hopelessly corrupt, urging visitors to join the celebration immediately as they dock.

Read More

Inside George W. Bush’s Closet

“It was a slap in the face.” Steven Levine is remembering that day in 2006 when President George W. Bush took the stage in a small-town school gym in Indiana. It was October 28, right before the midterm elections, and Levine was a 22-year-old White House advance aide. He’d been camped out in Sellersburg all week, working to get the details just right for Bush’s campaign rally. The flags hung just so, the big presidential seal on the podium. Then Bush started talking, his standard stump speech about taxes and supporting the troops. But a new applause line took Levine by surprise. “Just this week in New Jersey,” the president said, “another activist court issued a ruling that raises doubt about the institution of marriage. We believe that marriage is the union between a man and a woman, and should be defended. I will continue to appoint judges who strictly interpret the law and not legislate from the bench.”

The crowd loved it. Levine was crushed.

He was gay and working for a Republican and convinced it was possible to be both at the same time.

Like dozens of other gay colleagues in the Bush White House, many of them closeted, Levine had been sure that Bush himself was personally tolerant even if the GOP was notâ€"and uncomfortable with gay-bashing as a way to win elections. But this was a rebuff, and it was hard not to take it personally: “To be working extraordinarily hard with all of your energy, working through many nights for somebody that you believe in, and to hear that person that you work so hard for come out against something that you are.”

Levine knew, of course, that Bush had officially backed the Federal Marriage Amendment, a proposed amendment to the Constitution to define marriage as solely between a man and a woman. But this was also the president who had made combating AIDS in Africa a personal cause (later, at Levine’s urging, he would even decorate the White House North Portico with a giant red ribbon to mark World AIDS Day), who had met with previously ostracized gay Republican leaders and whose hard-line conservative vice president had an openly gay daughter. And besides, opposing gay marriage just “wasn’t a centerpiece of the campaign to date,” Levine recalled when we talked recently. “So it wasn’t something that I was expecting to have been sort of his rallying cry at that event.”

Afterward, Levine made what small protest he could, telling his bosses he refused to work advance for future campaign events. Back in Washington, Levine says, “I told the folks in the [White House] advance office that I couldn’t do that anymore. … I told them why. These are my friends.”

“That was sort of my quiet way of objecting,” Levine recalls.

***

Levine stayed with Bush right upuntil the president hopped into the armored presidential limo for the ride to Barack Obama’s inauguration 27 months later. As the taillights disappeared down Pennsylvania Avenue, Levine left town. A few months later, one of his gay friends who had also worked in the White House sat down in front of Facebook and counted the Bush White House staffers he knew to be gay. He came up with at least 70 (only two of them women).

That numberâ€"and after speaking with two dozen sources I have no doubt it was an incomplete tallyâ€"has surprised almost everyone I’ve told. Alberto Gonzales, the former Bush White House counsel and attorney general, for example, says he never knew dozens of gays had served on the White House staff. “I don’t think I could identify more than one or two,” he told me. “It was just something that we didn’t talk about.”

Scott Evertz was Bush’s openly gay AIDS czar. He told me he was entirely unaware he had company. “I, of courseâ€"just by the law of statisticsâ€"knew that there were other gay people in the White House,” he says. “But not a single one of them was out to me, so I felt completely alone.”

The broader political environment was, to say the least, hostile. When Evertz’s appointment was announced in 2001, the religious right was furious. On the fringe, Evertz recalls the late Fred Phelpsâ€"later known for offending everyone by picketing the funerals of American soldiers killed in Afghanistan and Iraqâ€"calling for protesters to burn the flag of Wisconsin, where Evertz had been living, and publishing nasty posters on his church’s website referring to Evertz as “Bush’s butt buddy.” Once Evertz was ensconced in the Office of National AIDS Policy, he remembers, “People would come to my office, and they’d make appointments. And their sole purpose was to pray for me in my office.”

Evertz says Bush’s political guru, Karl Rove, for a time would only give him clearance for public appearances if he promised not to be billed as the first openly gay appointee in a Republican administration. With the politics swirling, Israel Hernandez, a deputy assistant to the president, came into Evertz’s office and gave him a hug. Evertz was sure Rove had sent him as a nice gesture. It was only much later that Evertz learned Hernandez, who had been with Bush since serving as his driver and personal aide in the early 1990s, was gay. The hug had been a quiet statement of support from a member of the White House’s gay underground.

“Did we have a lot of people in the closet in the administration?” says one former senior official in the Bush White House whose office included at least three gay staffers. “I used to say we had an entire warehouse.”

In recent months, I’ve reported extensively on life in the closet of the Bush White House, and a number of his former aides are quoted on the record in this story for the first time about their experiences as gay Republicans in an administration that was perhaps the last of the era when institutionalized discrimination against gays and lesbians was still legal, if increasingly frowned upon. Their accounts offer a time-capsule view of a Republican Partyâ€"and a presidentâ€"at war with itself over an issue on which public opinion and the law have now changed dramatically. At the time, it seemed to be great politics for Bush: Coming out against gay marriage, as Rove bragged in his 2010 book, Courage and Consequence: My Life as a Conservative in the Fight, “benefited my candidate” and “helped reelect him” in 2004. But since a Supreme Court decision last year, 19 states and the District of Columbia have legalized gay marriage, just the outcome that Bush and his team fought to prevent, and a clear majority of Americansâ€"a record high of 55 percent this yearâ€"now tell pollsters they support this right.

Timothy J. Burger, a former reporter for Bloomberg, Time and other publications, is a consultant in Washington, D.C. Follow him @BurgerInfo.

Read More

How The Disney Animated Film 'Frozen' Took Over The World

June 25, 2014

Posted by Maria Konnikova

Earlier this month, BabyCentre, one of the largest Web sites that track baby names globally, released its mid-year report on the top hundred names of 2014 in the U.K. Usually, the popularity of names stays roughly the same from one year to the next. But, this year, a name jumped two hundred and forty-three slots, into eighty-eighth place: Elsa. As in Elsa from a recent Disney film you may or may not have heard of, “Frozen.”

Since its release, “Frozen” has earned $1.2 billion worldwide, becoming the fifth-highest-grossing film of all time and by far the highest-grossing animation. That’s not to mention two Academy Awards, a BAFTA, a Golden Globe, a soundtrack that’s garnered more than a million album sales and seven million Spotify streams, official YouTube video views in the hundreds of millions, and a DVD that became Amazon’s best-selling children’s film of all time based on advance orders alone.

The film’s success transcends the commercial realm. It’s on the streets in the guise of little girls (and boys) belting at the top of their lungs. (The wait time recently at Disney World to meet Elsa: five hours.) “Frozen” birthday parties, high-school boys leading “Let It Go” choruses, college students arranging movie nights. Adults, too, have been hit hardâ€"many of them without children of their own to spur them on. “Frozen” has a Twitter hashtag that spans all age groupsâ€"#TheColdNeverBotheredMeAnywayâ€"and fan videos that include adolescents and adults along with toddlers and teenyboppers. Jennifer Lee, one of the film’s directors, has documented “Let It Go” interpretations that touch on autism, cancer, and divorce. Even people who haven’t seen the film feel its constant presence. “I haven’t seen it but I know all the songs,” Molly Webster, a producer at Radiolab, told me. How? “There isn’t a single time I’ve walked down the street in N.Y.C. the last two months and some kid isn’t singing it.”

Why? What is it about this movie that has so captured the culture?

Predicting a film’s success is a fraught business. In 1983, Barry Litman, an economist at Michigan State who spent his career examining how different aspects of media contributed to success, posited that a movie’s performance was determined by three factors: its content, its scheduling, and its marketing. When he analyzed a hundred and twenty-five films released between 1972 and 1978, he found that actual movie typeâ€"like drama versus comedy or animated versus liveâ€"mattered far less than the story itself. High-quality storiesâ€"as determined by things like the reputation of the screenwriter and director coupled with timeliness, theme (as determined by film-guide descriptions), and critical ratingsâ€"trumped things like star power and name recognition. It was good if a certain degree of familiarity, the result of an adaptation, say, was thrown in for good measure. Release date was important, too, but secondary. The only timing that really mattered was whether a picture was released before Christmas. As for marketing, it wasn’t so much a film’s own advertising as less formal word of mouth that did the trick. Critical ratings and awards mattered, but not nearly as much as one would expect. Instead, it was the “buzz” leading up to a release that made a difference. In the end, though, Litman concluded, the findings were complicated: these factors could largely tell a dog from a general success, but they couldn’t predict the true runaway sensations. For a number of years, Litman’s research remained the most prominent empirical model of film success, summarized in his 1998 book, “The Motion Picture Mega-Industry.” But, as more nuanced metrics have become available, film scholars have begun to take a second look at the variables that may signal a hit movie.

In 2009, Dean Simonton, a psychologist at the University of California at Davis and a co-editor of the 2014 book “The Social Science of Cinema,” conducted a substantial reëxamination of the field, including Litman’s work, and found that, while Litman’s broad points held true, the formula got very messy very quickly. Sometimes awards and ratings mattered; sometimes they didn’t. Sometimes timing was key; sometimes it meant nothing. But a few things continued to stand out: story and social influence. The most important figure in determining ultimate creative success, Simonton found, was the writer. “We can learn a great deal about what makes a successful film just by focusing on the quality of the screenplay,” he declared. Still, as he’d found earlier, quality did not always translate to quantity: even the best screenplay could be a box-office dud. And the thing that could potentially be even more, or at least equally, predictive wasn’t easy to quantify: so-called information cascades (basically, a snowball effect) that result from word-of-mouth dynamics.

So what does all of this mean for “Frozen”? On the one hand, the movie shares many typical story elements with other Disney films. There are the parents dead within the first ten minutes (a must, it seems, in Disney productions), royalty galore, the quest to meet your one true love, the comic-relief character (Olaf the Snowman) to punctuate the drama. Even the strong female lead isn’t completely newâ€"think “Mulan” and “Brave.” But “Frozen,” it seems, has something more.

George Bizer, a psychologist at Union College, first became interested in the “Frozen” phenomenon when his seven-year-old daughter requested that they watch it. Normally, a parent shouldn’t be surprised when a young girl wants to watch a Disney-princess movie. But for Bizer’s daughter, the request was highly out of character. “My daughter is a princess-hating daughter,” he told me. “She has made us warn everybody in prior years that she didn’t want anything with princesses on it for her birthday. And if she got a princess, she would get angry. Really angry.” Why, then, would she want to go see a movie where not one but two princesses reigned? “ ‘It’s O.K., Daddy,’ she said. ‘These are strong princesses. I’m going to like it a lot,’ ” Bizer recalled. And she did.

That was enough to pique Bizer’s curiosity, and when he started seeing “Frozen” fans cropping up around the college campus, he realized that there was a potentially more powerful force at work. Union students, after all, weren’t your typical Disney-loving fans. Together with his fellow Union psychologist Erika Wells, Bizer decided to test possible theories on every psychologist’s favorite population: college students. They organized an evening of “Frozen” funâ€"screening and movie-themed dinnerâ€"and called it “The Psychology of Frozen.” There, they listened to the students’ reactions and tried to gauge why they found the film so appealing.

While responses were predictably varied, one theme seemed to resonate: everyone could identify with Elsa. She wasn’t your typical princess. She wasn’t your typical Disney character. Born with magical powers that she couldn’t quite control, she meant well but caused harm, both on a personal scale (hurting her sister, repeatedly) and a global one (cursing her kingdom, by mistake). She was flawedâ€"actually flawed, in a way that resulted in real mistakes and real consequences. Everyone could interpret her in a unique way and find that the arc of her story applied directly to them. For some, it was about emotional repression; for others, about gender and identity; for others still, about broader social acceptance and depression. “The character identification is the driving force,” says Wells, whose own research focusses on perception and the visual appeal of film. “It’s why people tend to identify with that medium alwaysâ€"it allows them to be put in those roles and experiment through that.” She recalls the sheer diversity of the students who joined the discussion: a mixture, split evenly between genders, of representatives of the L.G.B.T. community, artists, scientists. “Here they were, all so different, and they were talking about how it represents them, not ideally but realistically,” she told me.

Another strong point of appeal: the story keeps the audience engaged because it subverts expected tropes and stereotypes, over and over. “It’s the furthest thing from a typical princess movie,” Wells says. “The handsome prince is evil. The person with the magical powers is good. It spins Disney on its head.” It also, unlike prior Disney films, aces the Bechdel Test: not only are both leads female, but they certainly talk about things other than men. It is the women, in fact, not the men, who save the day, repeatedlyâ€"and a selfless act of sacrifice rather than a “kiss of true love” that ends up winning. “Frozen” is, in other words, the strong, relatable, and nuanced story that Litman and Simonton identified.

To James C. Kaufman, a psychologist at the Neag School of Education at the University of Connecticut and Simonton’s co-editor on “The Social Science of Cinema,” it isn’t surprising that an atypical, boundary-pushing film about princesses would succeed. In 2012, he and Simonton conducted a study of two hundred and twenty family films released between 1996 and 2009, to see whether successful children’s movies had certain identifying characteristics. They found that films that dealt with nuanced and complex themes did better than those that played it safe, as measured both by ratings on metacritic.com, rottentomatoes.com, and IMDb and by over-all financial performance. What works for children’s films is more or less the same as what works for adult ones. “A good story, issues to think about and wrestle with,” Kaufman told me. “I think the best kids’ movies have enough adult elements in them to hold on to both. I don’t know if you can extrapolate from kids to adults, but you can certainly extrapolate from adults to kids.”

Still, story is only part of the picture. Plenty of nuanced, relatable, boundary-pushing films don’t do as well as “Frozen” hasâ€"and in their 2012 review, Simonton and Kaufman were able to explain only twenty to twenty-four per cent of variance in critical success and twenty-five in domestic gross earnings.

The other element, of course, is that intangible that Litman calls “buzz” and Simonson calls “information cascades,” the word of mouth that makes people embrace the story, want to pass it on, and persuade others that they actually want to see it. It’s the force that made Bizer’s daughter identify the fact that she would love “Frozen” even though she hadn’t yet seen it, because she knew in advance it would have the other kind of princessâ€"the one who wasn’t at all princess-like.

Part of the credit goes to Disney’s strategy. In their initial marketing campaign, they made an effort to point out the story’s uniqueness. “Disney worked very hard to make it appeal to everybody,” Bizer says, from the trailers to the posters to the title of the film itself. They released the movie in Novemberâ€"the time that fits into Litman’s optimal release timing. And their lawyers allowed the music to spread naturally through social media. “The fact that Disney didn’t crack down on the millions of YouTube tributes, the fact that it’s been played everywhere, feeds back into the phenomenon,” Kaufman says.

And part of the credit goes to Jennifer Lee’s team, for the choices they consciously made to make the screenplay as complex as it was. Elsa was once evil; Elsa and Anna weren’t originally sisters; the prince wasn’t a sociopath. Their decisions to forego a true villainâ€"something no Disney film had successfully doneâ€"and to make the story one driven by sibling love rather than romantic infatuation have made “Frozen” more than simply nuanced and relatable. They’ve made it more universally acceptable.

Disney has had a history of being accused of one form of social slight or another, with criticisms including racism, overly stereotypical gender roles and the princessification of society, and gruesome and unnecessarily psychologically disturbing content. In contrast to other recent Disney films, like “Tangled,” “Frozen” isn’t politically fraught or controversial: you can say it’s good without fear of being accused of being a racist or an apologist or an animal-rights opponent. It’s pre-approved for admiration by adults, not just children. Part of the movie’s success, then, may have just as much to do with parents as with kids. Kids aren’t just liking it more; parents are taking their kids to see it more.

And even if you aren’t a “Frozen” convert, it may not matter for the film’s ultimate success once that word-of-mouth tide begins. Wenjing Duan, a professor at George Washington University who studies Internet marketing and online user-generated content, has found that, in the online world, awareness itself, not positive or negative slant, is the key issue. The greater the volume of postings and reviews, even if the views are nastyâ€"and “Frozen” hasn’t been immune from those eitherâ€"the greater the awareness of the movie all around and the higher the box-office returns.

We should be cautious, though, about over-interpreting anything. I can explain “Frozen” all I want, but that doesn’t mean I’ll have found a formula for reproducing its success. “I think that the things that work for ‘Frozen’ are the things that aren’t as easily copied,” Kaufman says. “I think you’ll see in the next few years films picking up the wrong elements. And if you see movies with strong female characters, great. But what’s at the heart of ‘Frozen’ are the relationships, the very adult emotions that you can’t easily knock off. ‘Frozen’ got Tony Award-winning songwriters, Tony-level singers. But that’s just a shortcut, not the whole story.”

When I ask Simonton for his take on the “Frozen” phenomenon, he brought up what he calls the “sixty-four-thousand-dollar question.” “It’s one thing to predict critical acclaim, movie awards, and box office,” he says. “Quite another when a children’s film like Frozen goes viral. If anybody knew, they’d have a great job at Pixar or Disney.” Or, to echo the words of the screenwriting legend William Goldman, “Nobody knows anything.” In the end, it may just be a bit of magic.

When it comes to naming trends, though, here’s one prediction you can be confident about: a lot of babies are going to be named Elsa throughout the year.

Read More

How Often Men Think About Sex

It's a stat that gets bounced around as e-mail-forward wisdom: men think about sex every seven seconds. Even when the idea lacks this mythical specificity and grandiosity (that's 7,200 times a day!), the idea that men think about sex basically all the time is widespread. And so, it is possible to attach all kinds of bogus statistics to the feeling that men are sex-crazed pigs. 

But the actual number of times that men think about sex in a day is not clear-cut in scientific research. There is no perfect technology that taps into one's sexy brain waves.

What researchers really do is come up with clever ways of asking people what they're thinking about. They call it "experience sampling." So, in a recent study, Ohio State University researchers gave people a clicker and were asked to hit one of three buttons on itâ€"sex, food, sleepâ€"every time the thought of one of those things came to mind. Their study showed that the average man had 19 thoughts about sex in a day. 

But the design of the study could have influenced the frequency count, writes cognitive scientist Tom Stafford in a new column. If you tell people to try to notice every time they think about something, you might very well increase the frequency of their thoughts about that thing. (Researchers call this the "white bear problem.")

Other researchersâ€"who use different sampling methodsâ€"get different results. So, a phone-based survey that asked participants more free-form questions seven times a day found that men think about sex less than they think about "food, sleep, personal hygiene, social contact, time off, and (until about 5 p.m.) coffee." 

If you put these two studies together, as Stafford does, it's obvious that the technique influences, if not outright dominates, the phenomenon being studied. 

And yet the experience sampling method has gotten more popular, in part because everyone has a little computer in their hands all the time, which makes surveying much, much, much easier. "Smartphones are an ideal platform for conducting Experience Sampling Method (ESM) based studies," a recent review of sampling techniques found.

But it's difficult to judge a person's thoughts, no matter what technology people use. The lead researcher in the Ohio State study, Terri Fisher, provided a self-critique of her study, which applies to many of them. 

"We weren't able to study how long the thoughts lasted or the nature of the thoughts. We also don't know if all of our participants followed the instructions and really clicked every time they had the sort of thought that they were supposed to track," Fisher wrote. "However, even if they didn't, the fact that they were supposed to be clicking probably made them more aware of their thoughts about their assigned topic than they might otherwise have been, and that would have been reflected in their daily reports."

The perfect technology would directly measure one's brain activity and somehow translate that into the number of sexual thoughts one had, but even that might prove very difficult. What we call "a thought" is not the discrete thing that we like to pretend. "There’s also the tricky issue that thoughts have no natural unit of measurement," Stafford writes. "Thoughts aren’t like distances we can measure in centimetres, metres and kilometres. So what constitutes a thought, anyway? How big does it need to be to count? Have you had none, one or many while reading this?"

Perhaps the more interesting question is why we want to quantify this kind of thing at all. Does it matter if men think of sexâ€"however definedâ€"12 times a day, or 19, or 7, or 400? 

These numbers reduce a whole set of arguments about the relative sexualities and norms of men and women, detaching the feelings from the lived experience of people.

That may be useful rhetoric for proving that men are pigs or women should be chaste or whatever, but the data says more about the limitations of our survey technologies than the nature of human sexuality. 

Read More