Daylight Savings Time Explained

by Bill Hayes

Since we are back on it, you might be interested in a short video explaining Daylight Savings Time.

Power Delusions: U.S., Russia Face Off Over Ukraine

by Bill Hayes

In Power Delusions: U.S., Russia Face Off Over Ukraine for Bloomberg Businessweek’s cover story, Romesh Ratnesar argues that “Russia’s aggression in Ukraine is a test of American influence — and a reminder of its limits.”

Putin calculates that NATO has no appetite for a war to restore Ukrainian sovereignty over Crimea, a region of 2 million that is home to Russia’s Black Sea Fleet. Charles Kupchan, a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, said in a March 3 conference call that “the Russians have established effective military and political control over the Crimean peninsula … and I don’t think anybody believes it’s of significant enough interest to introduce NATO or American forces.”

Even if it faces no direct military response, Russia may still pay a heavy price for its aggression. Putin’s chief vulnerability is the $2 trillion Russian economy, which decelerated for a fourth straight year in 2013, growing at just 1.3 percent. “There’s nothing more powerful than what the markets can do to punish Russia,” says Kuchins of the Center for Strategic and International Studies. Since the start of the year, the ruble has fallen 9 percent against the dollar, the most among 24 emerging-market currencies tracked by Bloomberg, after Argentina’s peso. Stock market declines are hitting some of the most powerful players in Putin’s petrostate: Longtime Kremlin ally Gennady Timchenko and his partner Leonid Mikhelson lost a combined $3.2 billion of their wealth after their gas producer Novatek Oao (NVTK:RM) tumbled 18 percent following the incursion into Crimea. [more]

The Manhunt for Christopher Dorner

by Bill Hayes

The Los Angeles Times has an in-depth and nicely illustrated piece on The Manhunt for Christopher Dorner, “the disgraced ex-LAPD officer [who] swore revenge on those he blamed for his firing. He vowed to kill them all … and their families.”

Lincoln’s secretaries

by David De La Torre

In Both the president’s men, The Economist reviews Lincoln’s Boys: John Hay, John Nicolay, and the War for Lincoln’s Image by Joshua Zeitz.

A new account, by Joshua Zeitz, focuses on Lincoln’s two secretaries, who had an insider’s view of a momentous presidency. John George Nicolay and John Hay shared a bedroom at the White House and served as Lincoln’s gatekeepers and letter-writers. The president called them “The Boys”. They called him, privately and devotedly, “The Tycoon” and “The Ancient”. [more]

Capote’s Swan Dive

by Bill Hayes

In Capote’s Swan Dive, Vanity Fair details how Truman Capote’s life spiraled out of control after he began publishing pieces from Answered Prayers, the novel he never finished that exposed New York high society, which he was a part of.

‘Have you seen Esquire?! Call me as soon as you’re finished,” New York society doyenne Babe Paley asked her friend Slim Keith over the telephone when the November 1975 issue hit the stands. Keith, then living at the Pierre hotel, sent the maid downstairs for a copy. “I read it, and I was absolutely horrified,” she later confided to the writer George Plimpton. “The story about the sheets, the story about Ann Woodward … There was no question in anybody’s mind who it was.”

The story they were reading in Esquire was “La Côte Basque 1965,” but it wasn’t so much a story as an atomic bomb that Truman Capote built all by himself in his U.N. Plaza apartment and at his beach house in Sagaponack, Long Island. It was the first installment of Answered Prayers, the novel that Truman believed would be his masterpiece.

He had boasted to his friend Marella Agnelli, wife of Gianni Agnelli, chairman of the board at Fiat, that Answered Prayers was “going to do to America what Proust did to France.” He couldn’t stop talking about his planned roman à clef. He told People magazine that he was constructing his book like a gun: “There’s the handle, the trigger, the barrel, and, finally, the bullet. And when that bullet is fired from the gun, it’s going to come out with a speed and power like you’ve never seen — wham!”

But he had unwittingly turned the gun on himself: exposing the secrets of Manhattan’s rich and powerful was nothing short of social suicide.

He had been a literary darling since the age of 23, when his first novel, Other Voices, Other Rooms, was published. Seventeen years later, in 1965, In Cold Blood, his extraordinary “nonfiction novel” about the brutal murder of the Clutters, a Kansas farm family, brought him international fame, sudden wealth, and literary accolades beyond anything he’d experienced before.

But trying to write Answered Prayers, and its eventual fallout, destroyed him. By 1984, after several unsuccessful stays at dry-out centers such as Hazelden and Smithers, Capote seemed to have given up not only on the book but on life. Abandoned by most of his society friends, locked in a brutal, self-destructive relationship with a middle-aged, married, former bank manager from Long Island, Truman was worn out. Or heartbroken.

After “La Côte Basque 1965,” only two more of its chapters were published, both in Esquire: “Unspoiled Monsters” (May 1976) and “Kate McCloud” (December 1976). (“Mojave,” which had appeared in Esquire in June 1975, was initially intended to be part of Answered Prayers, but Truman changed his mind about its inclusion.) [more]

Saving Kenya’s Elephants With Drones

by Bill Hayes

In Saving Kenya’s Elephants With Drones, Bloomberg Businessweek reports on technological fixes to conservation in Kenya.

The country has only 2,800 park rangers, so [Kenyan conservationist Marc] Goss and others are turning to Google Earth and drone aircraft to track and protect the elephants. “Drones are basically the future of conservation,” says James Hardy, the manager of the Mara North Conservancy, a 74,000-acre private wilderness tract where Goss heads the Mara Elephant Project. “A drone can do what 50 rangers can do.” [more]

Finance and the Good Society

by Bill Hayes

Economics professor Robert J. Shiller in Finance and the Good Society argues that the financial industry (and even government) should create better financial instruments.

From the New York Times Book Review:

Newfangled mortgages have earned a bad name, but Shiller would like to make them even more complex. The standard home loan obliges the borrower to pay back a fixed amount, and obstinately ignores the truth that if the economy or real estate market tanks, the borrower won’t do so. Far better, Shiller says, to equip mortgages with “preplanned workouts,” so that the amount to be paid back automatically declines if the economy collapses. Preplanned workouts would avoid the absurdity of a family buying a $300,000 home, defaulting on its $275,000 mortgage when the home’s value falls to $250,000 and eventually buying an equivalent home at the new price and with a smaller mortgage. Vast amounts of transaction costs, uncertainty and suffering could have been prevented if the mortgage had been reduced pre-emptively and the family had stayed in its original home. Indeed, Shiller goes so far as to suggest that flexible mortgages might have averted the 2007-9 crisis.

The same sort of innovation might also work for government finance. [more]

End the White House Press Briefing!

by Bill Hayes

In End the White House Press Briefing! for the New Republic, Reid Cherlin argues that daily briefing serves no useful purpose.

It is an accepted fact in Washington that the Obama administration and the press corps that covers it — once considered essentially two units of the same team — are now bitter enemies. After four years of smoldering disenchantment, reporters have seized on the government’s rapacious subpoenas of media records and L’Affaire Snowden as the excuse they needed to break into open rebellion. A primary arena for the skirmishing is the daily White House press briefing, where the ritual evasions by the administration’s mouthpiece, long a staple of the undertaking, are now received by his questioners with a contempt rivaling that of the Bush years. National Journal’s Ron Fournier, a D.C. eminence and former Associated Press (AP) chief White House correspondent, recently proposed a kind of retaliatory collective action: “If WH journos boycotted briefings for week,” he tweeted, “would 1) readers/viewers miss news? 2) the WH get the message?” As someone who spent two years in the White House press office helping the press secretary prepare for these exercises in silliness, I humbly submit that a boycott would fall short of what’s needed. The daily briefing has become a worthless chore for reporters, an embarrassing nuisance to administration staff, and a source of added friction between the two camps. It’s time to do the humane, obvious thing and get rid of it altogether. [more]

Cagle Cartoons: Putin

by Bill Hayes

See Cagle’s collection of editorial cartoons on Russian Leader Vladimir Putin.

For how to use editorial cartoons in the classroom, see Teaching With Editorial Cartoons.

Infographic of the Day: Twenty-Five Ways to Stay Creative

Explore more infographics like this one on the web’s largest information design community – Visually.

 

The Reincarnation Machine

by Bill Hayes

In The Reincarnation Machine for Foreign Affairs magazine, Adam Minter looks at what happens to junked American cars.

Over the course of several days, I visit a handful of major steel mills in the Bangkok area. They are flush with scrap, much of it imported. At GJ Steel, one of Thailand’s biggest steel companies, a manager tells me that they have 120,000 tons of steel just lying on the ground. Then, after a beat, he asks me:

“Is that a lot?”

It is, I assure him. That’s equivalent to the weight of a very large oil tanker, or perhaps 15 percent of the total American steel scrap exported to Thailand that year. We are in the mill, watching as a stream of imported shredded scrap as wide as a creek flows into one of the largest furnaces in Asia. That furnace looks like a science fiction nightmare: a flying saucer covered in dust and piping and shooting sparks. The heat is unbearable — we can’t draw too close — and I’m led instead into a control room where a group of technicians is looking at a monitor that displays the precise recipe for the steel that they’ll be making over the next few minutes.

• • 20 ton — PIG IRON (an iron ore product used in steelmaking)
• • 30 ton — HMS MIX (iron and steel scrap)
• • 20 ton — BUNDLE NO. 1 (steel sheets in a bundle)
• • 60 ton — BUSHELING (free, clean steel scrap)
• • 60 ton — SHREDDED IMP (IMP, as in imported)

Why imported? Because Americans and Europeans don’t use their metal goods — like cars — long enough to let them rust, they generally produce higher-quality scrap metal, including shredded metal, that melts better than local scrap. But even if Thai shredded scrap were equal in quality to American shredded scrap, there simply isn’t enough of it in the market to fully supply all of the steel mills rushing to meet these boom times. [more]

Online publications see a future in print

by Bill Hayes

In Online publications see a future in print, the Los Angeles Times reports that a number of online publications are creating print versions.

Alongside idealistic and aesthetic motivations, there also may be shrewd business logic in some cases. Samir Husni, director of the Magazine Innovation Center at the University of Mississippi, says he’s seeing “more and more” online-only sites coming to print, but he believes it’s for financial reasons, not nostalgia.

“It’s not that people love print,” Husni says, it’s that “they discover that there’s still a lot of money to be made in print while they’re searching for where money can be made online.”

Husni believes that’s because print is the only place ads aren’t ignored: “Online and in apps and on the digital frontier, we’ve all discovered ways to skip the ad. But in print… People buy the magazines as much for the ads as for the content.” [more]

Companies and the state

by David De La Torre

In A world of robber barons, part of its special report on companies and the state, The Economist looks at the increasingly hostile relationship between companies and many governments.

Perhaps the trickiest relationship at present is between governments and the technology industry. Some consumers are uneasy about the large amount of digital data being hoovered up and want governments to regulate the way that businesses use and maintain these data. The governments’ security services, for their part, want to have access to such information whenever they feel the need. Recent revelations about the extent of government monitoring of e-mails and phone calls have pushed this issue into the headlines and created a dilemma for tech companies. Do they stand up for their customers and risk being accused of compromising security, or do they give in to governments and risk alienating their customers?

Another set of complications arises from social benefits for citizens provided jointly by companies and governments. [more]

The Next Ailes: Newsmax’s Chris Ruddy Preps TV Rival to Fox News

by Bill Hayes

In The Next Ailes: Newsmax’s Chris Ruddy Preps TV Rival to Fox News, a feature story, Bloomberg Businessweek profiles the CEO and founder of Newsmax.

Christopher Ruddy, 49, the chief executive officer and founder of conservative media company Newsmax Media, is giving a tour of his neighborhood in an Acura driven by his chauffeur, Hector. The car heads south on I-95 from West Palm Beach to Boca Raton. It’s the heart of Florida’s Red Belt. Ann Coulter lives a few blocks away — Ruddy spent New Year’s Eve there. Rush Limbaugh is just across the bridge. Donald Trump, David Koch, Patty Mellon Scaife, and a host of other Republican power brokers have homes across the lagoon in Palm Beach. To live among such conservative heavyweights is one reason Ruddy settled in West Palm Beach; the other is that Florida has no state income tax. The headquarters of Newsmax is here, too, off Okeechobee Boulevard; virtually every Republican presidential candidate makes an obligatory visit.

Newsmax, which had revenue of $104 million in 2013, up from $85 million the year before, is perhaps best known for its namesake, 200,000-circulation monthly magazine. A conservative reimagining of the traditional newsweekly, Newsmax publishes political stories such as “President Obama’s Outrageous Power Grab” and ads for gold coins and hearing aids. For conservative politicians, making a Newsmax cover is an important stamp of validation. Newsmax.com, launched in 1998, before the magazine, is the most trafficked conservative site on the Web, with more than 11.5 million visitors in January, according to ComScore (SCOR). On a recent morning, the featured posts on the home page were “Obama Intel Reforms Threaten US Security,” “GOP Poised to Retake Senate as Disillusioned Democrats Depart,” and “Bomb-Strapped Islamists Threaten ‘Present’ at Olympics.” Ruddy has amassed a 5 million-person e-mail list, one reason Republican presidential candidates stop in to see him.

What’s remarkable about Ruddy’s prominence in the Republican media establishment is that he isn’t even a Republican, and Newsmax isn’t a conventional media company. Ruddy has taken Newsmax’s boomer audience, average age 54.7, and figured out how to sell it far more than political news. Newsmax, the corporation, is a smorgasbord of political, health, and financial information, self-help books, and even vitamin supplements constantly pushed through the website and e-mail lists. This eclectic array of products — the company made $46 million in subscription revenue from its 17 newsletters and $6 million from vitamin supplements in 2013 — makes Newsmax less of a news business and more of a strange hybrid of the Heritage Foundation and Amway. [more]

Don’t Look for a God Cameo

by Bill Hayes

In Don’t Look for a God Cameo, New York magazine reviews the new version of Cosmos on TV hosted by Neil deGrasse Tyson.

Tyson leads us through a primer on space and time that doubles as an advertisement for the scientific method. The narration is filled with what sound like digs at the “Science is kind of faith, too!” crowd. A tour of our solar system describes Venus’s brutally stormy atmosphere as the by-product of a “runaway greenhouse effect.” The opening voice-over sums up Cosmos as the story of “how a band of hunter-gatherers found their way to the stars,” moving from Galileo’s championing of heliocentrism to manned moon voyages in a matter of centuries. “Moses was born seven seconds ago,” Tyson narrates, as the show glides over moving pictograms representing the major faiths. “Buddha, six seconds ago. Jesus, five seconds ago. Muhammad, three seconds ago … and it was only in the very last second of the cosmic calendar that we began to use science to reveal nature’s secrets and her laws.” Every few minutes there’s a pointed reminder that while religion is great at uniting communities around shared values and expressing emotional truths, it’s of zero use in determining the age of the planet. [more]