Editors of The Nation, may we have a quick word?
You see, we enjoy sleeping at night. But sometimes we come across an image so disturbing, so utterly wrong, that sleep becomes impossible; we toss and turn all night, unable to shake the vile visual running through our heads. Do not click on this link, dear reader, lest you too become a victim.
As for those editors — please, people, for the sake of a nation’s mental health, never run such a cover ever again.
And if you won’t do it for us, then please, do it for the children.
As for the story itself: The thesis is that Al Gore’s new cable channel, Current, isn’t going to be particularly revolutionary. “What emerges on August 1, Current’s launch date, could resemble an interactive grad-school version of MTV,” writes Ari Berman. “Current may still improve youth television and usher in a wave of new technology, but it isn’t likely to change the media, or the world.” Perhaps, but the piece feels a bit early — Current still doesn’t really exist in any recognizable form, so Berman’s piece is ultimately mostly speculation about what’s to come. And not-terribly-assured speculation at that. Here’s the conclusion:
Maybe, in this age of corporate consolidation, launching a viable, independent media company is itself an act of political resistance. Yet one can’t help getting the sense that Gore and Hyatt, by buying a network, lining up bigwig investors, hiring industry professionals and courting advertisers and cable operators, ended up doing new media in a decidedly old-fashioned way. Instead of transforming the media, the media business may have transformed them.
Now we’re getting scared again. Or at least confused: Former Veep Gore, who went to St. Albans and Harvard and whose daddy was a senator, has been transformed from revolutionary lefty firebrand who refuses to play by the rules into a straight-laced, old-fashioned, advertiser-courting capitalist? By starting a cable channel?
Moving on: In The Atlantic, Stephen Budiansky brings word (subscription required) that, according to a legendary but oft-ignored 1943 report on interrogation, the best way to get information out of a prisoner is … to be nice to him. “[I]t is hard to imagine a historical lesson that would constitute a more direct reproach to recent U.S. policies on prisoner interrogation,” writes Budiansky. “And there is no doubt that [Sherwood] Moran’s report owes more than a little of its recent celebrity to the widespread disdain among experienced military interrogators for what took place at Abu Ghraib and Guantnamo when ill-trained personnel were ordered to ‘soften up’ prisoners. Since the prison scandals broke, many old hands in the business have pointed out that abusing prisoners is not simply illegal and immoral; it is also remarkably ineffective.”
So what works? According to Moran, knowing the culture and language of a captive, and treating him or her like a human being. Strong-arm tactics don’t work, most often because they help convince the captive to harden his resolve and reveal nothing. Instead, one should make the interrogation something more akin to a social chat; ask about wounds, for example, and make the prisoner homesick by talking about his culture. Eventually, he gives up “small and seemingly inconsequential bits of evidence … about training, weapons, commanders, tactics — that, when assembled into a larger mosaic, build up the most complete and valuable picture of the enemy’s organization, intentions, and methods.”
Finally, The American Conservative‘s Steve Sailer takes on economist Steven Levitt’s provocative claim that there’s a correlation between legal abortions and decreased crime. Levitt looked at the numbers and concluded that “In the early 1990s, just as the first cohort of children born after Roe v. Wade was hitting its late teen years — the years during which young men enter their criminal prime — the rate of crime began to fall. What this cohort was missing, of course, were the children who stood the greatest chance of becoming criminals” in the first place. But Sailer concludes something radically different: “[T]he first cohort to survive legalized abortion went on the worst youth murder spree in American history.” A far clearer explanation for the ups and downs of the murder rate, says Sailer, is the rise and fall of crack cocaine. There’s a lot of numbers behind this debate, so if you’re interested in sorting it all out, grab a copy of Levitt’s book Freakonomics, give Sailer’s piece a good read, and maybe brush up on your regression analysis while you’re at it. It’s gonna be one hell of a Friday night.
–Brian Montopoli
Brian Montopoli is a writer at CJR Daily.