The Atlantic Home Thursday, March 31, 2011 	 Go 	 Follow the Atlantic » Twitter Facebook RSS iPhone      * Politics       Presented by       Budget Deal Close?       Budget Deal Close?       Dan Friedman and Humberto Sanchez       Clinton Peaks in Polling as Obama Sinks       Clinton Peaks in Polling as Obama Sinks       Garance Franke-Ruta       U.S. Presidents on Opening Day       U.S. Presidents on Opening Day       Michael Catalini     * Business       Presented by       U.S. Economy Gained Steam in February       U.S. Economy Gained Steam in February       Daniel Indiviglio       The Elusive Inventory of Your Projects       The Elusive Inventory of Your Projects       David Allen       One Person Who Won't Replace Warren Buffett       One Person Who Won't Replace Warren Buffett       Megan McArdle     * Culture       Presented By       Why Baseball Makes For Bad Television       Why Baseball Makes For Bad Television       Hampton Stevens       'Mad Men' Downsizing: Who Should Be Fired?       'Mad Men' Downsizing: Who Should Be Fired?       Kevin Fallon       The Future of Reading (Hint: It's Not All Bad)       The Future of Reading (Hint: It's Not All Bad)       Heather Horn     * International       Presented By       Oil Wealth Threatens to Return Sudan to Violence       Oil Wealth Threatens to Return Sudan to Violence       MG Zimeta       Is Obama Trying to Scare Qaddafi Out of Libya?       Is Obama Trying to Scare Qaddafi Out of Libya?       Max Fisher       Airstrikes Aren't Enough for Libya's Rebels       Airstrikes Aren't Enough for Libya's Rebels       Clare Morgana Gillis     * Technology       Presented By       The Electricity Needed for Orbiting Telescopes       The Electricity Needed for Orbiting Telescopes       Alexis Madrigal       The Largest Photo Ever Taken Indoors       The Largest Photo Ever Taken Indoors       Nicholas Jackson       How Solar Energy Could Reshape the West       How Solar Energy Could Reshape the West       Jon Christensen     * National       Presented By       How Cynicism Prevents Talk of Virtue       How Cynicism Prevents Talk of Virtue       Kentaro Toyama       A Growing Anti-College Backlash?       A Growing Anti-College Backlash?       Professor X       When the Court Fears Too Much Justice       When the Court Fears Too Much Justice       Wendy Kaminer     * Life       Presented By       Penguin's New Hand-Sewn Covers       Penguin's New Hand-Sewn Covers       Rebecca Greenfield       An Intro to Roasting Your Own Coffee       An Intro to Roasting Your Own Coffee       Giorgio Milos       Walmart's Push to Sell Food to 'Liberals'       Walmart's Push to Sell Food to 'Liberals'       Marion Nestle     * Magazine       Presented by       Learning to Love the Media       Learning to Love the Media       James Fallows       North Korea's Digital Underground       North Korea's Digital Underground       Robert S. Boynton       Sympathy for Tiger Moms       Sympathy for Tiger Moms       Sandra Tsing Loh     * video       Presented By       Nikki Haley and the Women of the New GOP       Nikki Haley and the Women of the New GOP       Jennie Rothenberg Gritz       How Tennis Strings Became a Game Changer       How Tennis Strings Became a Game Changer       Jennie Rothenberg Gritz       James Parker on the Circus of SportsCenter       James Parker on the Circus of SportsCenter       Jennie Rothenberg Gritz  Thursday, March 31, 2011 "A Better Candidate" 31 Mar 2011 08:45 pm  107959059  Gabby Giffords, who is still recovering, is being talked about as a potential Senate candidate. Balko is uneasy:      I of course wish Giffords the best. And if, after making a full recovery, she then wants to run for higher office, more power to her. And for all I know, she may make a darned fine senator.      But that isn’t what’s going on here. Giffords has become an immensely more attractive Senate candidate because she got shot in the head. And, frankly, because she’s still recovering. These whispers actually started weeks ago, before it was even clear that she’d be able to talk again. Try to think of another profession where something like that would immediately make you more qualified for a promotion, before your colleagues even knew what sort of recovery was even possible.  (Photo: An autographed portrait of Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords at a makeshift memorial outside the hospital in Tucson, Arizona where she is in critical condition on January 10, 2011. By Shaun Tandon/AFP/Getty Images)  Permalink :: Share This "Right There Is Crack" 31 Mar 2011 08:15 pm  TNC discovers King Lear. As of next week, we will no longer be colleagues. But I will always be a reader.  Permalink :: Share This Fear The Beard 31 Mar 2011 08:13 pm  Sorry. I just couldn't resist:  Permalink :: Share This Focused On The Now 31 Mar 2011 08:06 pm  Freddie DeBoer makes a shrewd point:      Our news cycle moves fast, our attention span is short, and nobody cares about yesterday's news. I think anyone can imagine a situation where the rebels defeat Qaddafi and a new government is put into place, and the western world congratulates itself on a job well done, as Obama's approval ratings soar. Liberal hawks and neocons get even more entrenched in their views and self-satisfied. Meanwhile, Libyans will continue to wrestle with the consequences for decades to come.      And the results could be all kinds of bloody and terrible-- perhaps we might even call it humanitarian disaster. With Iraq, we were temporarily forced to deal with the long-term consequences because we were occupying the country. Now, even though we still have 50,000 troops there, our attention has gone elsewhere-- while the constant violence and near total political breakdown continues.      This is a very frightening turn for democracy, when long-term human consequences of our actions are so divided from long-term political consequences.  Read On  Permalink :: Share This Why Aren't Lady Superheroes Ripped? 31 Mar 2011 07:37 pm  Shani O. Hilton's theory:      My suspicion is that live-action women superheroes aren’t buff because in order to be traditionally sexy and feminine, they just can’t be. A Wonder Woman with powerful muscles would be intimidating to fanboys, not attractive.  Permalink :: Share This Eating Dirt, Ctd 31 Mar 2011 07:17 pm  A reader writes:      Craving dirt or rocks (or sometimes chewing on ice) is a sign of iron deficiency.  The reason it's a sign of pregnancy in Kenya but not in Northern Europe is that Kenyan women are much more likely to be anemic due to malaria, hookworm and less meat in their diet.  During pregnancy the body's demand for iron increases, thus pica (this type of craving) increases if a woman is already iron deficient.  Another writes:      Yes, I am Kenyan. Yes, I have eaten soil (I have never liked the word dirt). No, I have never been pregnant and no, it wasn't because I was hungry! (You westerners ... we are not all starving!) It is because I am very anemic. The very red rich volcanic soil will do that to you. Especially after the rains. It smells divine.  Permalink :: Share This Chart Of The Day II 31 Mar 2011 07:05 pm  BP  Cord Jefferson scoffs at BP's new sustainability report:      BP didn't think it important to include [the 2010 Deepwater Horizon spill] in the report because, according to the fine print, there's been "no accurate determination" of how much oil actually leaked into the Gulf of Mexico. And so because there's no exact measure, they didn't think they should include it.      Just to be clear, coming up with a perfectly accurate measure of how much oil BP spilled in 2010 would be impossible. However, a team of scientists worked diligently to come up with an estimate, the massiveness of which blows away the above totals combined: 205 million gallons, or about 776 million liters.  Permalink :: Share This The Partisan Anti-War Movement 31 Mar 2011 06:29 pm  Fabio Rojas studied the anti-war movement and found that it collapsed after Obama's election:      Bottom line: Social movements and parties rely on each other. Movements benefit when partisans appear because they can bolster their numbers. Parties use movements as platform for partisan grievances. But there’s a drawback, electoral victories mean that the rank and file will stop showing up.  Permalink :: Share This Face Of The Day 31 Mar 2011 06:03 pm  111302081  A Yemeni anti-government protester prays during a demonstration demanding the resignation of Yemeni President Ali Abdullah Saleh in Sanaa on March 31, 2011 as Saleh and his opponents prepared for another tense Friday in a two-month-long showdown with calls for rival demonstrations. By Ahmad Gharabli/AFP/Getty Images.  Permalink :: Share This Preferring New Capitalism To Old 31 Mar 2011 05:36 pm  Reihan isn't nostalgic for the past:      [Rob] Horning contrasts the “security that once came from long-term employment with large firms and the safety net supplied jointly by employers and the state” with the post-Fordist, neoliberal order created by “deregulation, outsourcing, globalization and total worker flexibility,” and I think it’s safe to say he believes that much has been lost. I don’t want to caricature Horning’s view, as I’m sure he understands that Fordist solidarity was built on exclusion, that entrenched gender inequality was a foundation of “family wage” social democracy, etc. And I recognize that my highly idiosyncratic subjective experience has inclined me towards preferring the new capitalism to the old.  Horning responds that he doesn't "think we can or should try to turn back the clock":      [T]he new forms of social relations offer certain freedoms at the cost of having to commodify oneself at a deeper level than wage slavery required, with more of everyday life subsumed into capitalism, made business like, subject to its procedures of rational calculation. Some of what stems from that is good: At times work is more harmonious with one’s overall life, at times it feels good to have the market assess the quality and extent of one’s sociality, at times the flexibility increasingly expected of us prompts us to be and feel more creative, at times our self-consciousness leads to a rewarding consideration of what other people are thinking, and not just what they are thinking of us.      But the negative aspects are inseparable from those positive aspects.   Read On  Permalink :: Share This Is Qaddafi's Regime Cracking? 31 Mar 2011 05:24 pm  Some welcome news:      Colonel Gaddafi's regime has sent one of its most trusted envoys to London for confidential talks with British officials, the Guardian can reveal. Mohammed Ismail, a senior aide to Gaddafi's son Saif al-Islam, visited London in recent days, British government sources familiar with the meeting have confirmed.      The contacts with Ismail are believed to have been one of a number between Libyan officials and the west in the last fortnight, amid signs that the regime may be looking for an exit strategy.  That, of course, would be the ideal solution. But who on earth would then take over?  Collapse Post  Permalink :: Share This Quote For The Day II 31 Mar 2011 05:07 pm  "The idea of a grand showdown on spending had long been a staple of conservative analysis. Even before Reagan's inaugural, he had been approached by one prominent conservative who urged him to force a showdown over the debt ceiling and simply refuse to sign on to one until the Democratic Congress reined in its spending plans. Reagan rejected this idea with a comment I wish I had understood better at the time. The conservative activist who told me that story was convinced that Reagan would have won such a showdown. For fifteen years I agreed with him, but I was to learn something about the American people that too many conservatives don't appreciate. They want their leaders to have principled disagreements but they want these disagreements to be settled in constructive ways. That is not, of course, what our own activists were telling us. They were all gung ho for a brutal fight over spending and taxes. We mistook their enthusiasm for the views of the American public." - Newt Gingrich.  Permalink :: Share This Cool Ad Watch 31 Mar 2011 05:07 pm  I get excited. You get excited too:  Bonus Doctor: "The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Daleks" video tutorial.  Permalink :: Share This A Post-Qaddafi Libya 31 Mar 2011 04:42 pm   The secretary of defense doesn't sound happy:      The challenge of governing Libya after Gadhafi goes is a daunting one, in Gates’ telling: balancing tribal interests and weaving together a coherent nation. Those tribes will play a “major role” in any future Libyan politics. Hmm, what costly, long wars already fought by the U.S. military does that sound like?      Gates ... evinced the faintest confidence that the Libyan rebels would succeed in toppling Gadhafi. The opposition “is a misnomer,” he said, “very disparate, very scattered,” with each faction possessing its own agenda, and militarily “lacking command and control and lacking organization.” No wonder he doesn’t want the U.S. involved in helping it rise to power, or govern, reminding legislators of the “enormous human and fiscal cost” of the nation-building campaigns in Iraq and Afghanistan. If the opposition wants training and guns, “someone else” can provide it, he said, not U.S. forces.  Thank God for Bob Gates.  Read On  Permalink :: Share This Adventures In Arabic 31 Mar 2011 04:37 pm  "'Ma feesh Sarkozy al yawm.' 'There was no Sarkozy today.'” Meaning no air support," - Ryan Calder, a sociologist blogging from Libya.  Permalink :: Share This Mental Health Break 31 Mar 2011 04:20 pm  Twenty-five years of Pixar in five minutes:  Permalink :: Share This Flubbing The Script 31 Mar 2011 04:07 pm  Amy Davidson finds a historical precedent for Syria's awkward scene.  Permalink :: Share This DOMA And Bi-National Couples, Ctd 31 Mar 2011 03:52 pm  A reader writes:      Hang in there.  I - a mere academic weasel in the field of physics - got my EB1A green card a year ago. Clearly, you qualify. You've published, you've been cited, you're a leader in your field, and I'm sure you have a few awards. I guess your I-693 may freak them out a bit, but they can't refuse you for that anymore.      I know the anxieties that come with the green card.      They sent me an RFE, clearly mixing up my case with someone else's, even with their name on the forms. And they thought that I was an economist instead of a physicist. Idiots. Made me bounce around for a week or two. But, after that, I got the card, and last November I got married on Aruba to my American wife - without the USCIS knowing about it. I like it better that way. My personal life is none of their business. This is America. Land of the free.      Again: hang in there. And thanks for posting the view from my window captured an hour before my wedding.  Read On  Permalink :: Share This Rand Paul Believes In The Congress 31 Mar 2011 03:38 pm  Thank God someone still does:  Permalink :: Share This Could An Obese Goalie Change Hockey?