The Slow Shredding of the Cuban Embargo

Photos of the Week: 9/12-9/18

Alan Taylor

A coup in Burkina Faso, wildfires in California, a new hair accessory trend in Beijing, airstrikes in Yemen, migrants continue to flood into Europe, underwater robotics in France, an earthquake in Chile, and much more.

QR Codes for the Dead

Tamara Kneese

Graveyards are becoming smart spaces, but will today's technology last for eternity?

The QR code’s history is intrinsically tied to a quest for efficiency, thus mirroring the barcode’s trajectory. Drexel graduate students Norman Joseph Woodland and Bernard Silver patented the barcode in 1952, but their invention wasn’t fully realized until the 1960s, with the birth of the KarTrak system, implemented by the railroad industry to track the contents of individual railcars. Barcodes were then commercially popularized with the birth of the Unique Product Code, or UPC, in the 1970s as a way of automating cashiers’ labor, ostensibly saving time while preventing the carpel tunnel-inducing repetitive motions of manually entering numbers. But barcodes can only contain roughly twenty alphanumeric characters, thus limiting their applications. In 1994, a Japanese subsidiary of Toyota called Denso Wave released the “quick response” or QR code, allowing more information to become embedded into objects. Unlike the PDF417 and other earlier 2D barcodes, the QR code decodes information using image sensors rather than by utilizing a linear scan. Their ability to be read by smartphones means that QR codes are now being used in numerous ways, sometimes tied to long-standing physical structures. Although QR codes are primarily used to facilitate short-term commercial interactions, now they are being integrated into places associated with posterity.

The Black Family in the Age of Mass Incarceration

Ta-Nehisi Coates

American politicians are now eager to disown a failed criminal-justice system that’s left the U.S. with the largest incarcerated population in the world. But they've failed to reckon with history. Fifty years after Daniel Patrick Moynihan’s report “The Negro Family” tragically helped create this system, it's time to reclaim his original intent.

By his own lights, Daniel Patrick Moynihan, ambassador, senator, sociologist, and itinerant American intellectual, was the product of a broken home and a pathological family. He was born in 1927 in Tulsa, Oklahoma, but raised mostly in New York City. When Moynihan was 10 years old, his father, John, left the family, plunging it into poverty. Moynihan’s mother, Margaret, remarried, had another child, divorced, moved to Indiana to stay with relatives, then returned to New York, where she worked as a nurse. Moynihan’s childhood—a tangle of poverty, remarriage, relocation, and single motherhood—contrasted starkly with the idyllic American family life he would later extol.

How an 18th-Century Philosopher Helped Solve My Midlife Crisis

Alison Gopnik

David Hume, the Buddha, and a search for the Eastern roots of the Western Enlightenment

In 2006, i was 50—and I was falling apart.

Until then, I had always known exactly who I was: an exceptionally fortunate and happy woman, full of irrational exuberance and everyday joy.

I knew who I was professionally. When I was 16, I’d discovered cognitive science and analytic philosophy, and knew at once that I wanted the tough-minded, rigorous, intellectual life they could offer me. I’d gotten my doctorate at 25 and had gone on to become a professor of psychology and philosophy at UC Berkeley.

I knew who I was personally, too. For one thing, I liked men. I was never pretty, but the heterosexual dance of attraction and flirtation had always been an important part of my life, a background thrum that brightened and sharpened all the rest. My closest friends and colleagues had all been men.

Hit Charade

Nathaniel Rich

Meet the bald Norwegians and other unknowns who actually create the songs that top the charts.

The biggest pop star in America today is a man named Karl Martin Sandberg. The lead singer of an obscure ’80s glam-metal band, Sandberg grew up in a remote suburb of Stockholm and is now 44. Sandberg is the George Lucas, the LeBron James, the Serena Williams of American pop. He is responsible for more hits than Phil Spector, Michael Jackson, or the Beatles.

After Sandberg come the bald Norwegians, Mikkel Eriksen and Tor Hermansen, 43 and 44; Lukasz Gottwald, 42, a Sandberg protégé and collaborator who spent a decade languishing in Saturday Night Live’s house band; and another Sandberg collaborator named Esther Dean, 33, a former nurse’s aide from Oklahoma who was discovered in the audience of a Gap Band concert, singing along to “Oops Upside Your Head.” They use pseudonyms professionally, but most Americans wouldn’t recognize those, either: Max Martin, Stargate, Dr. Luke, and Ester Dean.

"College" Football Has Almost Nothing to Do With College at All

Adrienne Green

On paper, a team is just a million-dollar, tax-exempt enterprise whose players happen to be in school.

College football’s popularity probably has a lot to do with how personal it is: Few other sports combine the camaraderie of Saturday afternoon tailgates, the rush of a victory in a decades-long rivalry, and, for some, the tradition of wearing the same school colors as one’s parents or grandparents. The sport also gets by on its perceived amateurism. Its players may look like fully-grown men, but they are in the earliest stages of adulthood. And they aren’t getting paid, which lends a sense of passion and scrappiness that are less evident in the NFL and other sports leagues.

But, as Gilbert M. Gaul, who has won Pulitzer Prizes for his coverage of blood banks and the American coal industry, explains in his new book Billion Dollar Ball: A Journey Through the Big-Money Culture of College Football, there’s nothing scrappy or amateurish about the sport’s business side. As Gaul explains, most college-football programs have come to operate more or less independently from the universities that chartered them, and money has become their raison d’etre. TV contracts, corporate sponsors, and “seat donations”—in which elite teams charge their fans above and beyond the price of a season ticket for the privilege of securing a seat—are just three reasons why a program such as the University of Texas’s could go from making $18.7 million in 1999 to $104 million in 2012.

The Coddling of the American Mind

Greg Lukianoff and Jonathan Haidt

In the name of emotional well-being, college students are increasingly demanding protection from words and ideas they don’t like. Here’s why that’s disastrous for education—and mental health.

Something strange is happening at America’s colleges and universities. A movement is arising, undirected and driven largely by students, to scrub campuses clean of words, ideas, and subjects that might cause discomfort or give offense. Last December, Jeannie Suk wrote in an online article for The New Yorker about law students asking her fellow professors at Harvard not to teach rape law—or, in one case, even use the word violate (as in “that violates the law”) lest it cause students distress. In February, Laura Kipnis, a professor at Northwestern University, wrote an essay in The Chronicle of Higher Education describing a new campus politics of sexual paranoia—and was then subjected to a long investigation after students who were offended by the article and by a tweet she’d sent filed Title IX complaints against her. In June, a professor protecting himself with a pseudonym wrote an essay for Vox describing how gingerly he now has to teach. “I’m a Liberal Professor, and My Liberal Students Terrify Me,” the headline said. A number of popular comedians, including Chris Rock, have stopped performing on college campuses (see Caitlin Flanagan’s article in this month’s issue). Jerry Seinfeld and Bill Maher have publicly condemned the oversensitivity of college students, saying too many of them can’t take a joke.

Was Goodfellas the Last Truly Great Mobster Film?

David Sims

Twenty-five years later, Martin Scorsese’s masterpiece is unequaled in its understanding of the horrifying realities—and dark appeal—of a life of organized crime.

Goodfellas, released 25 years ago today, might be the last great mob film: Not only did it help redefine the genre, but it also spawned many worthy successors (and many more pale imitators). Even Martin Scorsese’s follow-ups in the genre, Casino and The Departed, bear obvious debts to his 1990 masterpiece, which upended every concept of nobility and honor in organized crime without undermining its appeal. When Henry Hill (Ray Liotta) tells the audience he “always wanted to be a gangster,” it’s easy to understand why. But as much fun as the movie is, viewers also understand why they don’t want to be gangsters: Because they’re merciless, violent crooks.

Soul Searching Through the Myers-Briggs Test

Ilana E. Strauss

The personality test isn't perfect, but it plays to people's desire to understand themselves and others.

A group of young adults shyly meet for the first time on the second floor of an empty Manhattan shopping mall. The stores are all closed for the weekend, and other than a man stopping in the lobby to read his phone, this group is the only sign of activity.

“I actually really like clubbing,” shares one guy.

The group goes silent.

“Get out of the circle,” a woman whispers.

Everyone in this group took the Meyers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI), a personality test. They all tested as the same type (one that tends to be introverted), joined an online group for others who got the same result, and decided to meet up.

Which explains why they’re meeting in an empty food court: It’s perfect for a group of people who like quietude. In this crowd of 20-something New Yorkers, the clubber is, truly, an oddball.

Readers Lament the Rise of 'Victimhood Culture'

Conor Friedersdorf

They worry that the rise of microaggressions undermines efforts to solve problems in productive ways.

In a previous item, I shared correspondence from readers who defended the rise of the “microaggressions” framework and changes in moral culture that gave rise to it. All of the emails were responses to two recent articles, “The Rise of Victimhood Culture” and “Why Critics of the ‘Microaggressions’ Framework Are Skeptical.” This batch of correspondence comes from readers who are skeptical of the “microaggressions” framework and lament the trend toward “victimhood culture.” The diversity of opposition is striking: Readers from a wide variety of backgrounds raised numerous, sometimes overlapping concerns about the cultural trend.

The most common sentiment: “I find the rise of victimhood culture alarming. It gives so little room for people to solve problems in a productive way or live in harmony.”

More Minority Students, Fewer Teachers of Color

Adrienne Green

A report looks at nine major cities and notes that the disparity between teachers and students of color has increased in each city over the last decade.

This past school year was the first time in history that racial and ethnic minority students outnumbered their white counterparts. The U.S. Department of Education has projected that by 2022, non-white students will make up 54.7 percent of the public-school student population, largely due to the national increases in U.S.-born Hispanic and Asian populations.

Despite the fact that more students of color will be filling classrooms at increasing increments every school year, it’s a well reported fact that almost 80 percent of their teachers are white—and it doesn’t appear that that will change any time soon.

According to a recent study from the Albert Shanker Institute, a think tank funded by the American Federation of Teachers, the number of black teachers dropped from 2002 to 2012.