• The Obama Administration seized two months’ worth of phone records from the Associated Press, ostensibly to investigate a leak in Yemen. Understandably, reporters did not like this infringement on freedom of the press, citing the “horrific chilling effect on journalism.” The law behind the seizure is tricky (and may be changing), but the dangerous effects are already clear.

• Every recurring joke in Arrested Development.

• Angelina Jolie had a preemptive double mastectomy and spoke out about BRCA.

• How are the Yankees winning?

• A goodbye to Barbara Walters.

• What is “terrorism”? Does Benghazi count? And how does radicalization happen?

• The future of online education.

• Jaron Lanier on the Internet and the middle class. Also, a review of Lanier’s new book and other Internet partisans.

• Here’s what OWS is up to lately.

Senator Elizabeth Warren, one of the few American politicians willing to challenge the current financial system, has introduced her first bill in the US Senate. With student loan rates set to double from 3.4% to 6.8% on July 1, the Bank on Student Loan Fairness Act would temporarily reduce those rates to 0.75%, which is the same rate that banks borrow money from the Federal Reserve.

There’s certainly something nice about the symbolism of this bill: Highlighting the discrepancy between the rates offered to financial institutions and rates offered to students investing in an education illustrates the inequities of the financial system. When Senator Warren frames it as a choice between students and banks, it’s clear which side you should be on. And since the bill has no chance of passing, that symbolism is important. But the spirit of the bill is misguided, because the problem with student loans is not that they are too expensive, but that they are too cheap.

I’m no economist, but I know that making something cheaper means people will consume more of it.* In this case, making loans cheaper would mean that students would accrue more debt. Student debt is already a devastating problem in this country—the average college graduate has more than $26,000 in debt, and there are plenty of cases of debt topping $200,000. Such debt is particularly burdensome to young graduates, who have suffered disproportionately from the economic slump, especially when you consider that student debt is nearly impossible to shed (well, except through death!).

*Admittedly, this is an oversimplification. Many would counter that demand for college is inelastic, and thus not sensitive to small changes in price. This is probably true for many schools, particularly elite the institutions like Harvard and Yale, but there is growing evidence that it’s not true of college in general, and especially not true at for-profit schools, which have exploded in popularity in recent years and would likely benefit most from keeping rates low.

Of course, owing $30,000 at 0.75% is a lot better than owing it at 6.8%, but when you’re talking about principals in the tens of thousands of dollars, these loans would be burdensome with any interest rate. And the low interest rate will entice students who would have shied away from loans at higher rates. So all the Bank on Student Loan Fairness Act would do is exacerbate the already crippling problem of student debt.

This problem exclusively harms students. Politicians like keeping rates low because they can say they are “pro-education.” Schools like keeping rates low because they subsidize skyrocketing tuition costs that would be completely unaffordable without loans. Even the banks Senator Warren enjoys shaming like the current system, since it ensures customers for their private student loans. But when students graduate with thousands of dollars in debt and no job, they don’t like the system.

Defenders of student loans like to point out that keeping rates low makes college more affordable, and therefore makes it accessible to low-income students. But low-income students are precisely those who are most burdened by the debt. Students from wealthy or middle-class families can afford to move back home or take an internship while their parents make payments, but students with no other means to pay their bills are often forced to take whatever job just to start paying back their debts. This means they often get stuck in jobs away from their desired field or with little opportunity for advancement. So a college education, normally a tool for social advancement, actually becomes precisely the opposite.

Of course, people are often quick to point out statistics that show the value of a college degree, like the fact that the unemployment rate for non-college graduates is even higher than it is for graduates. This is often mistaken for proof that a college education is “worth it.” But this is silly logic: College graduates are more successful, but not necessarily because they went to college. College graduates are more likely to be more intelligent, from wealthier and more stable households, and more dedicated than those who do not. It’s not that college magically makes someone more successful; it’s that people more likely to be successful are more likely to go to college.

Perhaps the most accurate (and honest) defense of a college education is the signaling model, which holds that an education is valuable because of what it signals to potential employers: that an applicant is hard-working, dedicated, intelligent, etc. The problem with this argument is that, when weighed against the crushing burden of the accumulated debt, it would have to be an incredibly valuable signal. Surely there is some way to signal intelligence and diligence to employers without amassing tens of thousands of dollars in irrevocable debt.

If college degrees were really “worth it,” then graduates would be learning things they need to succeed at the jobs they want. This is pretty clearly not the case. Forty-eight percent of college graduates are underemployed—about a third work in jobs that don’t require a college education. Even when degrees are “required,” they are rarely needed: They function primarily as a sorting mechanism for employers who are overwhelmed by applicants in a bad economy. At best, they are a very crude sorting mechanism; at worst, they work as a kind of class warfare, effectively barring poor but competent applicants from jobs like receptionists and file clerks.

The only way to break this system is to stop assuming that every smart, motivated student should go to college. As long as that is the case, employers will continue to use degrees to narrow their pool of applicants. Only when there is a sizable group of dedicated, intelligent, and competent applicants without college degrees will employers stop discriminating based on education. And the best way to do that is to price them out. Trust me, it’s for their own good…

• An in-depth look at President Obama’s handling of Syria.

• Stephen Hawking joined the academic boycott of Israel, opening himself up to predictable attacks from the nation’s defenders. But will Hawking’s support of the boycott send a message to Israel about the occupation?

• You’re probably using paper towels wrong.

• Breaking down a classic and polarizing episode of The Simpsons.

• An inside look (kind of) at Draft Day from Chuck Klosterman.

• Matt Walsh on Veep and the future of UCB.

• On Michigan’s emergency-manager law and whether or not it disenfranchises the poor.

• Who is the highest paid public employee in your state? Probably a football coach.

• The CIA really did edit the script for Zero Dark Thirty.

• Jason Collins became the first active professional athlete in one of the four major leagues to come out of the closet (well, sort of the first). Most of the sports world was supportive, including Collins’ former fiancee, though obviously there was a predictable share of ignorance and intolerance.

• Dzhokhar Tsarnaev could avoid the death penalty.

• The issue of Guantánamo Bay was raised again, thanks to the prisoners’ ongoing hunger strike. Some are now being force-fed, which is as bad as it sounds. President Obama reiterated his desire to close the prison, though once again took no tangible steps to make that happen.

• Read this, and you’ll never have to read anything else about Tim Tebow again.

• Grantland tries to match the NY Times when it comes to the visual presentation of stories inexorably tied to the cold.

• Would open borders end poverty?

• Good journalism.

• Scenes from the early days at the Upright Citizens Brigade Theater.

• An interview with David Graeber, whose new book The Democracy Project was reviewed by John S yesterday.

• The fall of standardized tests in Texas.

• Jazz scholars analyze the new soundtrack for The Great Gatsby.

• Beards make you healthy and handsome.

An OWS Manifesto

“Men make their own history, but they do not make it as they please; they do not make it under self-selected circumstances, but under circumstances existing already, given and transmitted from the past.” —Karl Marx

What ever happened to Occupy Wall Street? Only 18 months after the camps in Zuccotti Park and across the country were being compared to the Arab Spring, people now remember the movement with the same dismissive nostalgia usually reserved for lesser Backstreet Boys. Cynics wonder what the movement ever accomplished, as if OWS fizzled out on its own accord as opposed to being brutally, aggressively, and covertly evicted in a coordinated, nationwide campaign of repression.

Of course, the reality is that OWS never really went away—it only became less visible and therefore easier to ignore after the evictions. Even when OWS couldn’t be ignored, it was always easier to make fun of it than to try to understand it. The lack of concrete demands, the weird hand gestures, and the eclectic mix of people all made the movement impossible to fit neatly into the ubiquitous “Democrat vs. Republican” narrative, and so it was generally viewed as a sideshow or a “liberal Tea Party” by the mainstream media.

But OWS was always better understood in the context of history than in the context of American politics—the entire premise of the movement was that American politics were fundamentally broken in the first place. David Graeber’s new book, The Democracy Project: A History, A Crisis, A Movement aims to place OWS in that historical context. It’s something of a tricky task, since the movement is only two years old, and its long-term effects are still unclear.

In this respect, Graeber’s book calls to mind The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Napoleon, in which Karl Marx tried to place the rise of Louis Bonaparte in the larger context of the socialist movement. Like Marx, Graeber is commenting on a social movement almost while it is unfolding, while also trying to see it through centuries of history. Unlike Marx, Graeber doesn’t have a single view of history to which all events must comport—The Democracy Project offers no modern version of dialectical materialism. In some ways, this makes the book less coherent, but also more accepting of the oddities of history; Graeber’s book pays close attention to the impact of little things.

Much of the book is dedicated to ways in which protest movements are traditionally marginalized, and why those things didn’t work against OWS. For example, Graeber talks about the way protest movements are often penned into preordained “Free Speech Zones” with steel guards as a way of making protest seem simultaneously permissible and pointless. Small things about OWS, like the tents in the park, helped it grow as much as any political philosophy did.

One notable example that Graeber highlights is the People’s Microphone, or the system of amplification through repetition that was used in OWS’s General Assemblies. Though originally it was only used because organizers had failed to anticipate how many people would show up, and therefore didn’t have suitable mics or megaphones, Graeber talks about its other effects:

“It has a curious, and profound democratic, effect. First of all, it strongly discourages speechifying. Almost anyone will know better than to ramble on unnecessarily if they know that a thousand people are waiting to repeat every word. Second, since anyone can speak, and everyone must repeat, it forces participants to genuinely listen to everybody else.”

The crux of Graeber’s argument is that these things helped turn OWS into the culmination of a movement toward anarchist principles of resistance. This contention might seem somewhat alarming, since “anarchist” was constantly used as a term of slander against OWS, and people often vehemently denied that the movement had been “co-opted” by anarchist extremists. But Graeber simply denies that anarchists could have co-opted the movement, since it was always fundamentally anarchist in its principles:

“In reality, OWS is anarchist-inspired, but for precisely that reason it stands squarely in the very tradition of American popular democracy… Anarchism does not mean the negation of democracy—or at least, any of the aspects of democracy that most Americans have historically liked. Rather, anarchism is a matter of taking those core democratic principles to their logical conclusions.”

Graeber, an anthropologist at Goldsmiths, University of London and author of 2011’s Debt: The First 5,000 Years, has a unique perspective to examine OWS, as he was present during its early days. Part of his book is essentially a memoir of the events leading to the encampment at Zuccotti Park, and these sections read like an Inside Baseball account of New York City’s activist movement, with all the infighting and politics that goes on behind the scenes. There is an alphabet soup of organizations—the WWP, the IAC, the ISO—that all have their own leadership structures, their own levels of acceptable radicalism, and their own rivalries. Each group is eager to take credit and control of any protest it feels will get some attention. Of course, this is precisely what turns so many people away from activism.

When Graeber and other activists arrived at an originally planned “General Assembly” on August 2, 2011, they were disappointed to find a strictly organized protest: “The organizers’ idea of an ‘assembly’ seemed to be an open mic, where anyone in the audience had a few minutes to express their general political position or thoughts about some particular issue before we set off on the preordained march.” Graeber speaks very dismissively of activist groups whose ideas of activism consist of “marching around with signs.” It was only when a few activists broke off and began their own General Assembly, under more horizontal principles, that the movement really took off.

It’s these horizontal principles that Graeber identifies as “the democracy project.” His use of the term “democracy” is initially confusing, since so many people now simply define the term as “more or less the kind of system America (or the UK, etc.) has.” Graeber, though, means something much closer to the word’s definition in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, when “democracy” was largely used as a term of slander, to mean something like “mob rule” or “anarchy.” After all, the Constitution and the Bill of Rights were written essentially to prevent democracy of this type, and parts of The Democracy Project are spent detailing how the term came to mean essentially its opposite.*

*Something else Graeber shares with Marx is a keen eye for the way terms are used.

Given this history, though, it’s not clear why Graeber even bothers with the term “democracy” at all. Like so many other terms, it seems more or less lost to history, and its use is only likely to confuse people. It’s true that none of the other terms Graeber uses—“horizontal,” “small-a anarchists,” etc.—have the romantic cache that the word “democracy” has, but the latter term is so loaded that it’s more of a distraction than anything else. Graeber describes how people used to the conventional forms of democracy had difficulty adjusting to the processes at OWS. People familiar with majority votes weren’t used to working in a consensus model, in which even minority viewpoints have to be considered and addressed. Similarly, people had to be taught that a “block” is not the same as voting “no,” and should only be used as a last resort. None of these are features of what we’ve come to know as “democracy,” and a new term might help prepare people for the differences.

This is especially important since the differences are the point. What made OWS successful was how it demonstrated the contrast between the current political system and an ideal “democracy.”

Of course, some people would take issue with calling OWS “successful.” The second chapter in The Democracy Project is called “Why Did It Work,” which essentially takes for granted a point many would question: that it worked at all. It’s true that Graeber’s definition of “success” is colored by his years as an activist: He freely admits that activists spend their lives planning events that almost everyone ignores. The mere fact that people paid attention to OWS makes it a success by these standards

For those outside this world, though, “success” is usually defined by tangible political results, and it’s not like OWS led to a tide of progressive legislation or electoral victories. Once again, though, it’s important to view “success” through a wider historical lens. OWS didn’t “succeed” by gaining concessions from the political system because the idea behind it was always to offer alternatives to that system and show how corrupt that system really was: “The refusal to make demands was, quite self-consciously, a refusal to recognize the legitimacy of the existing political order of which such demands would have to be made.” It’s hard to understand what “success” by these criteria would actually entail, short of outright revolution. But Graeber makes a persuasive case that it can be judged by the effects it had on participants, who came to see that the American political system was not the only way to interpret “democracy.”

Some of the book’s most profound insights come on the topic of violence. Part of the success of OWS, Graeber contends, is that it exposed how much of the current political system is built simply on the use of force. Many of the most memorable images of the movement were of the police pepper-spraying peaceful protestors. What was unusual wasn’t the level of violence on the part of the police—Graeber assures the reader that this is to be expected at any protest—but that the media actually paid attention to it. Normally, he contends, the media simply define “violence” as “the unauthorized use of force”—something the police are, by definition, never guilty of. But Graeber cites various reasons, like the abundant evidence of abuse on social media and the similarities to the Arab Spring, that sources couldn’t take the same authoritarian perspective on OWS.

Thinking about this more generally, Graeber delves deeper into what this says about cultural attitudes towards violence. While massive acts of violence committed by the police or the government are almost always accepted as necessary, even the faintest hint of violence on the part of protestors is often enough to condemn the entire cause.* Exposing this double-standard is one of the many ways that OWS succeeding in exposing the moral hypocrisy of the state.

*The most perverse aspect of this, according to Graeber, is how often Gandhi is invoked by those in power to condemn all forms of semi-violent opposition. It’s true, of course, that Gandhi supported nonviolence, but he refused to condemn acts of violence committed by his allies. “While opposing injustice nonviolently, [Gandhi] insisted, is always morally superior to opposing it violently, opposing injustice violently is still morally superior to doing nothing to oppose it at all.”

This type of success may not satisfy everyone. It is, after all, very hard to gauge things like the state’s level of exposed hypocrisy. But it would be silly dismiss the effects of these things simply because they are hard to measure. In retrospect, of course, we understand the impact something like Uncle Tom’s Cabin had on the abolition movement. Graeber makes a persuasive case that OWS succeeded on the same level.

Making this case, of course, means making the case against the system of “democracy” that OWS was protesting. Graeber does this by placing what he calls “mafia capitalism” in the context of centuries of history. Like he did in Debt, Graeber jumps through history to identify the way certain features of American life—like, say, the student loan industry—are really just modern incarnations of historical systems of servitude. Sometimes he moves through history with haphazard restlessness—and he seems at times too dismissive of economic arguments—but he’s always enlightening and clever, and often slyly funny. By the end, even a reader less inclined to embrace his style of anarchism will have a new view of the historical role OWS plays.

Of course, such things can only be conclusively determined after many years have passed, so, to borrow a phrase from President Bush, history will be the judge. But history will ultimately depend on the future—how OWS is remembered will be determined by what happens over the next few years. The Democracy Project functions as a hodgepodge of different books—memoir, history, philosophical treatise, procedural guideline—but it’s mostly a call to arms. By illustrating what happens when people insist on “living as if they are already free,” Graeber invites readers to do exactly that. Presumably, they have nothing to lose but their chains…

• Some follow up on the Tsarnaevs and the Boston bombing: Dzokhar Tsarnaev was charged with the crime and could face the death penalty (though Alan Dershowitz persuasively arguing against it here). But did the Surveillance State work as planned? Should the FBI have listened to Russia more? What happend to the wrongly accused Brown student? Should we, as NYC Mayor Bloomberg suggested, “change our interpretation” of the Constitution? And were drones part of the motivation?

• Speaking of drones, the harrowing testimony of a Yemeni citizen on the effects of drone strikes in his country. This also comes on the heels of Jeremy Scahill’s new book on the drone wars.

• Are trailer parks the future?

• Bradley Manning is not welcome at the SF Gay Pride parade, that alleged bastion of tolerance and freedom.

• To go to grad school or not to go…

• Matt Taibbi on yet another Wall Street scandal. Will this lead to the end of Too Big To Fail banks?

• Everyone loves Winnie Cooper.

• Don’t let the George W. Bush Library fool you into misremembering his legacy.

• Noam Chomsky on civil liberties under President Obama. And George Will weighs in on abridging the Constitution. But Canada can infringe on civil liberties too…

• Prisoners are now reviewing their prisons on Yelp.

• So, uh, not such a great week. The carnage at last Monday’s Boston Marathon, which is such a cherished event in that city, shocked the country and brought back memories of 9/11. Luckily there were countless examples of heroism in the aftermath of the tragedy, including an impressive response by Boston’s medical teams. The city went into lockdown in order to find the suspects. One was killed early Friday morning, and the other was found later that evening, capping a turbulent week for one of nation’s oldest cities.

• Of course, there were mistakes along the way, from the rush to blame Islamic radicals without any evidence, to the misidentification of “suspects” based on their nationality and skin color, to false reports from news outlets, to confusing Chechnya with the Czech Republic. Once the proper suspects were identified, Senators Lindsey Graham and John McCain rushed to abandon the Constitution, asserting that the Tsarnaevs should be treated as enemy combatants. Dzhokhar Tsarnaev was not read his Miranda rights when arrested, with the FBI citing the “public safety” exception (despite repeated assurances from public officials that there was no more danger to the public). Emily Bazelton explains why this is so dangerous.

• Worth remembering this week: We just passed the 50th anniversary of MLK’s “Letter from a Birmingham Jail.”

• In other sad news, Pat Summerall, the greatest play-by-play announcer in football history, passed away at the age of 82.

• Joe Posnanski and Michael Schur wrote a baseball “preview” even though the season is already three weeks old. Posnanski also dismissed the notion of “pitching to the score.”

• A very interesting look at income inequality through New York’s subway system.

• How a meeting between Dickens and Dostoevsky that never happened became a part of scholarship.

• A long conversation between Julian Assange of WikiLeaks and Eric Schmidt of Google.

• Whatever happened to Allen Iverson?

• How 37 banks turned into four big ones.

• The top 20 Quentin Tarantino food scenes.

• Sabermetrics in tee ball, or: Why Mike Tanier Is the Best.

• Dove’s “Real Beauty” campaign is not feminist.

There’s a lot to like about Oswalt’s message, but there’s one aspect of it that really bothers me: When he refers to the unknown perpetrators of the crime, he refers to either “one human insect or a poisonous mass of broken sociopaths.” It’s just a throwaway line—it doesn’t really affect the substance of what Oswalt is saying. But it’s a telling line that reveals a problem with the way we conceive of tragedies like this attack.

It’s easy and very tempting to dehumanize the people who plant bombs and attack children—to call them “insects” and “sociopaths”* or whatever term that paints them as some mythical bad guy. After all, how could anyone do something this horrible unless he was subhuman in some way? But it’s a dangerous logical trap to assume that anyone who does an evil thing is an Evil Man.

*Of course, the word “sociopath” has the added problem of insulting those people with actual mental health problems, the vast majority of whom, it’s worth pointing out, do NOT commit outrageous acts of violence. It’s true that in many cases there is evidence that perpetrators are sociopaths in the literal sense of the word (though this is rarely conclusive), but throwing around words like “crazy” or “unhinged” or “insane” to describe anyone we don’t like warps the meaning of those words.

This is dangerous because it very quickly leads to the corollary that if someone is not an Evil Man, then what he does is not evil. This is how people come to excuse horrible things. For example, yesterday people were quick to call bombs that targeted first responders “evil.” Of course, the U.S. government now does this routinely in its drone program, but there is no similar outcry because few Americans believe members of the CIA or the military are Evil Men.

But this is what leads to heinous acts of violence in the first place. People tend to excuse otherwise inexcusable behavior when they respect the people involved. This can make an American tolerate his country’s use of drones in Yemen, and it can make Muslims excuse acts of terror against the West. If we want to break this cycle of violence we need to accept that “good people” are capable of doing terrible things, and that the moral value of something is not determined by who does it.

Which brings me back to Oswalt’s message, and the way it divides the world into “the good” and the “human insects.” His point is that “the good” vastly outnumber these “insects,” but this dividing line between the two is not just dangerous but imaginary. Good people do bad things and bad people do good things. Those people in the videos running toward the wreckage to help are obviously heroes. But they are also people—people who cheat on their spouses, or who don’t recycle, or who watch Honey Boo-Boo, or who say “literally” when they mean “figuratively.” This “darkness” Oswalt talks about is not some mysterious thing that only exists in others—it’s something everyone is capable of, and remembering that is the only way to stop it.

• 42, the movie about Jackie Robinson breaking baseball’s color barrier, opened this weekend. Roger Angell and Joe Posnanski look back at Robinson’s legacy.

• Jonah Keri breaks down last week’s Dodgers-Padres brawl.

• McClatchy reports on the Obama Administration’s use of drones against “unknown” targets, exposing the lies the CIA and White House officials have told the public.

• A report on the OCC’s foreclosure review details the fraud behind the lackluster settlement obtained for Americans whose homes have been illegally seized by banks.

• Margaret Thatcher, the influential Prime Minister who changed Great Britain, backed apartheid, and helped support dictators all across the world, died at the age of 87.

• Also dying last week: Gus Triandos. David Simon discusses how Gus came to be mentioned on The Wire.

• A look back at Earth Day and the environmental movement.

• Atheism and Islamophobia.

• Why wasn’t the Super Mario Bros. movie a hit?

• Congress wants to protect Israel’s right to discriminate against Americans.

• The fake story of when Dickens met Dostoevsky.

• A chart of college nicknames.

• Roger Ebert, the most famous movie critic in the country, died last week at the age of 70. His health troubles over the last few years had been well-documented, but his legacy and impact as a critic will persist for generations. Ebert, of course, was known for his enthusiasm for movies, but he was great to read when he hated a movie as well. He will be missed…

• Shane Carruth, the writer/director/star of Primer, has a new movie coming out.

• A guide to the Infinite Jest references in last week’s episode of Parks & Recreation.

• Matt Taibbi on the future of Too Big To Fail banks. Speaking of banks, what’s the future for Bitcoin?

• Apple’s latest endeavor: a new $5 billion office.

• Wondering what Hitler’s former food taster is up to these days? Then boy do we have a link for you…