The New NYTimes.com Paywall Is Completely Incomprehensible

Felix Salmon tries to unravel the mysteries:

This paywall is anything but simple, with dozens of different variables for consumers to try to understand. Start with the price: the website is free, so long as you read fewer than 20 items per month, and so are the apps, so long as you confine yourself to the “Top News” section. You can also read articles for free by going in through a side door. Following links from Twitter or Facebook or Reuters.com should never be a problem, unless and until you try to navigate away from the item that was linked to.

Beyond that, $15 per four-week period gives you access to the website and also its smartphone app, while $20 gives you access to the website also its iPad app. But if you want to read the NYT on both your smartphone and your iPad, you’ll need to buy both digital subscriptions separately, and pay an eye-popping $35 every four weeks. That’s $455 a year.

The message being sent here is weird: that access to the website is worth nothing. Mathematically, if A+B=$15, A+C=$20, and A+B+C=$35, then A=$0.

Why We Still Can’t Close Down Guantanamo

And we probably won’t be able to for a long time, if ever:

After Obama’s election, a team led by the Pentagon’s top detainee official, Sandra Hodgkinson, was tasked with determining whether it would be possible to close Gitmo and move all detainees to military prisons in the U.S. A person familiar with the team’s work said that it examined four possible locations: the Navy brig in Charleston, S.C.; the Army prison at Fort Leavenworth, Kan.; the Marine Corps Base at Camp Pendleton, Calif.; and the Marine Corps Air Station at Miramar, Calif. The team concluded that the incoming administration could meet its 12-month deadline for closing the facility if work got started immediately. The Pentagon conveyed the findings to Obama and his national-security team. Shortly after taking office, the president issued the executive order officially promising to close the prison within a year.

A person who has read the Hodgkinson team’s report said, however, that it failed to adequately take into account the political and logistical challenges of closing the Guantanamo Bay detention facility. The group didn’t consider whether Congress was likely to provide the necessary funding to build a new prison, and it didn’t examine the sheer bureaucratic challenges of doing major construction on domestic military bases, a lengthy process that involves environmental-impact studies and other hurdles, this person said.

Cambria & Friends

On a whim last night, I went out on the town in Cambridge, Massachusetts to see if i could find a concert to photograph. I succeeded when I stumbled into the Cantab Lounge in Central Square. Andy Cambria and a bunch of his bluegrass colleagues put on a hell of a show. Who would have thought that Boston was a thriving community for fans of bluegrass? Here is a photoset of the concert that I threw together:


Created with Admarket’s flickrSLiDR.

More of Andy’s music here

The Villifcation of Teachers

You can say what you want about teacher’s unions. We can probably have totally civil disagreements as to their efficacy and to their place in the U.S. education system. But can we all agree that villifying teachers, as the GOP have been relentlessly doing, is deplorable? Teachers are among the hardest working people in the world. There are a crapton of bad apples, but for every lazy teacher who coasts, there are a dozen that bust their ass to try and give some time and attention to students who the system has often forgotten.

Sarah Averill explains:

The real sting, though, is that suddenly, teachers are characterized by politicians and pundits alike as greedy money-grubbers with powerful unions and bloated benefits, who work a few hours a day with summers off, and can’t even get a kid to pass an exam. There have always been people who say this, and normally we can laugh it off — you need to have a good sense of humor, after all, to be a teacher. But now, it’s not just anyone saying these things — it’s our leaders, the ones we voted for and listen to. And people, from school boards to parents, are listening to them as well.

The Inhumane Treatment of Bradley Manning

David House’s recounting of his visits with friend Bradley Manning is a must-read for those concerned with how the U.S. is upholding its own rule of law. The entire piece is tragic but this excerpt stuck out to me:

Riding the overnight train, one of the things House says he tries to put out of his mind is the hate mail resulting from his part in the campaign to support the solitary young man accused of being the “hacktivist” behind all the notorious recent publications of Wiki-Leaks. “I receive probably 10-15 pieces a day. It’s quite a lot, but only one or two a week are actual death threats.”

When the best part of the hate mail you receive is that “only one or two a week are actual death threats,” then you know the odds are skewed against you.