Kindle Edition, 2013 © Time Inc.

Across The Red Line
Evidence of a brutal chemical attack in Syria poses a defining test to the U.S.'s reputation and to Barack Obama's foreign policy vision

ERBIN NEWS/NURPHOTO/ZUMA PRESS

Unidentified victims Syrian corpses are buried in a mass grave after a chemical-weapons attack in the Damascus suburb of Ghouta on Aug. 21

Michael Crowley | 3253 words

Foreign policy grants American presidents almost supernatural powers. From thousands of miles away, they can mobilize fleets and squadrons at a whim, sometimes killing without risking a single soldier's life. But foreign policy can also become a curse, with an equally mystical ability to ruin a presidency. Barack Obama learned that lesson watching his predecessor wage what Obama famously called "a dumb war" of choice in Iraq. His opposition to the invasion launched the one-term Senator's first presidential run, and he arrived in the White House with a clear vision of a humbler America narrowly focused on core interests, like healing domestic economic and social wounds. Obama would hunt down terrorists in caves and deserts and throw a harder punch at the Taliban in Afghanistan. But he also presented himself as a conciliator, a peacemaker who would land the Nobel Peace Prize before he'd even redecorated the Oval Office.

From the start of his presidency, Obama sounded his call in speeches from Washington to Prague to Cairo, describing a transformed world order--"a revolutionary world" where "we can do improbable, sometimes impossible things." Cynics said Obama was just putting a gloss on harsh economic reality: deep in debt and with its financial sector in a tailspin, the U.S. couldn't afford an interventionist foreign policy. But Obama seemed genuine enough when he spoke of starting a dialogue of "mutual respect" with Iran, and to other rivals, he vowed that "we will extend a hand if you are willing to unclench your fist." Reason would replace raw power, and the neoconservative vision would be retired. It was hope and change on a global scale.

But history, it has turned out, wasn't interested.

The fists remained clenched, the rhetoric toward the U.S. was disrespectful, and although there was revolution from Cairo to Tripoli to Damascus, it often unleashed dangerous religious and tribal passions across the Middle East. The hope has fermented into fear, the change into danger. Now, in a region that has confounded Presidents for decades and where the security stakes are highest, Obama faces a defining test in Syria.

This is not where Obama wanted to be. On Aug. 22, one day after a cloud of what is suspected to have been nerve gas descended on a Damascus suburb, killing hundreds of people, the President left the White House for an all-smiles bus tour of upstate New York, focused on college affordability. But that morning in the Situation Room, Obama's national-security team was grasping the shocking scale of the attack and its implicit challenge to American power and authority.

In a bitter irony, the attack had come on the one-year anniversary of Obama's warning that the use of chemical weapons by the Syrian regime constituted a "red line" that, if crossed, would have "enormous consequences." Video footage showed ghastly images of the dead, including women and infants, who almost seemed fortunate compared with the spasming, frothing survivors. As Obama was briefed on his presidential bus, it became clear that he too was facing the prospect of military action in the Middle East over weapons of mass destruction.

The world watched to see whether Obama would flinch from the role of global cop. He had already allowed multiple chemical-weapons attacks to come and go without any clear consequences beyond modest U.S. support for a disorderly rebel movement.

And the Syria crisis was not the only one testing the limits of Obama's foreign policy approach or the power of his country. Iran is moving forward with its nuclear program in defiance of Obama's similar warnings of military retribution. In Egypt a military regime backed by U.S. taxpayers continues to ignore his calls for peace after it killed more than 600 protesters. Afghanistan's shaky government warily prepares for the prospect of civil war when U.S. troops finally leave next year, while terrorist bombs continue to torment the unstable cities of Iraq. Al-Qaeda, meanwhile, is alive and well in places like Yemen and North Africa, even if Osama bin Laden is not. At home, the perception of his foreign policy performance has steadily declined: only about 40% of Americans now approve.

Syria's defiance, if left unpunished, risked a domino effect of further defiant actions around the globe, the White House concluded. "We have our reputation on the line," explains Brent Scowcroft, the onetime National Security Adviser to Presidents George H.W. Bush and Gerald Ford who has informally advised Obama.

It was exactly the place Obama hoped to avoid in those early optimistic speeches around the world: boxed in by the madness of the Middle East, forced into military action by Syria's dictator, a former ophthalmologist most Americans would be hard-pressed to name.

The Road to Damascus

How did it come to this? some of it is bad luck--although that often comes with the job: Bush had 9/11, Clinton had the Balkans, Carter had the Iranian hostages. But Obama has made missteps as well. The art of foreign policy is preventing no-win decisions from ever presenting themselves. And in retrospect, Obama's caution may have worked against him.

From the start, he kept a wary distance from the Arab Spring. The first incarnation, though it wasn't obvious at the time, was the reform movement that filled the streets of Tehran in June 2009. Calling for regime change might have had a Bushian ring, and the White House feared making statements that would allow Iran's government to make the protests look like a foreign plot. Obama wound up saying only that the U.S. would "bear witness to the extraordinary events" taking place there, with little support for the protests. In hindsight, his staff found fault with the timidity. "I think we were too cautious," says Dennis Ross, the point man for Iran policy in Obama's first term. "I regret it." It was, perhaps, a harbinger of things to come.

As protests ignited across the Middle East two years later, Obama continued to tread lightly--choosing stability over the risk of the unknown and refusing to lay out any unified theory of U.S. reaction. "Trying to calibrate how we need the U.S. to involve itself without overextending has been a central foreign policy question of this presidency," says Ben Rhodes, Obama's Deputy National Security Adviser.

It took Obama weeks to embrace the 2011 Cairo protests that forced Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak from power. When the Gulf kingdom of Bahrain--a strategic ally and host to the U.S. Fifth Fleet--violently repressed a popular uprising, Obama took no action. Even in Libya, he at first stood by as rebels fighting Muammar Gaddafi's forces found themselves outgunned and on the run.

Obama finally intervened only when Gaddafi's forces massed outside the city of Benghazi, threatening a slaughter of innocents while pressure mounted from France and Britain. Republicans latched onto this as "leading from behind," a phrase uttered by an Obama aide to draw a contrast with George Bush's pre-emptive cowboy diplomacy but which critics called an abdication of real leadership.

Gaddafi's relatively quick downfall initially made the intervention in Libya appear a success. "[We've] demonstrated what collective action can achieve in the 21st century," Obama said. But the story would sour. Wary of trying to rebuild another Arab nation, Obama invested little in post-Gaddafi Libya, where rogue militias and radicalism flourished--including the militants who attacked an underguarded U.S. compound in Benghazi, the very city Obama had saved, killing Ambassador Chris Stevens and three other Americans.

The Syrian uprising began in earnest around the same time as Obama's Libya operation. He watched Syrian President Bashar Assad's regime brutally respond for another six months but took no action. As the death toll mounted, observers who saw an "Obama doctrine" in the Libya intervention wondered, Why not Syria? Obama's aides say the comparison is futile. "The notion of a doctrine is good as an organizing principle for people thinking about foreign policy," Rhodes says. "But in government, it's impossible in practice."

Syria was clearly a harder problem. Libya had shabby air defenses and offered a desert battlefield that made air strikes easy. Syria has densely populated cities, and Assad has serious firepower. Unlike Gaddafi, who had no close international allies, Syria boasts decades of military and intelligence partnerships with both Iran and Russia. Obama waited until August 2011 to declare that "the time has come for President Assad to step aside." In hindsight, this may have been his first misstep in Syria. When Assad ignored the advice, the dictator faced no consequences. "He hasn't gotten the message," Obama told reporters a year later. More likely, Assad saw no reason to heed it.

Not that Obama had great choices. Some argue that he could have escalated support for Syria's moderate rebel factions a year or more ago, before radical Islamists hijacked the uprising. Even at the end of 2012, top Obama officials, including Hillary Clinton and David Petraeus, were still arguing for this course. But Obama rejected their proposals, fearing the U.S. could do little to influence such a complex situation. He also worried about empowering al-Qaeda-affiliated rebels who could threaten U.S. interests more than Assad ever did. Now, even onetime supporters of such policies say the window has likely closed. "Syria today is not about choosing between two sides but rather about choosing one among many sides," none of whom share U.S. interests, Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Martin Dempsey recently wrote.

Then there was the "red line" statement. In response to a question at a White House press briefing in August 2012, Obama said the use or movement of chemical weapons would have "enormous consequences." Obama likely came to regret that remark. Assad seemed to taunt him with small-scale chemical attacks--large enough to kill dozens but not quite enough to precipitate an international crisis. Perhaps in response, Obama fine-tuned his red-line definition last April, saying it was the "systematic" use of chemical arms he would not tolerate. By June 2013, with Assad gaining a clear upper hand, the Administration said it would finally arm Syria's rebels. But credible reports that few, if any, arms have actually been delivered again cast doubt on Obama's resolve.

The apparent nerve-gas attack outside Damascus on Aug. 21 became the final straw. Here was a culmination of factors: evidence of a pattern of attacks and grotesque footage of victims suffering convulsions. It was a "moral obscenity," as Secretary of State John Kerry put it, that was too much for Obama to ignore, explain away or refer to a committee for study.

The timing was perfectly terrible, at a moment when Obama already appeared intent on favoring stability over American values. Seventeen phone calls from Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel to Egyptian General Abdul Fattah al-Sisi had failed to stop the coup and bloodshed there. Now Washington is left with few vocal allies in the Arab world's most populous country. "It is pretty remarkable," says Eliot Cohen, a former senior adviser to Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, "that we've managed to convince everybody in Egypt we've betrayed them."

Limits of Power

Some of Obama's problems have a familiar ring. Early in his first term, Bill Clinton--who, like Obama, focused on domestic matters--also faced charges of timidity and weakness. "We simply don't have the leverage, we don't have the influence [or] the inclination to use military force," a senior State Department official complained in 1993. And much as Obama is facing pressure at home and abroad over Syria, Clinton was castigated for not intervening in the Balkan wars. "The position of leader of the free world is vacant," French President Jacques Chirac lamented in 1995.

Obama has likewise developed a strangely broad coalition of critics: humanitarians who want to stop the war in Syria; hawks who want a bolder U.S. foreign policy; democracy and human-rights advocates appalled that Obama isn't tougher on Egypt's generals. Meanwhile, U.S. allies in Europe complain that America isn't showing leadership, and a senior Arab government official tells TIME that friendly states in the region don't feel they can count on the U.S. "There's no perception that we're engaged in issues in the Middle East right now," says Christopher Hill, a veteran diplomat who served as Obama's ambassador to Iraq.

Obama's defenders say he has done the best with a poisoned inheritance--from anti-Americanism abroad to tight budgets and rising isolationism at home. And his White House predecessors have often heard cries from overseas that the U.S.'s will to power was faltering. But it's also true that the public is tired of paying in blood and treasure to solve faraway problems that often look unsolvable. "At the end of the day, the U.S. cannot impose its will on every problem in the world," says Adam Smith, the top Democrat on the House Armed Services Committee.

The blunt instrument of military power may be especially useless when it comes to untangling the Arab Spring's social upheavals. "Frankly, the U.S. is not good at resolving another country's political implosion," says Mieke Eoyang, a national-security analyst at Third Way, a Washington think tank. "It may be that the U.S. just doesn't have the tools."

Syria would certainly require high-precision equipment. The country of 22 million, bordered by the Mediterranean to the west and Iraq to the east, has been a dictatorship since 1949. It has also been a constant thorn in the U.S.'s side, aligning with Iran's ruling mullahs and sponsoring the Lebanese terrorist group Hizballah. During the U.S. occupation of Iraq, Assad left his border open to Islamist fighters crossing into Iraq to kill American soldiers. Even so, Assad said in 2009 he "would like to have a dialogue" with the U.S., and American diplomats including Kerry, then chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, paid several visits to Damascus before the uprising began there. But Assad could never quite be coaxed into real cooperation.

The Assad family comes from Syria's Alawite sect, an offshoot of Shi'ite Islam. Their rule over a country that is roughly three-quarters Sunni has always required repression of a degree reminiscent of Saddam Hussein's Iraq. But in March 2011, Syrian society fractured and Assad's rule was openly challenged in the streets for the first time by what would become a Sunni-dominated rebellion.

Syria matters a lot to its neighbors. The civil war has already produced nearly 2 million refugees, an exodus that threatens to destabilize Jordan and Turkey, and has heightened Shi'ite-Sunni tensions in Lebanon and Iraq, inflaming a sectarian conflict that could stretch from the Persian Gulf to the Mediterranean. For months, Assad's allies in Iran and Lebanon have been sending fighters to support his regime. That's one reason the stakes in Syria are so high: it has become a proxy war, fueled by cash and arms, between Iran and its Sunni rivals like Saudi Arabia. There is the obvious moral imperative with regard to a conflict in which more than 100,000 people have been killed. And there is the matter of Israel's security when a chemical-armed state is collapsing.

Obama doesn't deny any of this. "We've got serious interests there," he told PBS's Charlie Rose in June. "And not only humanitarian interests. We can't have the situation of ongoing chaos in a major country that borders a country like Jordan, which in turn borders Israel. And we have a legitimate need to be engaged and to be involved." What he disputes is that he can shape the outcome in Syria through military intervention, either with direct action or by arming rebels who may have radical Islamist ties.

So as they planned their response to the Aug. 21 chemical-weapons attack, Obama's aides focused on calibrating a response that would send a message without causing wider chaos. Too much force could alter the strategic balance of the conflict, possibly empowering Islamist rebels--some of whom are allied with al-Qaeda--whom the White House considers more dangerous than Assad himself. Use too little force, however, and you look feckless. Warns Scowcroft: "Nothing would be worse than to make a gesture which changed nothing and made us look even more impotent."

A Message to Tehran

On Dec. 10, 2009, Obama flew to Norway to accept the Nobel Peace Prize, a premature honor that was not entirely welcomed by the White House. By then Obama had already sent more troops to Afghanistan, escalated drone strikes against al-Qaeda terrorists and seen his hand of friendship rejected by Tehran. It was growing clear that the world might not transform after all. So even as Obama celebrated the cause of world peace that day, he acknowledged that a dangerous world sometimes calls for war, usually led by American arms. "Whatever mistakes we have made, the plain fact is this: the United States of America has helped underwrite global security for more than six decades with the blood of our citizens and the strength of our arms," he said.

Obama is applying that principle now in Syria. Whatever comes of Obama's confrontation with Assad, an even more dangerous confrontation lies in wait--the one with Iran. If another round of negotiations with Tehran should fail, Obama may soon be obliged to make good on his vow to stop Iran from developing a nuclear weapon. "I will not hesitate to use force when it is necessary to defend the United States and its interests," Obama told the American Israel Public Affairs Committee in March 2012.

But to his critics, Obama does hesitate, and trouble follows as a result. With more than three years left in his presidency, he has the opportunity to reverse that impression. Success in Syria and then Iran could vindicate him, and failure could be crushing. "The risk is that, if things in the Middle East continue to spiral, that will become his legacy," says Brian Katulis, a former Obama campaign adviser now with the Center for American Progress.

Some Democratic Presidents have been crippled by foreign policy: Carter by Iran, Lyndon Johnson by Vietnam. But there is another model. Clinton doused the fires in the Balkans and demonstrated the nobility of American intervention. Obama has time to find a path through the current chaos to a successful legacy abroad.

As he charts his course, he might consider a thought from an unlikely source. In a 2009 British newspaper interview that struck a moderate tone, Assad said he hoped Obama would take an active role in the Middle East peace process because only Washington could broker a lasting solution. He said, "There is no substitute for the United States."

10 Questions.
Singer-songwriter John Mayer on throat surgery, his new album, life in Montana and the DIY music industry

MAYER: DAVID JOHNSON FOR TIME

Josh Sanburn | 619 words

You've been out of the spotlight for a couple of years. You had throat surgery and Botox injections into your vocal cords to get rid of a recurring inflammation called a granuloma. What were you up to all that time?

I was really able to come off-line and think, Who do you want to be now? You certainly have the opportunity to make whatever music you want to make. I remember at some point thinking, Wow, do you hear that? That's the sound of nobody thinking about me.

You weren't at home in Montana thinking music's going on without me?

I loved it. I said, Let it go. I want to watch American Idol or The Voice and for the first time not be a snobby critical guy. I became a consumer. I'd go to shows, and instead of me going, Oh, right, you're doing that, I would be fully emotionally affected by it because I didn't just automatically consider myself one of the guys.

Because of the surgery, you couldn't sing or even speak for months. What was that like?

It was exciting at first. And then the novelty wears off, and that's when what could have been depression sets in. And I think you have a choice in those moments in life. You can panic, or you can go, Well, this is f---ing interesting.

Why didn't you panic?

Because I knew that wasn't an option. You've signed up for a wild life anyway. It's no less wild to lose the ability to sing than it is to put your first record out.

Has your voice changed?

It's coming back, and it will come back all the way. The Botox takes a while to dissolve, so as it dissolves, my range comes back.

How did that affect your recent album, Born and Raised and your new one, Paradise Valley?

They stem from this inability to sing higher. I didn't know I had a granuloma for most of the making of Born and Raised. The songs are all low [in pitch] because I would hit a ceiling faster. Looking back on it now, I've been making these records based on those limitations.

Has your songwriting changed as well?

A lot of the greatest stuff for me lately has been stuff that I had tossed off. "Dear Marie," I thought, never could've been good enough. Not enough turns and bobs and weaves. But you get to a point where you go, I don't need to overexpress myself.

You're not worried about writing pop hits anymore?

I'm not worried anymore, period. I'm not worried about pop hits. I'm not worried about sales. I care about one thing, which is just, tell your story. And I want this story to really unfold onstage.

So what's your live show like now?

It's arranged for the short attention span. By the time you realize you're at a show, we're seven songs in. I'd like to get to that point where people go, "You've got a really good sound." There are certain songs from the past that don't fit in that sound right now, and I'm working overtime to write more songs that do.

How has the music industry changed since you first made it big in the 2000s?

It's very DIY now. The artist has his or her finger on the trigger every single day with Twitter and Instagram. If I take too much cough medicine, I could leak anything I want to leak. The problem is when that trickles down into the music, and there's nobody around to say, "I don't think that makes a very good first single." It's a hell of a lot of power for an artist to have, probably too much.

TO SEE MAYER'S INTERVIEW, GO TO time.com/10questions

I Want My MP3
Inside the messy--but promising--future of streaming music

ILLUSTRATION BY MARTIN GEE FOR TIME

Victor Luckerson | 414 words

Any song, anywhere, anytime--all for less than $10 a month. that's how the world should consume music, according to the folks behind services like Spotify, Rdio and Pandora, which collectively reach almost 100 million active users (up from just 45 million two years ago). Despite that breakneck growth, however, none of them are making any money. Spotify, for example, lost $78 million last year. The revenue from its paid users, who shell out as much as $120 a year to stream songs on their mobile devices, could not offset the licensing costs--fractions of cents per play, for artists--generated by users of its free, ad-supported service. Pandora, which is mostly ad-supported, faces similar struggles. "That's the opposite of getting economies of scale," warns Catherine Moore, a music-business professor at New York University.

Both market leaders are working hard to find profits--Spotify by capping listening hours on its free service and Pandora by upping its mobile ad plays. In the meantime, artists are griping (Pink Floyd has called some of Pandora's actions "less than scrupulous") and competitors are circling. Here's how three new streaming-music services stack up, including the much anticipated iTunes Radio, which is expected to get a national rollout in September.

GOOGLE PLAY MUSIC ALL ACCESS

ITUNES RADIO

BEATS MUSIC

Launched in May

Expected to launch in September

Launching later this year

THE GOOD

Users can upload up to 20,000 songs to cloud storage--a feature absent from Spotify--then listen to them on desktop computers and mobile phones

Royalties (a reported 13¢ per song) are higher than Pandora's (12¢), which should help iTunes to keep getting first-listen exclusives from big acts like Justin Timberlake and Daft Punk

Will reportedly offer playlists that are hand-curated by experts and artists--Nine Inch Nails front man Trent Reznor is serving as chief creative officer--to help users discover new music

THE BAD

Available only on Web browsers and Android devices; some tech bloggers have said the name is too long and clunky to catch on

No ability to play songs on demand, likely because Apple still wants music fans to buy their favorite tracks--as much as $1.29 a pop--from the iTunes Store

Spotify added the same feature in August--offering playlists for parties, morning commutes and more--and Beats has yet to respond

THE PRICE

$9.99 per month

Free with ads or $25 per year without ads

TBD, but MOG, the service that Beats bought to seed Beats Music, is free with ads and costs $5 to $10 without them

Elmore Leonard
Capo di tutti capi of crime novelists

LEONARD: MARC HAUSER PHOTOGRAPHY LTD.--GETTY IMAGES

Carl Hiaasen | 225 words

Dutch Leonard was the master of cool. Years ago an editor at the Miami Herald contrived a serial thriller for which 13 writers with Florida connections each did a chapter, independent of the others. The result was a chaotic little novel called Naked Came the Manatee. The publishers sent me, Dutch and Dave Barry on a mini media tour in New York City. We were doing the Today show with Katie Couric when Dave and I began to suspect that Dutch hadn't read a word of the book except for his own chapter. Finally, in the back of a town car, he confessed.

Yet Dutch, who was 87 when he passed away on Aug. 20, was so smooth and charming that nobody caught on, not even Charlie Rose. During the final interviews, Dave and I were fairly merciless, but Dutch never cracked. He was such a pro. I believe it was PEOPLE that wanted to photograph all of us in a plastic wading pool with cheesy pink flamingos and fake palm trees. Dave and I said no way, we're not doing that. But we look over and there's Dutch climbing in. Dave said, "That's the greatest crime-fiction writer in America, and he's O.K. with this." So we proudly got in the pool with him.

Hiaasen is a best-selling author and journalist. His latest novel is Bad Monkey

The Lost Months
Immigration reformers won the battle of August. Can they win the war?

KEVIN DIESCH--LANDOV

Alex Altman | 624 words

Sleepy August, a month of baseball and barbecue, can be a killing field for liberal legislation. The last time Congress mulled immigration reform, back in 2007, the effort died after a grassroots outcry marked by talk-radio screeds and venomous town halls. To avoid the same fate, the forces behind this year's immigration push fanned out across the U.S. during the August recess, organizing rallies and marches, sit-ins and ad blitzes.

If you measure success by events held and headlines generated, the campaign worked. Reformers thumped a shrinking and disorganized opposition. Distracted by Obamacare, the conservative furies never erupted. Liberals exulted, and the media declared victory: immigration reform had survived.

That doesn't mean the cause is healthy. Neither the polls nor their party's political strategists have convinced House Republicans that a sweeping rewrite of immigration law is in the country's interests or their own. The reformers' recess successes did little to brighten the prognosis inside the Capitol. Immigration reform isn't dead, says Rebecca Tallent, director of immigration policy at the Bipartisan Policy Center. "But I don't know how you get it done before the end of the year."

Congress returns to Washington in September with little momentum on immigration and even less time. By stalling through the summer, House Republicans have dragged the immigration debate into a crowded 39-day legislative session this fall, when the calendar will be dominated by battles over how to fund the government and raise the debt limit. Once those wrap up, GOP leaders may lack the appetite for another spat that could split their fractious party.

House Republicans refuse to take up the bipartisan bill that sailed though the Senate, and Speaker John Boehner has forsworn a vote on any legislation that lacks support from a majority of his members. Dozens of conservatives in the House are leery of passing anything at all, lest Democrats use the ensuing bicameral negotiations to jam liberal provisions back into the package.

While Republicans tried to run out the clock, two of reform's most credible salesmen took a step back. Republicans Marco Rubio, a Florida Senator, and Raul Labrador, an Idaho Representative, had the credibility to pitch immigration reform to conservative colleagues. But Rubio, a likely presidential candidate in 2016, saw his poll numbers sink and tacked back to safe conservative territory, pushing a bill to curb abortion and joining the doomed effort to deny government funding unless President Obama agrees to gut his health-care law.

Labrador, a Tea Party favorite and former immigration lawyer, dropped out of a bipartisan House group charged with devising a blueprint for reform. That group remains "the best chance we have at getting a comprehensive House bill," says a House Democratic leadership aide. But it has begun to resemble a Samuel Beckett farce: its work product has been moments from arrival for six months now.

As many supporters privately concede, that leaves no clear path for a bill that beefs up border security, regulates the future flow of immigration and provides a pathway to citizenship for the 11 million undocumented people currently in the U.S. Once the issue slips into 2014, the looming midterm elections may scare off House Republicans, about 70% of whom represent districts that are less than 10% Hispanic.

The bleak outlook has some backers grumbling that negotiators misplayed a strong hand. And the reformers' triumphant recess belies the absence of an inside strategy. Victory in the field means little if it doesn't translate to votes in Congress, and grassroots strength isn't always a harbinger of legislative success. After all, the last time an August recess was hailed as pivotal was in 2009, when conservatives exploded over Obamacare. The left lost that battle. But it eventually won the war.

LightBox

Photograph by Carl de Souza--AFP/Getty Images

45 words

Beleaguered Beast

An endangered black rhino peers out of its crate at the Lewa Wildlife Conservancy in Kenya on Aug. 26. In an antipoaching effort, 11 rhinos are having their horns cut and are being outfitted with tracking devices

FOR PICTURES OF THE WEEK, GO TO lightbox.time.com

World

EGYPT: LOUAFI LARBI--REUTERS

Orthodox leaders walk around a burned evangelical church in Minya governorate on Aug. 26

Cleo Brock-Abraham, Andrew Katz, Lauren E. Bohn | 705 words

In Egypt, Christians Caught in Cross Fire

The revolution of January 2011 feels like a dream in Minya, a region 150 miles (240 km) south of Cairo. There, two years ago, 17-year-old Ayman Labib, a Christian, was beaten to death by two Muslim classmates--who were sentenced to three years in prison. The community, which is one-third Christian, says that's hardly justice. And amid renewed sectarian violence, similar attacks have occurred.

Across Egypt, 60-plus churches have been attacked since early August, allegedly by supporters of ousted President Mohamed Morsi seeking revenge for Christian support of the military coup. In Assiut, an Islamist stronghold with a robust Christian minority, church walls were smeared with MORSI IS MY PRESIDENT graffiti and buildings were tagged with BOYCOTT NESAARA, a derogatory Arabic term for Christians.

The government blames the Muslim Brotherhood, but its leaders have denied involvement and condemned the strife. Some have even alleged that national Coptic leader Pope Tawadros II advocated violence against mosques.

For many, however, this conflict was seen as inevitable. Because Christians account for just 10% of Egypt's population--and are underrepresented in the judiciary, politics and academia--they've historically been scapegoats.

Ayman's sibling Antonius has little hope things will get better. "They kill my brother. They kill my churches," he says. "A revolution? We never had a revolution."

For more Egypt coverage, visit world.time.com

CANADA

'One of our friends lit a joint and passed it around. I had a puff.'

JUSTIN TRUDEAU, Liberal Party leader, admitting to the Huffington Post Canada that he smoked weed after taking office in 2008; Trudeau previously voted for stiff pot-possession penalties but now supports legalization of the drug

DATA

WORLD'S HIGHEST-PAID TENNIS PLAYERS

Forbes ranked them on the basis of their earnings--on and off the court--from June 2012 to June 2013

Roger Federer

$71.5 million

Switzerland

Maria Sharapova

$29 million

Russia

Novak Djokovic

$26.9 million

Serbia

Rafael Nadal

$26.4 million

Spain

Serena Williams

$20.5 million

U.S.

The Explainer

What's Fueling Iraqi Unrest

With about 3,000 people killed in attacks over the past few months--more than 1,000 in July alone, the deadliest month since June 2008-- experts fear Iraq is falling into an all-out sectarian war. Here's why:

• INEPT SECURITY FORCES

The withdrawal of U.S. troops in late 2011 reignited old divisions between sectarian and political groups, and Iraqi military and police are not up to the task.

• A STRUGGLING ECONOMY

High youth unemployment, insufficient private-sector investment (domestic and foreign alike) and poorly managed infrastructure are fueling general discontent.

• INTERNAL DISTRUST

Insurgents who recently attacked the northern town of Shirqat might have been caught if Iraqi security forces and Kurdish authorities had more trust in each other. Now, both groups are looking into sharing information and conducting joint operations.

• AN UNSTABLE NEIGHBOR

Iraq's porous border with Syria has allowed Sunni extremists tied to al-Qaeda to infiltrate en masse, pulling off a large-scale prison break and frequent, coordinated attacks on the Shi'ite majority.

A Golden Tradition

BRITAIN

An estimated 1 million revelers--like the one above--flocked to London's Notting Hill Carnival, one of the largest street festivals in Europe, on Aug. 25. Throughout the holiday weekend, streets were packed with colorful floats, sequined performers and steel bands. The first iteration of the festival was held in 1964 as an Afro-Caribbean community response to poor race relations.

NETHERLANDS

$34,000

Price the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam is charging for 3-D replicas (made in partnership with Fujifilm) of the artist's works, including Sunflowers

Roundup

When Planes Go Child-Free

For April Fools' Day in 2011, budget flyer Ryanair joked about offering flights without kids--or as the airline put it, other people's "little monsters." But these new policies are the real deal.

Malaysia Airlines

Infants were barred from first class on some jets after a chief executive saw complaints that wailing kids were keeping passengers awake

AirAsia X

At no extra cost, travelers ages 12 and older can sit in the child-free Quiet Zone, seven designated rows behind the premium cabin

Scoot Airlines

Passengers of this Singapore Airlines subsidiary can pay $14 extra for the ScootinSilence rows, 21 to 25, where kids under 12 can't sit

Trending In

+

FILM

Thousands of One Direction fans gathered in London's Leicester Square for the premiere of the band's documentary, This Is Us

SEX

Zurich opened drive-in "sex box" facilities--complete with panic buttons--to make legal prostitution safer

EDUCATION

All 25,000 students who took an entrance exam for a Liberian university failed, because of poor English; 1,800 will still be admitted

DIPLOMACY

Palestinians called off planned peace talks after Israeli soldiers killed three people in a West Bank refugee camp

Briefing

ASSAD: SANA/AFP/GETTY IMAGES

272 words

THE WEEK

TENSIONS MOUNTED IN SYRIA

'That would go against elementary logic.'

BASHAR ASSAD, Syrian President, refuting accusations that his troops used chemical weapons "in a place where its own forces are concentrated"

'I didn't like it when the left spent eight years trying to delegitimize President Bush ... I don't think we should be doing that to President Obama.'

BOBBY JINDAL, Louisiana's Republican governor, on GOP calls to impeach the President

500%

Increase in U.S. college costs since 1985, almost double the uptick for health care, gasoline and housing

$40 million

Amount for which Donald Trump was sued by the New York attorney general, who alleged his Trump University had misrepresented its benefits

Yahoo

Passed Google in monthly page views for the first time in over two years

GOOD WEEK

BAD WEEK

Facebook

To pay compensation to members whose names were used in sponsored stories sans consent

'I'M VERY ASHAMED.'

BO XILAI, ousted Chinese politician, during the closing statement of his trial; he is accused of bribery, embezzlement, abusing power, attempting to hide an aide's defection and interfering in a murder investigation involving his wife

367

Pit bulls rescued after police busted a dogfighting ring spanning Alabama, Georgia and Mississippi

'I was Hannah Montana's mother ... Where did I go wrong?'

BROOKE SHIELDS, who played mom to Miley Cyrus on the Disney Channel--years before the tween idol's risqué Video Music Awards routine

'I do hope that some of my dissents will one day be the law.'

RUTH BADER GINSBURG, Supreme Court Justice, on her legacy regarding women's rights; in the past, she's dissented in rulings upholding the partial-birth-abortion ban and the statute of limitations on race- or gender-based pay-discrimination suits

Sources: BBC; Reuters (2); New York Times; Washington Post; Bloomberg; Meet the Press; Today show

Milestones

MEDAL: CAROLYN KASTER--AP

184 words

DIED

Muriel Siebert, 84, pioneering woman in the finance industry and the first, in 1967, to buy a seat on the New York Stock Exchange. She later became the first woman to serve as superintendent of banking for New York State.

AWARDED

The Medal of Honor, to Staff Sergeants Ty Carter and Clinton Romesha, for their actions at the Battle of Combat Outpost Keating in Afghanistan, marking the first time since Vietnam that a pair of living U.S. service members received the honor for the same battle.

CONFIRMED

A new element, by researchers at Lund University in Sweden. It will be No. 115 on the periodic table because its nucleus contains 115 protons.

DIED

Marian McPartland, 95, renowned jazz pianist who hosted a popular radio show on NPR, Piano Jazz, for more than 30 years.

DISCLOSED

By Linda Ronstadt, that she has been diagnosed with Parkinson's disease, a condition the 11-time Grammy Award winner says has left her unable to sing.

DIED

Sid Bernstein, 95, concert promoter best known for bringing the Beatles to the prestigious Carnegie Hall in 1964, when they were new to the U.S., and to Shea Stadium in 1965 and '66.

Nation

FILNER: ZUMA PRESS

Nate Rawlings, Alex Rogers, Adam Sorensen, Katy Steinmetz | 927 words

Blazing Summer

The Yosemite wildfire is just the latest in a costly fire season

For nearly two weeks, the Rim Fire has scorched a sacred corner of Northern California, burning more than 180,000 acres, including at least 22,000 acres of Yosemite National Park. As the fire threatened a crucial source of San Francisco's water supply, nearly 4,000 firefighters labored on the ground and in the air to contain the inferno. "It's all about access--being able to get our crews in there," says Cal Fire captain Mike Mohler. "It's a difficult fire."

The 19 elite firefighters killed battling a June 30 blaze in Arizona marked the start of an especially active summer. In California alone, 4,700 fires--11 of them major--have cost the state $44 million out of a $172 million budget for the year. Thanks to a summer of heat and drought, the U.S. Department of the Interior has already run through the bulk of its annual fire-suppression funds. And as the Rim Fire burned, more than 50 other fires were scorching 10 Western states.

Yet for all of the destruction they cause, wildfires are an important part of the ecosystem, eliminating old trees and clearing room for new ones. One positive effect of the Rim Fire is that it will help the giant sequoias in Yosemite release more of their seeds.

AIR

IT'S A BIRD ... IT'S A PLANE

Planes with tanks in the fuselage and bucket-equipped helicopters drop water on fires and fire retardants in a fire's path to stop its spread.

FREE-FALLING

Since 1940, firefighters known as smoke jumpers have parachuted into hard-to-access areas to battle blazes on the ground.

JUMP KIT

Smoke jumpers wear padded gear to guard against hard landings.

GREAT BALLS OF FIRE

Helicopter crews release thousands of plastic spheres filled with chemicals that burst into flames when they hit the ground. The spheres, which resemble ping-pong balls, are used to start small controlled fires that burn fuel like brush and wood and direct larger blazes away from population centers.

GROUND

GLOVES

A fire-retardant material protects vulnerable hands.

GROUND GAME

Crews on foot work to slow the fire's spread by clearing brush and trees, digging fire lines down to the mineral soil and setting backfires--controlled blazes that eat fuel ahead of the approaching inferno. Hotshot crews, specially trained units with superior fitness, are often used to reach the remotest sections of the fire.

PULASKI

The combination tool is used for chopping and digging.

HOMELAND SECURITY

Engine units are deployed to population centers to prepare ahead of the blaze. When the fire arrives, the crews beat back the flames with hoses.

Chicago's Crossing-Guard Army

Every one of the nearly 1,200 neon-vested workers lining the streets of Chicago's roughest neighborhoods this fall knows the name Derrion Albert. The 16-year-old's after-school beating death in 2009 exposed the plight of the city's violent neighborhoods and faltering schools and led the city to launch the Safe Passage program to protect kids who pass through gang territory on their way to class.

With 47 elementary schools and one high school program shuttered this summer and nearly 13,000 students now venturing farther from home to attend school, Safe Passage is getting its first real test. For the start of school, Aug. 26, Mayor Rahm Emanuel doubled the budget to $15.7 million and upped the number of walk-to-school routes watched over by the unarmed guards to 91.

Safe Passage buys more than watchful eyes. Chicago has demolished dozens of abandoned buildings, repaired hundreds of streetlights and scrubbed graffiti-covered walls. Despite that work, safety is not guaranteed, especially with the school closings sending more students across gang lines. According to the Chicago Sun-Times, 49 murders occurred within a block of those now protected routes last school year. Six of those slayings took place during school hours.

A Fringe-Movement Update

Removing Barack Obama from office--a cause nurtured on grassroots Republican websites and bedsheets hung from overpasses--remains a far-fetched prospect. Congressional leadership is opposed, and calls for virtually every President's ouster have been commonplace for decades. But August is the high season for the sport, and 2013 was no exception.

After a constituent told Michigan Representative Kerry Bentivolio to stop "this runaway train that we have in the White House" from rolling over the Constitution, the first-term Congressman replied, "If I could write that bill and submit it, it would be a dream come true."

Oklahoma Senator Tom Coburn said in Muskogee that Obama has been "perilously close" to committing a high crime or misdemeanor, the constitutional standard for impeachment. Despite considering Obama "a personal friend," Coburn said, "there's a ton of incompetence" in his Administration.

Republican Representative Blake Farenthold told constituents in Luling, Texas, that he believed impeachment actually stood a chance. "If we were to impeach the President tomorrow, you could probably get the votes in the House of Representatives to do it," he said after being confronted by a woman claiming she had proof that Obama's birth certificate was doctored.

A SAN DIEGO SUNSET

"It certainly was never my intention to be a mayor who went out like this," said San Diego Mayor Bob Filner, 71, announcing his plan to resign on Aug. 30 after a sexual-harassment scandal engulfed his first term in office. Since mid-July, 18 women have accused the former Democratic Congressman of inappropriate behavior. His departure came as part of a deal with the city council. San Diego agreed to pay some costs to defend him in a lawsuit filed by one of the women. Filner blamed his exit on a political "lynch mob."

$15

Hourly pay demanded by striking fast-food workers, more than twice the national minimum wage. The protest, which began with a one-day strike in New York last winter, has been embraced by fast-food employees from Michigan to Tennessee.

Shake It Up
Schools are subbing smoothies for fruit. Is that good for kids?

CAROLYN GRIFFIN FOR TIME

Alexandra Sifferlin | 361 words

Kids are supposed to eat fresh fruits and veggies--as much as two cups a day--to promote development, according to the USDA. Problem is, "they usually don't," says Maria Estrada, director of nutrition services at a school district in Riverside County, California. Instead, they opt for fatty snacks.

So like a growing number of administrators, Estrada decided to juice her marketing efforts. This academic year, Coachella Valley schools will introduce smoothie dispensers from JambaGo, the new program from Jamba Juice that's aiming to get K-12 students excited about consuming fruit again (albeit by selling them smoothies). They will be in about 1,000 schools by the end of December. Other schools, meanwhile, have started making smoothies in-house.

Nutrition experts have raised eyebrows. Smoothies tend to be high in sugar (although the only sugar in JambaGo's tweaked recipe comes from the blended fruit). They're also slurped quickly, which makes it tougher for the body to absorb the nutrients in the fruit they contain.

But at almost every school serving them, the number of students buying breakfast has increased--by as much as 10%. And ultimately that's good, says Jim Lewis, a nutrition supervisor for schools in Big Bear Lake, Calif. Although whole fruit is ideal, "if it comes down to some fruit in a smoothie vs. no fruit at all, then I have no issues defending the smoothie."

Julie Harris

HARRIS: AP

Richard Zoglin | 204 words

Great theater performers have a handicap in the mass-media age. Their work is ephemeral, available later only in the memory of those privileged enough to have seen them in person. One of those great performers was Julie Harris, who died Aug. 24 at 87 and who won a record five Tony Awards for Best Actress, in stage roles as various as Sally Bowles in I Am a Camera, Joan of Arc in The Lark and Emily Dickinson in The Belle of Amherst.

Those performances are gone, but her waiflike beauty ("If I had a bosom, I could rule the world," she once said) and unaffected intensity can be glimpsed in the few first-rate film roles she had: as the gawky, conflicted 12-year-old Frankie in Carson McCullers' The Member of the Wedding (a role she originated on Broadway in 1950 and played onscreen when she was 26) and matching James Dean's adolescent angst in East of Eden. She was a trouper in the best sense, working constantly in movies (The Haunting, Reflections in a Golden Eye), in television drama (A Doll's House), soap opera (Knots Landing) and on Broadway well into old age, starring in two autumnal career cappers, On Golden Pond and The Gin Game.

The Clintons Need a Restart
The power couple looks more like an example of excess in politics than a force to tame it

CLINTON: THEO WARGO--GETTY IMAGES

Joe Klein | 833 words

This has been an annoying summer for the Clintons. There was the spectacle of Hillary Clinton's closest aide Huma Abedin standing by her man, the infantile former Congresspervert Anthony Weiner--an unfortunate reminder of the interns of yesteryear. There was the splashback over whether Lawrence Summers, a former Clinton Treasury Secretary, should become chairman of the Federal Reserve Board--an unfortunate reminder of the feckless Clintonian attitude toward financial deregulation, which led rather directly to the Great Recession of 2008. And to top it off, there was a New York Times exposé of moral and fiscal slovenliness at the Clinton Foundation--an unfortunate reminder of the way the Clintons too often go about their business, combining great works in the world with shameless world-class fundraising.

All this while former Secretary Clinton was getting her ducks in a row, preparing, no doubt, for another run at the presidency in 2016. And all that as the political book of the summer, Mark Leibovich's This Town, was providing the rest of the country with a hilarious excoriation of Washington's incestuous culture of money, media, lobbying and paralysis.

I suspect that this will be a problem for Hillary Clinton going forward, unless she decides to do something about it. The Clintons, Leibovich makes clear, were present at the creation of Washington celebrity culture. Their political consultants became TV stars. Their press aides and pollsters careened through the revolving door to take jobs doing crisis management--and boy, were the Clinton aides experienced at that!--for some of the greatest corporate malefactors. Their fundraisers, like the relentless Terry McAuliffe, set new levels of brazen display. (You may recall the renting of the Lincoln Bedroom.) They were not alone in this, of course. Other Presidents' men and women have slid into greasy manipulation of the gears of power; former congressional leaders like Dick Gephardt and Trent Lott have abandoned what skimpy principles they had to lobby for the plutocracy.

Bill Clinton certainly has the right to make a little money. He grew up poor and stayed poor while in public office. He was Bubba, the lover of McDonald's fries, the fatherless empathy hound who really cared, in the pollster's eternal question, about people like you. A sleek vegan now, he made it clear during his moment of transcendent brilliance at the 2012 Democratic Convention, and in the most entertaining way possible, that the Republicans were different. They were from the fancy side of the tracks, peddling fantasies--talking to empty chairs, as it were; ignoring arithmetic--because they were, er, covering up the fact that, ah, they represented the interests of, well, the rich folks. Meanwhile, his top aide and surrogate son, Douglas J. Band, was moonlighting as the co-founder of a "corporate consulting, public relations and merchant banking" firm called Teneo while also directing the Clinton Global Initiative. Teneo's clients forked over as much as $250,000 per month for its services, including access to the aura of a paid adviser named William Jefferson Clinton. Band has resigned from his paid position at the Clinton Foundation, and Clinton has resigned from Teneo, but the memory lingers on.

Much of the political press and almost all the smug Democrats who populate the world that Leibovich describes in This Town have anointed Hillary Clinton as the party's next nominee and, given the morbid state of the Republican Party, probably the next President. She is certainly the best-qualified politician to run for President in many a moon. But I wonder: At what point does the stench emanating from Washington reach a critical mass of the population? Can a populist reformer, like New York's Governor Andrew Cuomo or Montana's Brian Schweitzer, run against her, making the Augean-stables argument that it's time to sandblast the filth from the nation's capital? A vigorous opponent could argue that the Clintons' long history of fancy conferences and steroidal speaking fees and flights on private jets, consulting with Democratic Wall Street sorts like Bob Rubin and Summers, has rendered them too precious to represent the people. There is something unearthly about getting paid $700,000 for a speech in Nigeria.

My guess is that Clinton will have to emerge from her comfort zone--the succor provided by her friends and sycophants and favored advisers--and really address the money culture that is rotting our democracy. She is going to have to reject her husband's Wall Street friends and policies. She may have to demand signed no-lobbying-ever-again legal pledges from her staff (with prohibitive financial penalties built in). She may have to get the world's greatest explainer to help with a mea culpa or two. He might even consider stopping in at a McDonald's--for a smoothie, if not a Big Mac--and getting back in touch with the folks.

TO READ JOE'S BLOG POSTS, GO TO time.com/swampland

Pop's Drop: From Madonna to Miley
Cyrus' derivative stunt reveals an artistically bankrupt music culture

CYRUS: KEVIN MAZUR--WIREIMAGE/GETTY IMAGES

Camille Paglia | 797 words

Disgusting!" "Raunchy!" "Desperate!" So went the scathing reviews that poured in after once wholesome Disney star Miley Cyrus' recent bizarre performance at the MTV Video Music Awards.

Bopping up and down the catwalk in hair-twist devil's horns and a flesh-colored latex bikini, Cyrus lewdly wagged her tongue, tickled her crotch with a foam finger, shook her buttocks in the air and spanked a 6-ft. 7-in. black burlesque queen.

Most of the media backlash focused on Cyrus' crass opportunism, which stole the show from Lady Gaga, normally no slouch in the foot-stamping, look-at-me department. But the real scandal was how atrocious Cyrus' performance was in artistic terms. She was clumsy, flat-footed, and cringingly unsexy, an effect heightened by her manic grin.

How could American pop have gotten this bad? Sex has been a crucial component of the entertainment industry since the seductive vamps of silent film and the bawdy big mamas of roadhouse blues. Elvis Presley, James Brown and Mick Jagger brought sizzling heat to rock, soul and funk music, which in turn spawned the controversial raw explicitness of urban hip-hop.

The Cyrus fiasco, however, is symptomatic of the still heavy influence of Madonna, who sprang to world fame in the 1980s with sophisticated videos that were suffused with a daring European-art-film eroticism and were arguably among the best artworks of the decade. Madonna's provocations were smolderingly sexy because she had a good Catholic girl's keen sense of transgression. Subversion requires limits to violate.

Young performers will probably never equal or surpass the genuine shocks delivered by the young Madonna, as when she sensually rolled around in a lacy wedding dress and thumped her chest with the mike while singing "Like a Virgin" at the first MTV awards show, in 1984. Her influence was massive and profound, on a global scale.

But more important, Madonna, a trained modern dancer, was originally inspired by work of tremendous quality--above all, Marlene Dietrich's glamorous movie roles as a bisexual blond dominatrix and Bob Fosse's stunningly forceful strip-club choreography for the 1972 film Cabaret, set in decadent Weimar-era Berlin. Today's aspiring singers, teethed on frenetically edited small-screen videos, rarely have direct contact with those superb precursors and are simply aping feeble imitations of Madonna at 10th remove.

Pop is suffering from the same malady as the art world, which is stuck on the tired old rubric that shock automatically confers value. But those once powerful avant-garde gestures have lost their relevance in our diffuse and technology-saturated era, in which there is no longer an ossified high-culture establishment to rebel against. On the contrary, the fine arts are alarmingly distant or marginal to most young people today.

Unfortunately, the media spotlight so cheaply won by Cyrus will inevitably spur repeats of her silly stunt, by her and others. Image and profile now rule the music industry. At a time when profits are coming far more from touring than from CD sales, performers are being hammered too early into a marketable formula for cavernous sports venues. With their massive computerized lighting and special-effects systems, arena shows make improvisation impossible and stifle the natural rapport with the audience that performers once had in vaudeville houses and jazz clubs. There is neither time nor space to develop emotional depth or creative skills.

Pop is an artistic tradition that deserves as much respect as any other. Its lineage stretches back to 17th century Appalachian folk songs and African-American blues, all of which can still be heard vibrating in the lyrics and chord structures of contemporary music. But our most visible young performers, consumed with packaging and attitude, seem to have little sense of that thrilling continuity and therefore no confidence in how it can define and sustain their artistic identities over the course of a career.

What was perhaps most embarrassing about Cyrus' dismal gig was its cutesy toys--a giant teddy bear from which she popped to cavort with a dance troupe in fuzzy bear drag. Intended to satirize her Disney past, it signaled instead the childishness of Cyrus' notion of sexuality, which has become simply a cartoonish gimmick to disguise a lack of professional focus. Sex isn't just exposed flesh and crude gestures. The greatest performers, like Madonna in a canonical video like "Vogue," know how to use suggestion and mystery to project the magic of sexual allure. Miley, go back to school!

Paglia is author of Glittering Images: A Journey Through Art from Egypt to Star Wars

The Alchemists of Wall Street
Clever financing may reward shareholders, but it does nothing to help the economy

ICAHN: HEIDI GUTMAN--CNBC/NBCU/GETTY IMAGES

Rana Foroohar | 850 words

One of the great ironies of American business today is that while the country's biggest, richest companies have more contact with investors and capital markets than ever before, they don't need any capital. Just take Apple, which has in recent weeks been beset by activist investors such as David Einhorn and Carl Icahn, who are urging the company, which has some $147 billion in cash on hand (and $3 billion in profit rolling in every month), to borrow money in the bond markets so it can turn around and hand the cash back to investors (like them) in the form of higher dividends or it can buy back shares. Apple is willing to play ball because it has been looking to bolster its share price, which has lagged since Steve Jobs' death nearly two years ago--the last time the company had a really big product hit.

The strategy works: Every time Apple announces a new payout--or Icahn tweets that it might--the stock soars. Apple's share price has risen to over $500 recently, from a low of $391 in April. But it also underscores an uncomfortable truth, which is that Apple, one of the most admired companies in the world, spends a large chunk of time and energy thinking about how to create value via financial engineering rather than the real kind. And that says something about the oversize and possibly damaging role that finance has come to play in our economy.

Indeed, economists are beginning to look closely at the fact that as finance has come to be a greater percentage of our economy in the post--World War II period--particularly since the 1980s--growth in the real economy has slowed. They are positing many reasons to explain this inverse relationship. One is that as banks and investors pour more money and attention into high-flying financial maneuvers like Apple's, they have less funding for plain-vanilla lending to the people and small businesses that create the majority of jobs. There's also the idea that Wall Street places huge pressures on firms to act in ways that maximize short-term profits at the expense of long-term, job-creating investments.

Unlike many small and medium American businesses, Apple has cash to spare. But isn't that cash better spent on an innovation-spurring R&D project than put in the hands of activist investors? (Not that some of them aren't smart long-term thinkers: Ralph Whitworth at Relational Investors would certainly be one.) After all, it's real-product development that ultimately spurs higher share prices--one reason that Google, which has been gaining on Apple in app development, has seen a slow but steady share-price increase rather than peaks and valleys over the past year.

Many investors like icahn would argue that a corporation's job is to get cash to shareholders most efficiently. In today's low-interest-rate environment, borrowing low to increase the dividend is certainly efficient. But there are plenty of long-term buy-and-hold investors like Warren Buffett and Vanguard founder Jack Bogle who warn that our capital markets have become too short term. And the short term is getting even shorter--even down to the millisecond--as speed traders have demonstrated. The entire value of the New York Stock Exchange in recent years has turned over roughly every 12 months, a rate that has doubled since the 1990s. As Buffett, who likens Wall Street to a restaurant with a casino, once told me, "You've now got a body of people [in the market] who've decided they'd rather to go to the casino than the restaurant."

Another worry about the way Wall Street influences American business is that it increases income inequality. Many economists believe that inequality can ultimately slow growth in an economy like ours, which is 70% dependent on consumer spending. As University of Texas economist James Galbraith points out, there are 100 years of good data to show that "as asset markets get bigger, inequality does too." As Wall Street grows, it sucks the air out of the room and makes the rich richer while not necessarily fueling faster growth in the real economy.

The disconnect between the stock price of Apple and the company's contribution to the larger economy can be seen in another way: taxes. One of the mind-bending reasons Apple is borrowing money is that it doesn't want to repatriate the cash it has in overseas accounts and be forced to pay U.S. tax rates on it. That we have a tax code that favors debt over equity and has allowed U.S. firms to shoulder a smaller share of the country's tax burden over the past 30 years, even while corporate profit as a share of GDP has been rising, is proof enough that there's a large disconnect between finance, big business and the rest of us.

What You Said About ...

606 words

THE IMPACT OF "I HAVE A DREAM"

"Mahalia Jackson said, 'Tell them about the dream, Martin.' And that's when we got American scripture," Jon Meacham told the hosts of Morning Joe while discussing his Aug. 26--Sept. 2 cover story about the 50th anniversary of Martin Luther King Jr.'s transformative "I Have a Dream" speech. The issue's cover line (founding father) linked King with some of the greatest leaders in American history, a sentiment many readers shared. "He was a servant who gave his life for the cause of freedom, justice and equality," wrote Scot DeGraf of Charles Town, W.Va. Kathy Naylor of Tampa, Fla., commented, "Young adults everywhere in the world need to learn from his outstanding example."

Other readers questioned the luminaries we tapped to reflect on the speech. "As far as I can see, Colin Powell was the furthest right on the political spectrum the issue was willing to go," wrote Tom Davis of Schroon Lake, N.Y. "Is this historically fair and balanced?"

The print feature launched alongside a multimedia package including original Life photos, interviews with attendees and the docuseries One Dream, which marked the first project from Time's own Red Border Films. "What an amazing site to honor an amazing cause," wrote Twitter user @danielwaisberg.

SONGS OF THE SUMMER Douglas Wolk's roundup of the 13 tunes that defined summer 2013--led by Robin Thicke's "Blurred Lines"--had a few glaring omissions, according to some Time.com commenters. Among them: "Popular Song" by Mika (featuring Ariana Grande) and the Miguel--Mariah Carey duet "Beautiful" ("Still the best," wrote CarrieBx).

BEHIND THE STORY

Photographs from activists and combatants are playing an important role in the Syrian civil war (which we explore in "Across the Red Line," page 28). Some of these images, taken by locals in the aftermath of an alleged chemical attack near Damascus, were posted on Facebook and Twitter before being distributed by wire services, which verified their authenticity.

GALLERY OF THE WEEK

This image by Stephanie Sinclair, of two 8-year-old girls with their adult husbands in Yemen in 2010 (part of the "Too Young to Wed" project), is just one of many that have won top honors at Visa Pour l'Image, the annual photojournalism festival in Perpignan, France, that's organized by Jean-François Leroy. For more, visit lightbox.time.com.

ON TIME.COM

On Sept. 4, we'll reveal our annual list of 30 pinners to follow, which will highlight expert Pinterest curators in food, fashion, tech, design and more. Here's a first look at the picks.

LAUREN CONRAD

Primping, dining, decorating--this reality star and lifestyle blogger pins it all

LEICA CAMERA

Offers photo tips, equipment advice and videos of photographers in the field

MARTHA STEWART

The domestic icon posts brunch recipes, organization tips, gardening how-tos and more

Please recycle this magazine and remove inserts or samples before recycling

The Robot Economy
As rapid technological advances create more powerful robots, which jobs will be left behind?

Photograph by Spencer Lowell

David Von Drehle | 2964 words

Japanese Engineers pulled off an impressive demonstration earlier this year. They arranged a convoy of four freight-hauling trucks, cruising smoothly at roughly 50 m.p.h., maintaining a steady distance between the vehicles as they roared past commercial buildings and rolling fields. The impressive part was that three of the trucks had no driver. Only the lead vehicle had a human at the wheel; the others were controlled by lasers, software and wireless communications. The automatons were really good too. At one point, the engineers arranged to have a chase car accelerate past two units of the convoy and cut in behind the second truck. The third and fourth vehicles promptly fell back to a safe following distance--then closed the gap after the chase car left the line.

Watching a video of that demonstration, I couldn't help wondering how many people are employed as truck drivers in the U.S. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the number was 1.6 million in 2010 and is projected to grow to nearly 2 million by 2020. These aren't bad jobs, either. Median pay for truckers as of 2010 was about $38,000, with many veteran drivers earning twice that, plus benefits. Were those Japanese trucks a vision of doom bearing down on all those middle-class jobs? In today's world (let alone tomorrow's), the speed and force of technological change seem to summon an uh-oh for every gee whiz.

The automation of human labor is as old as the Industrial Revolution. From the steam engine and the cotton gin to the desktop computer and the robotic welder, machines have enabled leaps of efficiency that create far more jobs than they destroy. And yet many economists and technologists believe that things are different this time, that society is entering a new and troubling phase as computing power and other advances make possible the creation of ever-more-powerful robots. What if the economic growth of the future produces more jobs for more robots, leaving humans behind? What if we're heading toward a future in which a handful of creative humans marshal an army of ever-more-intelligent machines while everyone else languishes? How does the world work without ... work?

We can see jobs vanishing before our eyes. Airport ticket counters used to teem with employees; now only a handful stand by to assist customers who use kiosks. Travel agencies once brightened streets with posters touting sunny destinations; now people book vacations online. For workers from accountants to X-ray technicians, technology has chipped away at a virtual alphabet of occupations. This revolution is likely partly to blame for the slow growth in jobs since the crash of 2008. Consider the manufacturing sector: robust growth in production has produced little or no growth in employment. According to a study published by the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago, by the end of last year U.S. manufacturing had recovered 75% of the output lost in the Great Recession but only about 21% of the lost jobs.

Whether you lean toward the gee whiz or the uh-oh, there is no doubt that the workplace is heading into uncharted terrain. As MIT professor Erik Brynjolfsson and principal research scientist Andrew McAfee put it in their book Race Against the Machine, "Computers (hardware, software, and networks) are only going to get more powerful and capable in the future, and have an ever-bigger impact on jobs, skills, and the economy. The root of our problems is not that we're in a Great Recession, or a Great Stagnation, but rather that we are in the early throes of a Great Restructuring."

The Human Advantage

Truck drivers are part of a huge web of workers around the planet who sort, pack, load, transport, unload and deliver the astonishing bounty of the global economy. Every touchscreen, sewer pipe, negligee and air compressor, every tractor, picture frame and Xanax tablet. Shipping is the lifeblood of human commerce, employing tens of millions of workers to pump goods and materials through the world's transportation arteries. If robots can steer trucks down highways, they can certainly pack boxes and load pallets. An enormous number of jobs are at stake in the shipping and distribution fields, which makes them a good coal mine in which to hunt for canaries.

As it happens, I don't live far from the Overland Park, Kans., headquarters of YRC Worldwide, a trucking giant that operates 450 shipping terminals, 15,000 trucks and 52,000 freight trailers across North America and beyond. The company's clients come from every economic echelon, from Walmart to Wally's Widgets. CEO James Welch showed me to a chair one recent morning in his modest 10th-floor office. His eyes gleamed when I mentioned a claim by those Japanese engineers that robotic convoys could cut fuel consumption by 15%. That's a lot of money in a highly competitive business--in the neighborhood of $100 million per year for YRC, which spent $630 million on fuel in 2012. Robots would also cut payroll costs, and machines don't take sick days or file for workers' compensation. Yet Welch was underwhelmed by the prospect of self-driving vehicles.

"I wouldn't bet against it," he ventured between sips of a soft drink he picked up at a nearby gas station. "But it doesn't seem very real to me anytime soon." Why? Because unlike the trucks in Japan, which cruised along empty roads marked with freshly painted white lines to guide the laser-driven steering, YRC's trucks traverse the wild and often crumbling roads of the U.S.'s cities and countryside. "I get around enough to see that we have some pretty serious infrastructure issues in this country," Welch continued, "not to mention all the people who are driving while texting or eating or watching movies." How's a computer to know that the driver of the car merging from the on-ramp is busy posting a Vine video of herself blowing bubble gum? How does an algorithm deduce that the cars up ahead are swerving to avoid an unseen tire in the middle of the road?

"I could picture it working if we built separate roads for driverless trucks," Welch said, "but who is going to pay for that? If they pass the cost to the industry, the tolls would be cost-prohibitive. And even if you had dedicated lanes, what happens when it's time to pull off for fuel?"

Welch told me that YRC teaches its drivers-in-training that truckers must make an average of 200 observations and 20 decisions per mile, and while those numbers are mere child's play for a computer, the tricky part is how many of the decisions are unpredictable. They rely on experience and intuition. This is why, for the foreseeable future, YRC's ideal truck driver isn't a robot. It's Arthur Cage of Memphis. In nearly 40 years of hauling and delivering freight, Cage, 64, has covered 5.6 million miles without an accident of any kind. The secret to his success starts with his attitude, he told me when I called him at home: like a computer, he never loses his cool or lets his concentration flag. But unlike a computer, Cage "always [expects] the unexpected." He studies the weather for hints of a slick road or a gusting wind. He peers into the cars ahead and beside and behind him, trying to intuit the next lurch or swerve or stomping of brakes before it happens. He's always learning. Sometimes he will follow an erratic driver to the next rest stop so he can add to his understanding of unpredictable hazards.

"I asked a man once, 'Back at mile marker 39, when your car started wobbling all over, what were you doing?' And he said, 'Lighting a cigarette.' You see? He and I were both lucky that the shoulder was firm where he ran onto it. If that man had done that same thing where the shoulder was made of gravel, taking his eyes off the road and weaving and bobbing, he would have lost control of that car. My job is to anticipate that." When Welch ponders the future of YRC's workforce, he thinks less about robots than about hiring and training young versions of Cage.

Yet there are many varieties of work under the big umbrella of the U.S. shipping industry, a nearly $17 trillion field, and many of them are robot-ready. Highly standardized and repetitive tasks are ideal for automation. Take loading and unloading cargo ships, for example. The vast majority of oceangoing freight travels in standardized intermodal containers, and robots are tirelessly adept at stacking and unstacking these boxes, moving them from ship to freight train to flatbed truck. Engineers envisioning the ports of the future foresee a continuing decline in the number of longshoremen, whose ranks have been hard hit by automation. At the Port of New York, for example, their numbers have been cut by some 90% since peaking in the 1960s.

Similarly, small-package handlers like Amazon and FedEx deploy robots to perform many of the tasks at their distribution centers around the world, because both firms work with standard-size boxes and envelopes. Last year Amazon paid $775 million to acquire Kiva Systems, a company that makes robots, zippy little orange mules that race through warehouses storing and retrieving merchandise.

YRC exists in a different world. Every shipment presents a new piece of an ever changing puzzle: how to pack all sorts of stuff, from long steel rods and bundles of lumber to barbecue grills and lightbulbs, neatly into outbound trucks. "It's always something different, and we haul this freight through traffic, along city streets, and eventually back our trucks right up to our customers' docks," said CEO Welch. "We'll be hiring drivers and forklift operators for as long as I can see."

Replaced by Robots

A distinction made by Frank Levy of MIT and Richard Murnane of Harvard, a pair of economists who have studied the impact of automation on human employment, helps explain the next phase of the Great Restructuring. If your job involves learning a set of logical rules or a statistical model that you apply to task after task--whether you are grilling a hamburger or issuing a boarding pass or completing a tax return--you are ripe for replacement by a robot. As computing power continues to increase and code writers continue to work their binary miracles, more and more occupations will fall into that category. We will see more robots in teaching, sales, nursing, stock trading--and journalism too.

The surviving jobs will be of three kinds, Levy and Murnane predict: solving unstructured problems, working with new information and carrying out nonroutine manual tasks. It's hard to design a suitable robot to style hair, fix plumbing problems, design buildings or plot corporate strategy. A computer might be able to write a routine contract, but attorneys who can write persuasive legal briefs will be in demand for the foreseeable future.

I wondered how the same question might look to someone whose business is robots. So I reached out to the editor in chief of the Journal of Field Robotics, Sanjiv Singh, a longtime faculty member at the cutting-edge Robotics Institute of Carnegie Mellon University. Field robotics means exactly what it sounds like: the study of real-world applications for the theoretical investigations of other scientists and engineers. In his workshop, Singh has tackled a wide range of applications. He spent one patch of his career applying robotics to harvesting fruit. Currently, he's perfecting large-scale autonomous air vehicles, which he helpfully translated as "giant helicopters that can fly by themselves."

Interestingly, Singh endorses a number of Welch's ideas. "It takes a long time to develop these technologies," he says, and the idea of robots as artificial humans is not something he expects to see. Instead, he thinks of humans and robots primarily as collaborators. Robotic devices can relieve people of jobs that are "dull, dangerous, dirty," whether those jobs are on mind-numbing assembly lines or involve tasks in unpleasant environments, like clearing land mines or welding on the ocean floor. (A major robotics competition this year, sponsored by the Department of Defense, will produce a humanoid robot designed to climb ladders, patch leaks and shut off valves at disaster sites like the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant in Japan.)

In other cases, technology can enhance people's ability to perform tasks. Rather than imagine a day when truck drivers are obsolete, Singh prefers to think about ways that sensors designed for robotic applications can support safer driving by humans. "I recently bought a Volvo with an optional drowsy-driver detector," he says. "It beeps at you if you start to veer. That's not what laypeople think of when you talk about robotics, but it is from our perspective."

Can sensors and software help fighter pilots land safely on storm-splashed aircraft carriers? Can machines speed apple harvests and relieve migrant workers of their bushel baskets? Can devices in the walls at Grandma's house ensure that she takes her medicine, turn off the stove when she forgets to and summon help if she breaks a hip? Yes, yes and yes. What worries many economists, however, is the next step, where robots go from assisting human workers to making them obsolete.

That step, says Singh, will be fraught with difficulty in many fields. Here again, driving is a good example. For years, Google has been spending huge sums (for reasons not entirely clear) to develop self-driving cars. And it has made great progress, racking up more than 300,000 test miles without an accident, according to the company's official blog. Yet the nation's cab drivers need not worry about their jobs. The Google cars may be self-driving, but they require humans at the ready to take over in case of trouble. The cars also fare poorly on snowy streets and can be flummoxed by such routine hazards as cones in the road. "There's still a long road ahead," Google acknowledged last year.

Nor are these issues purely technical. The closer we get to self-driving vehicles or pilotless airplanes or human-free restaurant kitchens, the more questions of law and culture kick in. "Like all machines, some are going to fail, and how are we going to handle that? Who's held responsible when a driverless car kills someone?" Singh asks. And what about emotional acceptance? Self-driving trucks hauling loads of ore back and forth at a remote mining operation in Australia are one thing. (Yes, it's happening.) "It's something else to put your daughter in a self-driving car on a rainy night and send her off to her violin lesson," Singh says.

The Permanently Unemployed

"Creative destruction" is the phrase coined by economist Joseph Schumpeter to describe the irresistible force by which market economies grind weak, fading or inefficient industries into fertilizer for new, stronger ventures. In 1870 it took nearly half of all working Americans to run the nation's farms and feed its people, according to Census data. Today far more food is grown by a tiny fraction of that number: less than 2% of U.S. jobs are in agriculture. Yet the destruction has led to many more jobs than were lost. The lightbulb helped kill the New England whaling industry, but the workers employed thanks to electricity could fill enough ships to darken the seas.

As ever-more-sophisticated machines move into all manner of workplaces--both blue collar and white collar--entire categories of work may disappear. "Workers will have to make a historically unprecedented transition," Martin Ford, a Silicon Valley software designer and writer, explained in a recent article for the Association for Computing Machinery. "Rather than simply acquiring new skills and moving to another routine job, workers will have to instead migrate to an occupation that is genuinely nonroutine and therefore protected from automation." Mastering creative, analytical or intuitive work is not for everyone, and yet it may become the only path to a productive occupation. Those who cannot make the leap may be doomed to jobs that pay too little to be worth automating--cleaning hotel rooms, trimming shrubbery--or face permanent unemployment.

Even the job of creating robots is not a safe 21st century career. As you read this, there are some very smart scientists in a discipline called evolutionary robotics who are busy developing robots that invent other robots. The limitations of the driverless truck give us reason to think their task may take a long time to complete. But the fact that they are working on it at all shows how deep we are into the robotics revolution. While we don't know what effect it will have on our economy or how we interact with one another, it should spur us to work just as hard to prepare ourselves, our children and our communities to meet the challenges this revolution will bring.

Cabin Pressure
As airlines become more streamlined and profitable, flyers face an ever tighter squeeze

Jeffrey Milstein

Bill Saporito/LGA to FLL/MIA to LAX to JFK | 2881 words

If you want some insight into why the department of justice put a gate hold on the merger between American Airlines and US Airways, here's a number to ponder: 13 million seats--gone.

That's how many airplane seats have disappeared over the past year--removed from the system by airlines as they reduce capacity. According to the website Aviation DataMiner, these cuts have come from across the industry. Only ultra-low-cost carriers Spirit and Allegiant are growing.

This means life in the skies will not be improving anytime soon: no empty seats, no room overhead and stressed-out staffs. With fewer seats available, the domestic load factor--the percentage of seats filled--reached a record of 87.1% in June. And as there is little or no capacity growth in the forecast, the future of flying promises more cramp for more cash.

That reality became painfully obvious in a two-day, three-airline lap around the country in late August. "You can't go out with flights that aren't filled," says Blair Pomeroy, an aviation expert with consultancy Oliver Wyman. "The load factor is up 20 points in the last two decades. They have gotten that increase by eliminating marginal flights." Fares are rising because airlines have stopped chasing market share. Instead, they've tried to maximize profit from existing customers by upsizing or downsizing their equipment and adjusting timetables. That means, in some cases, making fewer trips with larger jets. Or sometimes just the opposite: flying smaller jets that are cheaper to operate. This is why you are stuck on a 70-seat Embraer 175 for close to four hours from Pittsburgh to Denver rather than a more comfortable Boeing 737 or Airbus A320.

At the same time, the industry continues to harvest what it calls ancillary revenue (and what passengers call fees--along with a few other words) for everything from checked baggage to so-called premium economy seats, priority boarding, trip insurance, movies, meals and drinks.

The fees are part of a strategy to "decommoditize" air travel, as Delta said in a recent presentation to analysts, by focusing on a "customized and differentiated experience." Translated, that means you pay to get on the plane, then keep paying until you reach the level of comfort and service that matches your lifestyle or pocketbook, from zero extra for a middle seat in the way, way back of a fully loaded wide-body to a vast sum to be cosseted in business class. The major carriers, of course, also try to lock in their less budget-restricted corporate customers with global alliances and frequent-flyer programs that offer better seats and upgrades. But even for the top ranks of flyers, belts are tightening--Delta announced that it would be adding a spending qualification for its medallion level. "Every customer," says Marty St. George, head of marketing for the low-cost carrier JetBlue, "has to decide what they value."

The fare-and-fee strategy has rewarded the industry with plump profits. Last year, Delta's net profit hit $1.6 billion on rising revenue and profit per passenger; the industry's pretax profit margin is up 8 percentage points since 2009. More important, carriers have developed the operational discipline to sustain these profit levels for years, as long as fuel prices remain manageable. "The legacy airlines used to be run like government agencies and not hungry businesses," says Pomeroy. "Those days are over." Indeed. In July, American racked up $349 million in earnings. Not a bad bounce back from being broke.

How did we get here? You have to go back to 2008, when oil reached $147 a barrel and jet fuel peaked at $3.89 a gallon. The domestic airline industry lost nearly $10 billion that year. Struggling Northwest Airlines landed in the arms of Delta, dooming Northwest's struggling Memphis hub; for Delta, it was so long, Cincinnati. In 2010, United united with Continental. Cleveland is getting nervous about being dumped. And US Airways' earlier merger with America West ended Pittsburgh's hub dream. In merging, the combined companies shrank their footprints--and their costs.

As of 2012, jet-fuel prices were roughly at the same level as in 2008, yet the industry made about $2.3 billion. A new age has dawned.

Lean, Mean and Nothing in Between

The mixed glories of the new aviation age are on full display at New York City's LaGuardia Airport, where I wait in the luggage-check-in line for a Spirit Airlines flight headed for Fort Lauderdale, Fla. The scene is chaotic as passengers lugging shopping bags, boxes and all manner of containers frantically attempt to repack so they can avoid bag charges.

The flight looks full despite a 6:50 a.m. departure. Spirit often flies vampire hours to keep its planes in the air as much as possible. How about a 10 p.m. flight to Plattsburgh, N.Y., from Fort Lauderdale, and a return at 1:30 a.m.? It's filled with Canadians escaping high-priced fares in Toronto.

On board, seating is tight. Spirit gets 218 passengers on its Airbus 321s vs. 159 for, say, JetBlue's Airbus 321s. The guy sitting next to me, in the middle seat, has his knees jammed into the seat in front of him. Because I paid $25 extra to get a window seat next to the emergency exit, there's no chair in front of me and I can stretch out my 6-ft. 2-in. frame. The first row goes for another $50. Advertising is pasted on the overhead compartments and tray-table backs.

Spirit has become today's most profitable airline by attracting passengers who otherwise wouldn't fly: low-margin customers the network carriers no longer desire. "The simplest way we describe the Spirit market," says the company's CEO, Ben Baldanza, "is the people who pay for the tickets themselves."

Here's how Baldanza summarizes the changes he sees in the industry: "Less competition, less capacity, fewer intervening marginal hubs." He means, for instance, that St. Louis, once a hub for airlines like TWA and American, is no longer a Western gateway. And good luck finding direct service to Omaha--or much of any service to Sioux Falls, S.D. Closing midsize hubs "created an industry that is financially more stable for the first time in a long, long time," Baldanza tells Time. It's good for consumers in the sense that a stable industry has value, but not so good in that there are fewer flights between midsize cities--and some smaller markets have lost service completely.

Baldanza has been working hard to provide more options and city pairs. In doing so, he is shaking up the industry. After taking charge of the then money-losing Spirit in 2006, Baldanza analyzed all the world's airlines and reached a conclusion. "The airlines that were perennially successful were really at the extremes," he says. "We realized they were either high touch like Emirates, or low cost like Ryanair."

He went low cost, unleashing a highly disciplined, highly discounted airline that is growing 20% annually with industry-leading profit margins. At Spirit, price is the product. The average base fare is $79, which gets you a seat. Everything else is extra. Spirit charges for checked bags as well as those in overhead bins. If you want an assigned seat, a middle, aisle, window or exit-row seat, that will cost you, based on a sliding scale. Would you like some water? Two bucks. The average passenger typically spends an extra $30 for add-ons, but the average total cost, at $110, still beats most of the major carriers.

Baldanza has his sights set on expansion. He figures there are at least 400 city pairs in the U.S., Caribbean and South American markets--or roughly any market where 200 people a day are flying. "We have more growth opportunities than we have airplanes on order," he says. In the airline industry, that's revolutionary, even if it's not exactly the kind of revolution that brings a smile to the face of a frequent flyer.

Newer Isn't Always Better

I am flying with a senior citizen out of Miami--that would be the jet, not a fellow passenger. I'm on one of those aging Boeing 757s that have served as industry workhorses for years. This one is owned by American and has all the hallmarks of its age: the upholstery is tired, and the first-class seats are old school, not much different from the coach seats (or so I tell myself as I head back to Row 17). The in-flight entertainment is hilariously outmoded--ancient screens suspended from the cabin ceiling with your choice of the same movie. A woman behind me remarks that she was expecting something "where you could change the channels."

American and United have ordered hundreds of new jets, which theoretically could make life better in the air. The 787 Dreamliner, for instance, has a cabin altitude pressure of 6,000 ft., meaning you will suffer less from jet lag. But you might suffer elsewhere on the jet. Boeing has configured the long-haul Dreamliner with eight seats across in the coach section, with an option for nine. Likewise, it has offered its extended-range 777-300ER with nine seats across the back, with an option for 10. Typically, only charter outfits opt for sardine seating. But some airlines, like United and Japan's ANA, are converting to or ordering nine across in their Dreamliners. The loser gets seat 33-F, LAX to Tokyo. And on its 777s, American has opted for 10 seats, 3-4-3 across (meaning each row has four middle seats). Aviation designers are even broaching the idea of making middle seats narrower to offer the cheapest of the cheap seats.

The next day, homeward bound, I'm on another 757. A different carrier. And a better seat. An upgrade! This time it's United, from LAX to JFK, and there's evidence that the airline, newly consolidated with Continental, is trying to raise its game after a rocky start. The Los Angeles--to--New York and San Francisco--to--New York flights are among the most profitable routes in the U.S., and United has upped the ante in business class. The company has given up a couple of rows of coach seats to install lie-flat seating and everything else you would normally associate with transoceanic travel. American and Delta have no option but to match the offer, and they are doing so.

The seats have just about everything--and they should, given that their cost to the airline can easily exceed $50,000 apiece. There's a shelf for things like mobile phones. The individual in-flight entertainment includes movies, audio, games and the ability to connect your iPad or iPhone if you have the right cable. There's a USB port. And there are meals, served on actual plates, with unlimited wine and beverages. (This being a morning flight, coffee and juice will suffice.)

Business-class seats in the transcontinental market are typically priced from $3,000 to nearly $5,000. That's what has lately lured JetBlue into the premium market. It will begin business-class service on the coast-to-coast route next year, at what will likely be half the current market prices. "Our competitors all have that front-cabin product that creates a subsidy for them," says JetBlue's St. George. In other words, United can use the revenue generated in its business class to offer cutthroat coach fares against JetBlue's single-cabin coach offering.

Experts say this move by JetBlue and Southwest's expansion into international travel suggest that the days when low-cost airlines differentiated themselves from legacy carriers are over. They are now all fighting for the core corporate customer, plus as many leisure travelers as they can entice. Southwest, which thrived on its one-size-fits-all model, is now separating the herd with early-check-in fees; having acquired AirTran, it also has business-class seats to sell. "It's a hybrid world," says Pomeroy. St. George rejects that idea and says JetBlue is instead bringing innovation to another overpriced market.

It Can't Get Worse, Probably

As the United flight approaches JFK, the pilot announces that we are arriving early. Perhaps, but that's only because there's a time cushion routinely built into airline schedules; a flight is considered on time even if it arrives up to 15 minutes late. In reality, as many as 40% of flights nationwide are late, a consequence of an outdated air-traffic-control system and carriers' squeezing everything they can out of a handful of very busy hubs. Being early, however, often just means that you get to wait on a taxiway for a departing jet to get clear of your gate. At least the chair's comfy.

American and US Airways have gone on the offensive against the Department of Justice, vowing to fight for their merger in court on the grounds that it is pro-consumer. The companies say the combined airline networks are complementary and would offer more choices to more destinations across a broader global network. For frequent flyers, there's also access to American's OneWorld alliance, a network of connections with foreign airlines. The financial stability of the merger would also ensure job stability, the two carriers say.

The DOJ argues that having a grand total of three legacy carriers will lead to higher fares, especially at dominant hubs. Said Assistant Attorney General Bill Baer: "Consumers will lose the benefit of head-to-head competition between US Airways and American on thousands of airline routes across the country--in cities big and small." In the meantime, the merger is frozen until after the trial, which may not start until next year.

Economic history tells us that consolidation in the airline industry--and in virtually any industry--leads to higher prices. But the previous mergers were necessary for the airlines to survive. The DOJ could negotiate an agreement in which the new American gives up slots at Reagan National or Charlotte, say, to foster more competition here and there. But a settlement would surely mean a reduction of service to the smaller markets now served by those airports.

That's the way it is in the airline industry these days. Whatever happens can hardly make things worse. Until it does.

Arts and Crafts at the Playboy Mansion
Hugh Hefner teaches me nothing about women but a lot about how to make a really nice scrapbook

ILLUSTRATION BY TOMASZ WALENTA FOR TIME; CORBIS (2); GETTY IMAGES (11)

Joel Stein | 824 words

I always imagined Hugh Hefner's life was 20% boobs, 20% butts and 60% boobs and butts. But then I started reading his Twitter feed and found out he spends every Saturday scrapbooking. Scrapbooking is clearly way more fun than I thought. And since there was little chance of upping the boobs and butts in my life, I decided to learn how to scrapbook--from him.

Normally, the 87-year-old Hef scrapbooks with his 27-year-old wife Crystal, but for my lesson, he met me alone on a Thursday. I showed up at the Playboy Mansion in Los Angeles with a box of old photos and letters and an award I won in 2003 for Best Newspaper/Magazine Article from the International Hempology 101 Society. I also brought a 20-page blank scrapbook whose cover was printed with words like memories, cherish and reflect. I climbed up to Hef's scrapbooking room in the attic, where he greeted me wearing a captain's hat, a red robe over black pajamas and slippers. Hef's uniform never made sense to me, since old men who date young women tend to wear tight jeans and patterned shirts. Now, however, I realize it's the perfect scrapbooking outfit.

Hef's scrapbooking room is staffed by Steve Martinez, who has been his full-time head scrapbooker for 22 years. Hef's completed volumes fill shelves in two rooms and two hallways, where he also hangs his Guinness World Records certificate for the largest collection of personal scrapbooks. Hef has been scrapbooking nonstop since he was in high school, and each Saturday he cherishes memories from the week that occurred exactly three months earlier, so he can make sure all the relevant news clippings have arrived. On this day, he was working on Volumes 2,684 and 2,685. When I later asked Michelle Rubin, who had been the editor of Scrapbooks Etc. magazine and lives in Iowa, how many scrapbooks she had, she said, "Five."

Each of Hef's more recent handmade books are 60 pages. When he was married to Kimberley Conrad, each book covered about a month and looked kind of like mine would, with photos of kids riding bikes. But a few months after their separation in 1998, Viagra came out, and after that each volume covered only about two days. When I randomly took down the book dated Oct. 4--5, 2000, I saw lots of photos of microskirted blondes holding champagne flutes in limousines, plus Paris Hilton and James Carville. It looked like something someone had elaborately staged to blackmail Carville.

Though I had culled my letters and photos down to those I considered important enough for my book, Hef is a bit more catholic in his selections. He includes every one of his tweets ("Keith and I won tonight's game of Gin Rummy with the guys"), plus his e-mails, articles about any Playmate ever, newspaper stories about any of his famous friends, most of every issue of Playboy, and all the photos from Sports Illustrated's Swimsuit Issue to demonstrate Playboy's influence. "Who are they kidding that this is a swimsuit issue?" he asked.

Each Hef volume has a title and a cover photo. He decided to call one of the volumes he was finishing on our day together "Holly Has a Daughter," since there were a lot of articles in it about how his ex-girlfriend Holly Madison had a daughter. "Will your wife mind that you're making a scrapbook about your ex?" I asked him. Hef looked at me, confused, and then told me he wasn't worried. Still, I decided that for my book I would hide the pictures of me with ex-girlfriends behind photos of me with my lovely wife Cassandra and call the volume "Joel Is Still Married."

I asked Hef if, during his weekly reflection, he ever got insights into the possibility of changing parts of his life. "That thought hasn't crossed my mind," he said. "What has crossed my mind is I'm the luckiest f---er in the world." Which, I guess, is just another way of saying cherish and reflect.

In fact, Hef insists he rarely opens old volumes, which Rubin says is typical of scrapbookers. "I probably don't go through my scrapbooks that much," she said. I nodded, pretending I don't go back and read my old columns all the time.

After Hef finished his volumes, he reviewed mine. It was the first scrapbook other than his own he'd ever seen. He was not impressed. He wanted me to put everything in chronological order and add captions. "When you do it this way, you'll be telling a story," he said. He also suggested I live a better story. "There was a moment in time--when I started the scrapbook--I reinvented myself," he said. "I changed my clothing, called myself Hef." The first trick to living a more interesting life, I was learning, was to give myself a scrapbooking name. I'm going with Stei. My second scrapbook is going to be much better. Mostly because I have some photos of Stei at the mansion.

Archival of the Fittest.
With so many reissues out, are there any sets still worth boxing? Answer: yes

FITZGERALD: ELIOT ELISOFON--GETTY IMAGES

Douglas Wolk | 529 words

As the CD era draws to a close, record labels are trying to squeeze the last few coins out of the format. Classic and not-so-classic albums are getting ultra-deluxe expanded reissues; moribund chunks of back catalogs are being repurposed into "complete recordings" bundles. And the last few major artists whose vaults hadn't already been thoroughly plundered are becoming the subjects of box sets and "lost" live albums, most on the presumption that for some reason they didn't release the good stuff the first time around. (Sometimes that's even true!) Here are four of this summer's best archival releases.

THE BEACH BOYS

Made in California (1962--2012)

This six-disc career capstone takes a different tack from the 1993 box Good Vibrations, leaning heavily on lesser-known songs, unheard versions and exquisite fragments and ephemera. It follows the eternal teenagers from their surf-novelty youth through the years when Brian Wilson's wistful, experimental songwriting flowered then withered, even as the stage act he'd quit became a live powerhouse (as some nifty concert recordings demonstrate). The past three decades are dispatched in a shaky half-disc: by the time they declared "Brian's Back," they'd been devoured by the sun-and-fun nostalgia that had always dogged them.

ELLA FITZGERALD

Best of the BBC Vaults

The "greatest hits" line on the cover is misleading--this is a DVD with four live shows from 1965 (three decades into Fitzgerald's career) to 1977, plus a CD of highlights. But it's a small jewel. Ella had just completed her black-tie Songbook album series at the time of the earliest gigs here, but she was most in her element onstage with a small group behind her. These shows present her as a road warrior, laying claim to the jazz standards and pop earworms she adored with casual good humor, raspy tone and virtuosic phrasing.

SLY AND THE FAMILY STONE

Higher!

Sly Stone's box is long overdue, but he always was one to run late: he hasn't completed an album of new material in over 30 years. The slightly overstuffed first three discs survey the Family Stone's late-'60s records, in which they personified the utopian promise of their time: men and women, black and white, bringing audiences to their feet with joyful psychedelic soul. But this may be the only chronological box set whose final disc is its strongest. The up-with-people bliss of "Sing a Simple Song" and "Everybody Is a Star" shifted to existential horror and acidic murk in Sly's early-'70s records, and his most haunting music documents the collapse of a dream.

BOB DYLAN

Another Self Portrait (1969--1971): The Bootleg Series Vol. 10

The period around 1970 was the weirdest of Dylan's career. Sick of being the voice of a generation, he seemed as if he was trying to throw the hounds off his scent, especially with Self Portrait, an album so impudently crummy it had to be self-sabotage. So this is a salvage job: better or at least different alternate versions and outtakes from Self Portrait and its low-key follow-up New Morning, genial live tracks from 1969's Isle of Wight festival and a couple of collaborations with George Harrison. It's still a mess--but an intriguing mess rather than an off-putting one.

Pop Chart

MILES DAVIS' "BITCHES BREW," 2011: MARTIN KLIMAS--FOLEY GALLERY

Nick Carbone, Kelly Conniff, Eliana Dockterman, Nate Rawlings, Lily Rothman | 855 words

SUPERHERO EDITION

GOOD WEEK/BAD WEEK

Batman

Made worldwide headlines when Ben Affleck was cast to play him

Spider-Man

Ticket sales have slowed for his Broadway musical, Turn Off the Dark

ODDITIES

Spritz for Buzz

We can already drink, chew and suck caffeine. So we suppose Sprayable Energy is just a natural evolution: the concept product (which has raised $30,000 on Indiegogo) promises the same kick as a cup of coffee with just a few spritzes on your skin. Yay?

WATCH THAT TUNE

Martin Klimas can help you see music. No, really. By pouring paint onto a special speaker system, then turning up the volume, the German artist is able to photograph the actual sonic vibrations of songs like Miles Davis' 1970 jazz odyssey "Bitches Brew" (below). His "Sonic" exhibition is on view through Nov. 3 at New York City's Foley Gallery.

VERBATIM

'This is the "You got old" award.'

JUSTIN TIMBERLAKE, on receiving the Michael Jackson Video Vanguard Award (for lifetime achievement, solo and with *NSYNC) at the MTV Video Music Awards

OREOOPS

1.86

Proportion of frosting in a Double Stuf Oreo (vs. a regular one), as discovered by a high school math class in New York. It's short of what the company advertises.

ROUNDUP

Famous First Tweets

The Twitterverse has expanded rapidly in recent weeks, welcoming first tweets from Drew Barrymore, Prince, Bruce Springsteen and even the briefly reunited *NSYNC. Alas, most of their debut missives were relatively tame. (See "PRINCE'S 1ST TWEET ... TESTING 1, 2 ...") Not so with these (totally subjective) Hall of Famers:

MAY 2013

Warren is in the house.

@WarrenBuffett

JANUARY 2011

ryan seacrest told me I had to get on Twitter. So here I am.

@JimCameron

FEBRUARY 2010

Today I interviewed a squirrel in my backyard and then threw to commercial. Somebody help me.

@ConanOBrien

DECEMBER 2008

apologizing to a very needy cat for being gone so long.

@TaylorSwift13

DECEMBER 2008

GETTING READY TO SHOOT MORE CSI.

@iamdiddy

DIFFERENT SHADES

Though it may look as if it's ripped from the pages of a Dr. Seuss book, this landscape was actually shot in the Democratic Republic of Congo. The psychedelic hues come courtesy of photographer Richard Mosse, who snaps otherwise bleak-looking locales using old infrared aerial-surveillance film, which captures greens in shades of pink and red. His work will be on view Sept. 19 through 22 at the Aperture booth at Expo Chicago, a Navy Pier arts festival.

QUICK TALK

Gloria Estefan

Thirty years after "Conga" made Estefan a star, her latest album demands a very different kind of dancing. On The Standards, out Sept. 10, the 56-year-old Grammy winner belts jazz classics like "Young at Heart" and "The Way You Look Tonight." Here, she lets loose with TIME.

--LILY ROTHMAN

There are a lot of languages on this album--Spanish, English, French, Italian, Portuguese. Do you actually speak all of them?

I speak Spanish and English, and I studied French in college. Actually, my first job was as an interpreter for Customs and Immigration.

What did that entail?

We worked in hideous orange polyester uniforms. Once, they were going to strip-search a nun because they caught her smuggling a sausage into the United States. I grew up in Catholic girls' school, and it was very difficult for me to ask her to surrender the sausage. The CIA tried to recruit me because I was really serious.

You might be a CIA agent right now.

You wouldn't know. It's the perfect cover.

What was your standard for choosing these standards?

I whittled it down to 50 from a couple thousand. Then I sat with [conductor Shelly Berg], and we spent hours trying them. I made him cry, he made me cry.

Sounds like a lot of crying.

Yes, and a lot of playing and a lot of hours.

Are you a big crier in general?

Not at all. I'm very stoic, but I cry through music. Music was a catharsis to me as a kid. I had a tough time, and I would lock myself up in my room and sing.

I hear there's going to be a Broadway musical about you.

We've been working on this for a while, finding how we're going to tell this story. I'm still working and doing stuff, so it can't be my whole life up there.

Does it have a title?

On Your Feet.

What do you listen to when you're not testing jazz standards?

Right now I'm in a Brazilian phase. There's this guy in his 70s, Ney Matogrosso--he's kind of Bowie-esque, and he's still doing his thing. He's still a sex symbol. At the same time, that "pop some tags" song ["Thrift Shop" by Macklemore and Ryan Lewis] is crazy. I love it.

BOOKS

Modern Love

Step aside, Lena Dunham. The next great voice of the millennial generation is ... Aziz Ansari? The Parks and Recreation star signed a $3.5 million deal to write about the trials of 20-something dating, like when a girl Instagrams a pic of her pizza but refuses to text you back.

3 THINGS YOU DON'T HAVE TO WORRY ABOUT THIS WEEK

1. Kim and Kanye's family ties.

Baby North's public debut was a photo on the season finale of Kris, her grandma's talk show.

2. Getting your J.D. Salinger fix.

His biographers say five new works by the late author will be published this decade.

3. Burger King's ability to innovate (kind of).

The fast-food chain's latest gimmick burger topping: french fries.

FOR MARY POLS' REVIEW OF SNITCH AND TIME'S COMPLETE FILM COVERAGE, VISIT time.com/movies

I Have Sung the Future
Janelle Monáe broke out as an R&B innovator. Now she's going full eclectic

Photograph by John Van Der Schilden

Cosmic consciousness Monáe gets ideas from funk, R&B, glam rock, gospel, sci-fi films and an android alter ego named Cindi

Jesse Dorris | 1379 words

"A Time interview is right up my alley," Janelle Monáe says as she enters the room. "You know, I consider myself a time traveler."

She unhooks her pair of glossy black sunglasses and throws a look over the frames. Then she laughs, softly, her neon yellow fingernails fluttering against her signature black-and-white tuxedo.

She's not kidding. Monáe, 27, is well known for her 2010 smash "Tightrope," a funk workout with ukuleles and a dance-party video set in a supernatural insane asylum. She might be even better known for her hair, a Morrissey--via--Grace Jones antigravitational wonder, seen in its full glory in ads for CoverGirl and Target, or for her brief vocal on Fun's 2012 energy drink of a single "We Are Young."

But her new album, The Electric Lady (releases Sept. 10), proves that Monáe is further out than all that. For one thing, it brought her the opportunity to produce Prince, who appears on Lady alongside Erykah Badu, Esperanza Spalding, Solange and Miguel. "Janelle and Eye go way back," Prince says in an e-mail. "It's obvious she is smarter than all of us."

More than that, with Lady she continues to wrap her music in an elaborate sci-fi framework, conceiving her various explorations of R&B, folk, gospel, Broadway, glam rock and meta-genre songs as connected chapters or suites of a single cosmic saga. Lady carries the tale forward to Suites IV and V, which, as it happens, are flashbacks to times before Suite I, her first EP. Oh, and there are also the intermillennial, interspecies communiqués from androids that Monáe says she receives via dreams. But more on that later.

Right now, Monáe arranges herself on a couch as she explains how it all began in Kansas. Born Janelle Monáe Robinson, with 50 first cousins in her working-class Kansas City family, she says, "I grew up just like Dorothy. I mean, I had the red ruby slippers and everything. Except mine were purple." She laughs. "Oh, I had some orange ones too."

It wasn't all Technicolor, though. She digs through her phone for a photo: it's young Monáe in high-waisted black pants, white shirt and suspenders. The outfit is identical to the one she wears today. "I sat my parents down and let them know what I wanted to do for the rest of my life," she says. And like her black-and-white aesthetic, "it never changed."

Her mom drove her around the talent-show circuit, making the most of what they could find. "Kansas had some of the most amazing artists. There just weren't resources for them." She escaped to New York City, attending the prestigious American Musical and Dramatic Academy, before moving to Atlanta, where, she says, "I lived in a boardinghouse with six different girls. And then I made my first CD, going around the dorm lounges at Spelman and Morehouse and Clark, just sitting on their couches and singing songs with my guitar." She got fired from a day job at Office Depot for spending too much time on her website talking to fans, who would "knock on my boardinghouse door and buy a CD for $5. And if I wasn't home, my roommates would sell them. I felt like I could do that for the rest of my life. That was success to me."

The plot thickened when she met local musicians Nate Wonder and Chuck Lightning at a Def Poetry Jam. "I'd go to their place, and we would work," she says. On breaks, they watched films like Blade Runner and Fritz Lang's silent classic Metropolis. "That's what really got me into sci-fi. Those stories of struggle between the haves and have-nots reminded me of my parents, working day and night and feeling like we were not getting anywhere. Looking at something from 1927 but set in the future really connected with me. I wanted to do the same through music."

Local heroes Outkast were doing just that, fusing multiple styles and stances in their 2000 masterpiece Stankonia. Outkast's Big Boi heard about Monáe and asked for a track for a mix CD. She chose "Lettin' Go," a breezy tell-all about the Office Depot dismissal.

"That song really opened a lot of doors," she says. Emboldened by the support, with Wonder and Lightning she co-founded the label cum collective Wondaland Arts Society and released an EP, 2007's Metropolis: Suite I (The Chase). The EP introduces Android No. 57821, a.k.a. Cindi Mayweather, Monáe's alter ego, who falls into forbidden love with a human, Anthony Greendown, and flees under threat of disassembly. Its five songs include two atmospheric set pieces; the gloriously bombastic "Sincerely, Jane"; the '60s-soul throwback "Many Moons," which transforms a hook out of Monáe's impersonating sirens into an earworm; and the frantic, plot-summarizing "Violet Stars Happy Hunting!"

That last song was the one eagle-eyed talent scout Sean Combs found on MySpace. "He called me and Big Boi," Monáe remembers, "and said, 'I don't want to be involved creatively. I don't want to mess it up. I just want people to know what you got going on.' And I said, 'Well, if you're serious, two days from now I'm having my own release party in Atlanta, and you should come down so you can understand it. Because what we're about to do is gonna be illegal, and I don't have time for people who don't believe in the vision.'"

Diddy came, he saw, he licensed. His entertainment company, Bad Boy, reissued Metropolis with bonus tracks, including a cover of Charlie Chaplin's classic "Smile" that Monáe began closing her shows with. A Grammy nomination for "Many Moons" arrived in 2009 ... as did new messages from Cindi.

The BFF From the Future

"I'm going to tell you a secret," says Erykah Badu. "Janelle and I go by these human names, but we're actually sent from the ancient future to do good." She cackles. "Don't tell anyone."

Monáe explains things a bit differently. She says the songs that made up Suites II and III, compiled on 2010's The ArchAndroid, came to her in dreams sent by Cindi in fragments that Monáe would record, still half asleep, as voice memos on her phone. These transmissions became songs, like the double-time rock of "Cold War" and the psychedelic softness of "Say You'll Go," that tell of Cindi's notoriety and her ascent to queen of the androids--a story that, as it happens, could also be seen as a clever analogy for Monáe's conquest of pop music as an African-American, sexually ambiguous, clearly ambitious young woman.

"Some of the things she deals with in the future, I deal with right now," Monáe says. "I mean, we will have androids. So I'm looking at how we can correct the mistakes we've made in history by enslaving minorities and oppressing gay culture. Will we look at the android community as something 'less than' just because we don't understand it?"

Monáe's philosophy, sort of a mashup of Oprah and black science-fiction writer Octavia Butler, comes to fruition on The Electric Lady's first single, "Q.U.E.E.N.," a feminist call-to-arms duet with Badu. "We wanted to make it clear," Monáe says, "that two females who are strong can show love and admiration for each other without any underlying jealousy." The result, says Badu, is "two queens coming together to have tea."

"This album," says Monáe, "is Cindi exploring her feelings about love, religion, sexuality." And if its bold fusion of sounds and narrative strategies gives Monáe a reputation too, she's not worried. "We all have to be electric ladies and challenge the belief system of our society," she says. She puts the sunglasses back on and rises. "Besides, human beings don't scare me anymore."

The Linguist's Mother Lode.
What Twitter reveals about slang, gender and no-nose emoticons
Katy Steinmetz | 1248 words

There's more in a tweet than 140 characters. Among the 500 million messages sent each day on Twitter, there's a tsunami of slang terms and textspeak. There are hashtags, emoticons and links. Many tweets contain geotags that identify where on earth a person stood when pressing SEND. That may sound like just a lot of noise, but for linguists making ever more sophisticated use of it all, Twitter is providing the most enormous stream of data they have ever had at their disposal.

Gone are the days when a language researcher had to interview subjects in a lab or go door to door in the hope of gaining a few insights about a limited sample of people. Academics in the U.S. and Europe are using the seven-year-old microblogging platform to put millions of examples under the microscope in an instant. "It's unprecedented," says Ben Zimmer, the executive producer at Vocabulary.com, "the sheer amount of text you can look at at one time and the number of people you can analyze at once." Hidden in tweets are insights about how we portray our identity in a few short sentences. There are clues to long-standing mysteries, like how slang spreads. And there is a new form of communication to study. If language is the archive of history, as Ralph Waldo Emerson once said, social media should get its own shelf.

Data extracted from Twitter come with caveats--like the fact that some tweets are written by automated bots--and great minds are still in the early days of building computer programs that can understand tweets in all their humor and nuance. But what is being said on Twitter is invaluable to scholars as well as to researchers with agendas, like advertisers and campaign managers. "We can talk about culture and community, but language gives you a way to really observe those things," says Jacob Eisenstein, a computational linguist at Georgia Tech, "if you know how to pull that signal out of all that text." There are more people trying to locate the signal every day: upwards of 150 Twitter-based studies have come out in 2013 so far.

Language researchers have found that women are more likely to use first-person terms (like I and my) and exclamation points, especially repeated ones. Men typically share more links and use more technology-related words. But social networks matter too: a female who follows and tweets to a largely male audience is more likely to use features, like numbers, associated with the boys. And vice versa for men.

A Stanford University linguist found that older tweeters tend to use emoticons with noses--:-) instead of :)--an action tied to their preference for conventional language. Youthful "no nose" tweeters tend to use more swear words. In a study released this June, Dutch researchers at the University of Twente found that young tweeters were more apt to type all-capital words and to use expressive lengthening, like writing "niiiiiiice" instead of "nice." The older crowd is more apt to tweet well-wishing phrases like good morning and take care, to send longer tweets and to use more prepositions.

Then there are geography, income and race. For instance, the term suttin (a variant of something) has been associated with Boston-area tweets, while the acronym ikr (an expression meaning "I know, right?") is popular in the Detroit area. Tweets containing the word awesome, one study showed, are more likely to emanate from wealthy neighborhoods. Emoticons often appear in tweets sent from areas with a large Hispanic population.

These facts may seem frivolous. But research like this provides insights into how people purposefully and unwittingly use words to signal who they are. "Language is really a window into people's sense of personal identity," Eisenstein says. Tweet trends also make it possible to guess the demographics of senders when no information is explicitly provided--a huge asset for anyone trying to use Twitter to sell products, get out a message or collect statistics. For example, researchers at the Mitre Corp., a nonprofit science and technology group, came up with an algorithm that could correctly determine someone's sex 75% of the time on the basis of just their tweets. It outperformed humans, at a much faster speed. "We can't personally read all the tweets," says Carnegie Mellon professor Noah Smith, who has used Twitter to study economic confidence and presidential approval rates. "But you can write a computer program."

Smith--a specialist in natural language processing--and Eisenstein are researching the diffusion of new words, a pursuit that was much more painstaking in the pre-Internet days. Using Twitter, their team is constructing what Smith describes as "subway maps around the United States showing where words tend to move." What they've found is that race may matter as much as geography. A term coined in Jackson, Miss., for instance, might turn up in Memphis--both places that have a high percentage of African Americans--but not spread to Nashville, where the majority is white. Other researchers are following trails of tweets to investigate how rumors and urban legends change as they're passed from person to person.

Tweeters are generally oblivious to the possibility that their messages might be scrutinized, which is a boon to researchers who want to analyze natural speech rather than the kind of edited text you find in the pages of a magazine. "They don't feel like they're being observed by people in white lab coats," Smith says. "They really are just doing their thing." But that presents an ethical quandary too. Even if tweets are meant to be public--and are presented anonymously in academic papers--tweeters typically aren't consenting to be part of a study. As Zimmer says, "It's a gray area."

The data also has drawbacks. Though Twitter users number more than 200 million, they are not a random sample; they skew young and urban. People can lie about themselves. And no matter how much information academics can guess at, there are details--like income and education level--that they'd be able to get in a traditional study but can't get from a microblog. "When you're using these brute-force techniques of data collection, the picture of the individual gets lost," says Zimmer.

Another complication is that people write on Twitter in ways they never have before, which is why researchers at Carnegie Mellon developed an automated tagger that can identify bits of tweetspeak that aren't standard English, like Ima (which serves as a subject, verb and preposition to convey "I am going to"). The need for that program illustrates how hard it can be to process tweets but also shows how revolutionary the medium has been. "For almost its entire history, written language has had this weird bias, where it's only used in formal situations," says Georgia Tech's Eisenstein. "Social media has taken the informal peer-to-peer interaction that might have been almost exclusively spoken and put it in a written form. The result of that is a burst of creativity." And, of course, a language bonanza.