Here are some names: Ronnie Lee Graham Jr., Darrell Orlando Daniels, Stephen Antwoine Harris, Keith Allen Cox, Richard Joseph Miller, Henry Lee Bayardo. They were all black men shot and killed in Los Angeles since the beginning of 2015. There are many others, but there isn’t space for them here. As the days of the year accumulate, so will the deaths. The names, unknown to most, will be forgotten by nearly all. I forgot them as soon as I wrote them.

That is shameful, but it is true.

“All go unto one place,” says the preacher. “All are of the dust.” Some, though, go quicker than others. And more violently.

And here are some numbers: Although black men account for only 6 percent of the nation’s population, they constitute almost 40 percent of its murder victims. In the 2,677 killings of black men in Los Angeles between 1994 and 2006, there were arrests in only 38 percent of the cases. In 1993, right before the crack tsunami ebbed, a young black man in Los Angeles was as likely to die as was an American soldier during the 2003 invasion of Iraq. At least a soldier felled in Sadr City perished in the service of a greater cause. In Athens Park, things might pop off for no more than a hard foul, the wrong colors, a glance at someone’s girl.

This is also shameful. And it is also true.

Lastly, one inescapable conclusion: We do not care about black men. Oh, we might “care” about them while reading the latest dispatch from Ferguson or Cleveland on an idle Sunday afternoon. But what can you or I do to correct the long-standing injustices of slavery, racism and segregation? You know that these accrued wrongs explain the young men in white T-shirts and flat-brimmed Cincinnati Reds hats, sauntering with quiet menace down the street, the old men who talk plangently to themselves in front of convenience stores. Yet we are helpless to help them. And so we turn to the travel section.

Jill Leovy, a reporter for the Los Angeles Times, is one of those rare people who have translated caring into more than just brunch-table outrage. In 2007, she started a blog for the Times called “The Homicide Report,” which bills itself as “a story for every victim.” “The Homicide Report,” which Leovy no longer runs, makes clear whose blood flows and where it does its ample flowing. The city’s homicides are largely confined to Southside neighborhoods like Westmont, Watts and Vermont Square. The jagged Modernist villas carved into the Hollywood Hills? They are a distant dream.

Leovy is intent on taking you through that invisible Los Angeles most Americans know only through lurid depictions in films like Menace II Society and the albums of Snoop Dogg. Her new book, Ghettoside: A True Story of Murder in America, is like those Mathew Brady photographs of the Civil War, revealing to the nation bloody battlefields it would not otherwise see. Ghettoside is nominally concerned with a single murder, but Leovy is too distracted by the ensanguined landscape to write the kind of police procedural that might have made for a great true-crime story. As a work of sociology, however, this is first-rate stuff, arguing with suasion and force that “forty years after the civil rights movement, impunity for the murder of black men [remains] America’s great, though mostly invisible, race problem.”

I suspect that if it were possible, Leovy would have undertaken a Borgesian project in which every murder victim in Los Angeles would be the subject of his own book (the masculine pronoun is apt here as most of the victims are men). But she does highlight a single case, that of Bryant Tennelle, an 18-year-old shot in the Manchester Square neighborhood on May 11, 2007. Tennelle was the son of a respected African-American detective who had married a Costa Rican woman; the Tennelles were a middle-class family that refused to leave the Southside out of principle. Their two older kids had gone to college, happily embodying what remained of the American dream. Bryant veered off, losing interest in school and developing new friends of a tough cast. Yet he wasn’t a gangbanger or a gunslinger. Why he was shot in the head as he walked down West 80th Street that spring evening seemed to be a mystery, just another one of those inexplicable atrocities that make life on the wrong side of the Santa Monica Freeway so harrowing on a daily basis.

The work of solving Bryant’s murder fell to John Skaggs, a white detective “right out of GQ,” according to a fellow officer. He liked working in the ghetto; he liked solving cases. Skaggs looked down on detectives who did the minimum required, deriding them as “40 percenters,” a reference to their inexcusably low clearance rate for murder cases. His rate was at least twice as high. Skaggs represents a central conviction of Ghettoside: that, as Leovy writes, “many more of these murders were solvable.”

There are plenty of police in black neighborhoods, Leovy concedes, but they are engaged in preventative policing. The head of the Los Angeles Police Department at the time of Bryant’s death was William J. Bratton, who became famous as New York City’s top cop in the early ’90s with the no-crime-too-small approach known as “broken windows.”

But handcuffing a teenager caught spray-painting his tag on a convenience store wall is not the same as catching a murderer. A 2009 study of the LAPD by researchers at Harvard found that so-called index crimes (“non-negligent homicide, rape, robbery, aggravated assault, burglary, larceny and motor vehicle theft”) constituted a mere 15 percent of the arrests in Los Angeles by 2007, a decline of 12 percentage points since 1982. The study noted that this shift “represent[s] police management decisions to use arrest powers more aggressively for less serious crimes.”

“Broken communities, not broken windows, are the real socio-economic crisis in LA, and Bratton’s approach simply served to perpetuate the divide,” the 1960s activist Tom Hayden wrote in The Nation about the Harvard report as Bratton prepared to resume his leadership of the New York Police Department in 2014. Leovy similarly argues that preventative tactics largely harass blacks without excising the small but highly malignant tumor of violent felons capable of vitiating an entire community.

As the Bureau of Justice Statistics noted in a 2011 report, a black American is six times more likely to be the victim of murder than a white American. The epidemic has made many numb to its horrors. So when a murder victim is a comely teen from California’s Huntington Beach, her death is a tragedy guaranteed a good run of column inches and breaking news reports, along with heroically tireless investigators. But a black kid, Cripped-up and bleeding out on a street in LA’s Harvard Park, gets the mundane treatment of a fender bender on the Harbor Freeway. The police, busy patching broken windows, respond accordingly.

“The system’s failure to catch killers effectively made black lives cheap,” Leovy writes, noting that our creaky criminal justice apparatus “hauls masses of black men through its machinery but fails to protect them from bodily injury and death.” Apathy is the true villain of the ghetto.

I won’t give away whether Skaggs solves Bryant’s murder. I will, however, warn that this is less The Wire than The Wire’s backstory, an explanation of how the ghettoes of the Southside came to be. For example, how blacks shut out of Southern California’s aerospace industry never ascended en masse into the middle class; how prejudicial real estate practices created enclaves of gathering misery; how cops quickly saw the futility of Southside work and, for the most part, yearned for escape.

Summoning history, sociology and criminology, Leovy argues that the pathology of the black ghetto is nothing novel, citing examples of marginal communities that implemented “rough justice” only because there was no justice of any other kind to keep a lasting peace. She points out, for example, that “eighteenth-century [homicide] rates among settlers on the wild edge of the American colonies were almost exactly those of South Central blacks in the twenty-first century.” Same for some Arab residents of Israel. As for gangs, Leovy makes the case that they are symptoms of a deeper disease, not the disease itself. Believing that a community can simply “step up” and pacify warring Bloods and Crips is a “pernicious distortion,” she argues. Cops need to do that, not church deacons and football coaches.

Leovy’s sensitivity to the black victims of gun violence might lead readers to assume that she is just another liberal trumpeting bromides: the shredded social safety net; institutional racism; police brutality. But it is a mistake to think compassion is a weakness, that sympathy erodes judgment. Leovy’s book is, in fact, a rejoinder to the witless anti-police sentiment propagated by some lefties. The ghetto desperately needs police officers, she argues. But it needs better police officers, police officers willing to solve tough cases like the Bryant Tennelle murder, to see victims as more than just bangers and hoods.

Ghettoside is a dispatch from a Los Angeles many of us would not otherwise know. Maybe care begins with informed despair, a dismay at how things truly are, intelligent grief that hardens into defiant conviction. “The heart of the wise,” the preacher says, “is in the house of mourning.”

Kat Kissick has preferred bearded men for as long as she can remember. “It’s a personality indicator that maybe this man likes to have fun, maybe they’re creative, maybe they’re just trying to express their individuality,” says Kissick, 40, who lives in St. Louis.

So when she saw a Facebook post a few weeks ago about Bristlr, a dating website and app for men with beards and the people attracted to those men, she signed up without hesitation. “I want to meet some interesting people. I want to have some good conversation,” she says. “And if I end up making out with someone with a beard, that’s OK too.”

Kissick is far from alone in her predilection for scruffy gentlemen; she’s one of 60,000 people around the world, from Iceland to Iraq, who have signed up for Bristlr since its launch last October. At Bristlr’s helm is John Kershaw, a bearded, 28-year-old software developer who lives in Manchester, England. One day last fall, Kershaw was thinking about how he could contribute to the growing “on-demand” economy of Uber, Airbnb and online dating.

“I was stroking my beard and thinking there’s got to be something that I can come up with,” he says. The answer, he realized, was right under his nose.

The tagline came first: “Connecting those with beards to those who want to stroke beards.” Kershaw says he was mostly joking when he posted a signup page on Facebook for the service, then yet to be developed. To his surprise, 70 people showed interest within a week. “I felt like my bluff had been called,” he says, and so he got busy launching a website and app. That initial tagline stuck.

Bloggers helped spread the word, and membership has doubled every month, he says. Most users come from the United States and United Kingdom; membership is also strong in Brazil, France, Canada and the Netherlands. Around 4,000 people are active on the service each day, 47 percent of whom register as having beards. Kershaw says he gets some money from merchandise and donations, but that barely covers the cost of his morning coffee.

Some 60,000 people have signed up for Bristlr since it launched in October 2014.Bristlr

The site and app are simple; as with Tinder and other popular online-dating services, users “heart” other users, and those who match can interact. Bristlr has some innovations that mainstream services don’t, such as a gender-neutral design (users select whether they want potential matches with or without beards, but not male or female). The site also notes—or, publicly shames—users who send the exact same message to multiple people. Users can also search for people by words in their profiles and set their geographic range for matches to as wide as “global.”

Indeed, many users tell Newsweek they’ve been chatting up people far from home. “For two weeks now I’ve been getting nonstop messages from all over the world,” says Steve Lax, 31, a bearded user in Florida. He says he’s been using Google Translate to exchange messages with a woman in Brazil. He hasn’t gone on any Bristlr dates yet but has plans for a few meet-ups.

A Bristlr user named Lisa says she went on a bowling date in Washington, D.C. It went well, she says, but the pair didn’t click. Another user, Liz in Brooklyn, New York, met a guy for beers and burgers, and says she’s even run into two ex-boyfriends on the service.

Rob Ruminski, 37, who runs a video production company in Melbourne, Australia, says that within seconds of his first Bristlr date, the woman ran her hands through his beard. “Women every day deal with aspects of their appearance being highlighted or fetishized, but to have the shoe on the other foot is educational,” he says.

As articles have pointed out, Bristlr’s popularity coincides with that of the lumbersexual, a term that a blogger for Gear Junkie has said he coined last November. The blogger described the lumbersexual as “bar-hopping, but he looks like he could fell a Norway Pine…. His backpack carries a MacBook Air, but looks like it should carry a lumberjack’s axe.” Cosmopolitan, People, Time and others picked up on the portmanteau, which even made its way overseas.

“The rise of the lumbersexual is definitely a global phenomenon,” Kershaw says. Indeed, the U.K.’s Daily Mailand Telegraph jumped on the trend. Ruminski, the Bristlr user, says the trend is “alive and well in Melbourne…. Sometimes I’m not sure if I’m in Australia or I’m in Portland.”

The beard has gone in and our of fashion throughout history.Wikimedia Commons

Admiration for bearded men isn’t new, however. “It’s an ongoing, off-and-on-again love affair that we’ve been having with the beard since antiquity,” says Mark Johnston, an associate professor at the University of Windsor and author ofBeard Fetish in Early Modern England. Various cultures have embraced beards at different times, such as during the Elizabethan era, when Johnston says beards may have served as “a marker of masculinity” during a period when “the nation was somewhat effeminized” under a female ruler.

Dr. Allan Peterkin, a Toronto-based psychiatrist and author of One Thousand Beards: A Cultural History of Facial Hair, says society has likely reached peak beard. “Men are freer now to make grooming decisions and keep their jobs than at any time in history,” he says.

Though wartime cultural values and Army regulations kept American men clean-shaven during the first half of the 20th century, Peterkin says, the decades since have each had unique facial-hair styles, especially within countercultures. Now, however, beards have moved into the mainstream and are for the first time in more than a century equated with style and grooming, appearing in the pages of fashion magazines. “From the mid-’90s there’s been no turning back,” Peterkin says.  

Then there are those who take beard admiration to a whole other level. Pogonophilia means sexual arousal from touching a beard or having a beard touched. Some in academia have said that research on the subject is lacking, but at least one study shows that women perceive men with full beards as healthier and as having greater parenting ability.

Kershaw isn’t the only one carving out Internet space for pogonophiles. A dating website called Beardiful.com launched in June 2011 as a site “for guys with beards, who are looking for prospective dates that are into the scruff.” And in December 2014, Lumbermatch.com went live as “a community and dating site for beard growers and those who love them.” Its other tagline: “Where beardies meet beauties.”

Lumbermatch creator Kevin Gillem, a married, 33-year-old air traffic controller who lives in California, says his site evolved from a Twitter account he made last fall, @TruLumbersexual. On Twitter, he posted photos of men with impressive beards and soon had women contacting him, asking where they could find such men. He decided to become a part-time matchmaker.

Most of Lumbermatch’s 4,000 users are women, Gillem says, and in their early to mid-20s. An app for iOS and Android is forthcoming. Gillem adds that he learned of Bristlr only after launching his own site.

Don’t expect the competition between Bristlr and Lumbermatch to get hairy. “There’s plenty of room for all these services,” Kershaw says. “We’re clearly all correct in our love for beards.”

The parents of an American humanitarian worker held hostage by Islamic State since August 2013 said on Friday they are hopeful she is still alive, after the group said she was killed in a bombing by Jordanian fighter jets.

Carl and Marsha Mueller, the parents of Kayla Jean Mueller, asked the Islamic State group to contact them privately, according to a statement released by a family representative.

"This news leaves us concerned, yet, we are still hopeful that Kayla is alive," they said in the message.

In a message directed to "those in positions of responsibility for holding Kayla," they said: "You told us that you treated Kayla as your guest, as your guest her safety and well-being remains your responsibility."

Mueller was the last-known American hostage held by Islamic State, which controls wide areas of Syria and Iraq. The militant Islamist group has beheaded three other Americans, two Britons and two Japanese hostages - most of them aid workers or journalists - in recent months.

U.S. officials said they could not confirm that Mueller had been killed. Jordanian leaders have questioned the group's claims.

Kayla Mueller, from the small city of Prescott about 100 miles (160 km) north of Phoenix, felt compelled to help others from an early age, according to a statement from the family.

"When asked what kept her going in her mission, she said 'I find God in the suffering eyes reflected in mine, if this is how you are revealed to me, this is how I will forever seek you'," the statement said.

As a high school student at Tri City College Prep, she received several awards, in part for her volunteering with groups like AmeriCorps and Big Brothers Big Sisters, the statement said.

She graduated from Northern Arizona University in 2009 and went on to work for humanitarian aid groups in northern India, Palestine, and Israel before returning to Arizonato work at an HIV/AIDS clinic and volunteer at a women's shelter, it said.

Mueller relocated to the Turkish-Syrian border in December 2012 to help Syrian refugees, working with the Danish Refugee Council and the aid group Support to Life. She was taken by Islamic State while leaving a hospital in the northern Syrian city of Aleppo in August 2013.

Her parents said they had previously remained silent about her capture "out of concern for Kayla's safety," and to abide by the group's warnings.

If you’re a privacy-conscious traveler, you may have wondered from time to time why hotels ask for ID when you check in, or why they ask you to give them the make and model of your car and other information that isn’t essential to the transaction. What’s the ID-checking for?

There’s never been a problem with fraudsters checking into hotels under others’ reservations, paying for the privilege to do so…

Well, in many jurisdictions around the country, that information-gathering is mandated by law. Local ordinances require hotels, motels, and other lodgers (such as AirBnB hosts) to collect this information and keep it on hand. These laws also require that the information be made available to the police on request, for any reason or no reason, without a warrant.

That’s the case in Los Angeles, which not only requires this data retention about hotel guests for law enforcement to access at will or whim; it also requires hoteliers to check a government-issued ID from guests that pay cash.

Open access to hotel records may have been innocuous enough in the early years of travel and lodging. Reading through hotel registers was a social sport among the wealthy, who could afford long-distance travel and lodging. Today, tourism is available to the masses, and hotel records enjoy tighter privacy protections.

Most people would quit a hotel that left their information open to the public, and many would be surprised that hoteliers’ records are open to law enforcement collection and review without any legal process.

In City of Los Angeles v. Patel, which will be argued in the Supreme Court March 3, a group of hoteliers have challenged the city’s ordinance requiring them to hand over customer data whenever a police officer wants it. After losing in the District Court and in their first appearance before the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals, the hoteliers won when an en banc panel of the Ninth Circuit found that it was unreasonable (and thus unconstitutional) for the statute to require hoteliers to turn over their records without giving them an opportunity to challenge law enforcement’s discretion.

In our brief to the Court supporting the hoteliers, we make some points that we hope will strengthen Fourth Amendment case law. As we’ve done in many prior briefs, we discourage the Court from applying the “reasonable expectation of privacy” test.

“Reasonable expectations” doctrine is a contortion of the Fourth Amendment that springs from one concurrence in a 1967 case. Rather than estimating whether hoteliers have a “privacy expectation” in their records, we invite the Court to adhere to the Fourth Amendment’s language and determine whether the the right of Los Angeles hoteliers “to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects” is protected by a statute that permits any search of their records law enforcement should want.

The question is not whether private parties’ privacy expectations are reasonable. The Fourth Amendment asks whether government agents’ searches and seizures are reasonable.

The petitions submitted by the City of Los Angeles and the U.S. government both treat the idea of “frequent, unannounced inspections” as a virtue of the statute. According to the government parties, innocent business owners, who are not suspects of any crime, should be subject to routine surprise inspections by government agents to make sure that they are performing surveillance of their guests for the government.

There is some precedent for warrantless searches of businesses under the “administrative search” doctrine. If warrantless searches of pervasively regulated businesses are reasonable at all, the doctrine has never been applied when the search is for evidence of wrongdoing by someone other than the party searched.

It may be reasonable to search auto dismantlers because of the propensity to possession of stolen cars and car parts in that line of business. It is not reasonable to search hoteliers because some of their customers may use drugs or participate in prostitution.

There would be no end to it if the government were allowed to require businesses to perform surveillance on its behalf. Banks could be made to collect and turn over sensitive financial information about customers. The phone company could be made to turn over information about Americans’ calling behavior. The list goes on.

If you’re privacy conscious, of course, you recognize that the federal government already does require banks to turn over sensitive financial information about non-suspect Americans. The government collects phone calling records about as many Americans as it can every day, all without probable cause or a warrant. This is because of a key pair of Supreme Court cases ratifying Bank Secrecy Act requirements on banks to report information about their customers.

The case of California Bankers Association v. Schultz (1974) could be treated as a precedent suggesting that the Los Angeles law is valid. Our brief shows that it is not, as the Court did not carefully consider the Fourth Amendment rights of businesses in that case. To the extent California Bankers and its companion case, United States v. Miller, suggest that businesses can constitutionally be conscripted into spying on their customers, they deserve reconsideration.

This was something Justice Sonia Sotomayor directly suggested in her concurrence with the majority’s decision in United States v. Jones (2012), which struck down warrantless tracking of automobiles using GPS devices.

[I]t may be necessary to reconsider the premise that an individual has no reasonable expectation of privacy in information voluntarily disclosed to third parties. This approach is ill suited to the digital age, in which people reveal a great deal of information about themselves to third parties in the course of carrying out mundane tasks. People disclose the phone numbers that they dial or text to their cellular providers; the URLs that they visit and the e-mail addresses with which they correspond to their Internet service providers; and the books, groceries, and medications they purchase to online retailers.

The Court should revisit the third-party doctrine and the “reasonable expectation of privacy test,” which produced it.

Jim Harper is a senior fellow at the Cato Institute. This article first appeared on the Cato Institute website.

An extensive archive of photographs and documents focusing on the life of Rosa Parks was opened to researchers and members of the public on Wednesday, what would have been the civil rights activist’s 102nd birthday.

Housed at the Library of Congress, the The Rosa Parks Collection includes roughly 2,500 photographs and 7,500 documents that provide a “wonderful kind of window” into her life and activism, says Margaret McAleer, a senior archive specialist in the library’s manuscripts division.

“As an archivist it was like this wonderful treasure hunt,” McAleer says. “[You] get a sense of a woman whose activism spanned decades rather than a single day.”

Parks was best known for refusing to give up her seat to a white man on a Montgomery, Alabama bus on December 1, 1955. After her death in 2005, it took nearly a decade for the papers, photographs and other items she left behind to make their way to the public by way of the Library of Congress.

They arrived at the library in October 2014, on long-term loan from the Howard G. Buffett Foundation, which had purchased the materials over the summer.

Included among the papers was correspondence, such as letters from Parks to her husband, Raymond Parks, and to her mother, as well as writings, financial documents and event programs.

Parks was arrested for her refusal to give up her seat, and was taken into custody before being released on bail the same day. Her subsequent trial for violating segregation laws became the impetus for the Montgomery bus boycott beginning on December 5, 1955. E.D. Nixon, who had been head of the state’s NAACP, helped form the Montgomery Improvement Association to manage the boycott, and a young Martin Luther King Jr. was named its president.

The boycott lasted until December 20 of the next year, after the Supreme Court’s order declaring bus segregation unconstitutional reached Montgomery. Many of the letters and writings in the collection date to this tumultuous decade.

There’s “wonderful documentation about her activities, what she was thinking, what she was feeling at that time,” McAleer says. The Parks letters and other writings mention her arrest and the bus boycott, and they put those events in the context of an environment governed by Jim Crow laws. She “lets us see the psychological impact of Jim Crow segregation and discrimination in a way that is very compelling,” McAleer says.

Parks is often portrayed as a quiet seamstress bullied by the cruel laws of segregation. What emerges from the collection is a more well-rounded portrayal of the activist, she says.

Parks was someone “who wrote at full volume,” and often in a way that would put her in danger. “It was her writings that really blew me away,” McAleer says, citing as an example an excerpt from an unidentified handwritten note, probably from the 1950s:

Treading the tightrope of Jim Crow from birth to death, from almost our first knowledge of life to our last conscious thought from the cradle to the grave is a major mental acrobatic feat. It takes a noble soul to plumb this line. There is always a line of some kind—color line, hanging rope, tight rope. To me it seems that we are puppets on string in the white man’s hands. They say we must be segregated from them by the color line, yet they pull the strings and we perform to their satisfaction or suffer the consequences if we get out of line.

The collection also includes financial documents, like tax returns, that provide concrete evidence of the sacrifice Parks made for her activism. She lost her job as a seamstress at the Montgomery Fair department store shortly after her arrest, and her husband lost his as well.

Soon after the boycott, the Parks decided to move to Detroit, but that city was hit particularly hard by the national recession, McAleer explains. Their joint tax return from 1959 shows a combined income of $661.06, down from $3,749.94 in 1955. In 1965, Representative John Conyers, whom Parks had supported in his election campaign, hired her to work in his district office in Detroit. Parks was able to leave years of poverty behind.

"My goal was always to ensure this historic collection would be made available for the public's benefit so that as many people as possible can learn about Rosa Parks and the sacrifices she made to support the civil rights movement," the collection's owner Howard Buffett, the son of billionaire investor Warren Buffett, said in September when he announced the 10-year loan to the Library of Congress.  

As of Wednesday, researchers and members of the public of college age and older who have a Library of Congress reader card can examine the thousands of items that present a fuller story of Parks than could be told before. Selected items will be on display as part of a larger civil rights exhibit between March 2 and January 2016, and two additional temporary displays will be on view during the month of March.

Rosa Parks, Nov. 1956. Photographer not identified.Rosa and Raymond Parks Institute for Self Development/Library of Congress

Draft letter to a “friend” written by Parks in January 1956, describing racial segregation in Montgomery, Ala. Written on Montgomery Fair department store stationery. Parks was let go from her job as an assistant tailor at the store that month.Rosa Parks Papers/Manuscript Division/Library of Congress

Rosa Parks waving from a United Air Lines jetway in Seattle, Washington. Photograph by Gil Baker, 1956.Rosa and Raymond Parks Institute for Self Development/Library of Congress

Leona McCauley concerning her activities in New York in May 1956. Parks spent two week in New York attending various events, including the Madison Square “Heroes of the South” rally. Participating in the rally were Eleanor Roosevelt, A. Phillip Randolph, E. D. Nixon, Sammy Davis, Jr., Cab Calloway, and Pearl Bailey. Parks spoke before the crowd of six thousand. Rosa Parks Papers, Manuscript Division/Library of Congress

Postcard to Parks from Martin Luther King, Jr., 1957, while traveling in Europe. Rosa and Raymond Parks Institute for Self Development/Library of Congress

Poll Tax receipt, 1957. Even if they were able to overcome the numerous hurdles designed to deny them the right to vote, African Americans were confronted by the requirement that they pay back poll taxes. The sum was often beyond the means of the poor to pay. Rosa Parks secured the right to vote in the 1940s after at least two failed attempts to register. This receipt is for her annual poll tax in 1957, shortly before she and her husband left Montgomery for Detroit. Rosa and Raymond Parks Institute for Self Development/Library of Congress

Recipe for featherlite pancakes, written in Parks’ hand, undated. Rosa and Raymond Parks Institute for Self Development/Library of Congress

Broadside, Tribute Dinner honoring Parks, 3 April 1965, COBO Hall, Detroit, Mich. The event was organized by the Women’s Public Affairs Committee of 1000 and featured Coretta Scott King and Ralph Abernathy as speakers. Proceeds from the dinner went to Rosa Parks. In the summer of 1960, the press had begun reporting on Parks’s poverty that continued long after the bus boycott and the loss of her job as an assistant tailor at Montgomery Fair department store. In 1960, Jet magazine described her as “penniless, debt-ridden, ailing with stomach ulcers and a throat tumor, compressed into two rooms with her husband and mother.” Rosa and Raymond Parks Institute for Self Development/Library of Congress

Black activist Kwame Toure (L), formerly known as Stokely Carmichael, at the University of Michigan to discuss civil rights at a forum. Another civil rights leader Rosa Parks (R) has a lighter moment with Toure after a panel discussion. Photograph by UPI, 1983 Feb. 14.Rosa and Raymond Parks Institute for Self Development/Library of Congress

Rosa Parks and Congressman John Conyers, in Detroit, Michigan, circa 1990. Photographer not identified.Rosa and Raymond Parks Institute for Self Development/Library of Congress

Certificate from the Presidential Medal of Freedom, 1996.Rosa and Raymond Parks Institute for Self Development/Library of Congress

The Maryland Court of Special Appeals has agreed to allow an appeal by the subject of the explosively popular podcast Serial, Adnan Syed, who was convicted in the 1999 strangling death of his ex-girlfriend Hae Min Lee, reports The Baltimore Sun.

Syed, 33, also attempted to appeal the decision several years ago, but his request was denied by the Baltimore Circuit Court. His attorney, C. Justin Brown, applied on Syed’s behalf via the Maryland Court of Special Appeals in 2014 to overturn that decision, arguing that Syed’s previous counselor, Christina Gutierrez, who died in 2004, hadn’t effectively aided her client in the case.

The lawyer said Gutierrez was “ineffective” in defending Syed during the 2000 murder trial, failing to honor pre-trial requests such as exploring whether the state would cut a plea deal and not pursuing an alibi offered by a high school classmate of the defendant, Asia McClain.

Although McClain said she could provide an alibi for Syed, Gutierrez did not call her in as a witness. McClain, who claimed in an affidavit last month that she remembers speaking to Syed at school at the time the murder purportedly happened, has said that she would testify if the case were to be reopened.

The Washington Post reports that the appeal decision may allow new evidence to be introduced in the case, but first a three-judge panel must decide whether McClain’s testimony would be admissible.

Brown told The Baltimore Sun that he and Syed were “extremely happy” with the decision, but that it is only the “first step in a pretty long process.” He has yet to tell Syed of the results, according to The Washington Post.

Syed was found guilty in 2000 on charges of robbery, kidnapping, first-degree murder and false imprisonment and is serving a life sentence. But an investigation probed by the podcast revealed that there was no physical evidence or eyewitnesses suggesting that he had committed the crime. The case relied heavily on the statement of a past friend, Jay Wilds, who testified in court that he had assisted Syed in hiding Min Lee’s body in Baltimore’s Leakin Park.

During the show, Serial host Sarah Koenig, who also produced This American Life, attempted to retrace the route the two supposedly took to the park, but said the times and locations cited didn’t add up. Some believe the show has helped expose cracks in the story; as the Sunnotes, these kinds of appeals are rarely granted, especially after a convict has spent 15 years behind bars.

“I think that it shows that the court is interested in the issues that we raised. If they weren’t interested in them they wouldn’t have granted” the application for leave to appeal, Brown told The Washington Post.

Unless the state attorney general’s office denies the motion by April 16, Syed’s appeal date is currently scheduled for June. 

On August 13, 2012, freelance journalist Austin Tice went missing in Syria as he was preparing to travel from Daraya to Beirut, Lebanon. In September of that year, a grainy YouTube video surfaced and purportedly showed the 33-year-old walking with a group of masked men through a deserted countryside. He was blindfolded, and his hands were tied behind his back.

That was the last time his family received definitive proof Tice was alive. This week, it announced a media campaign, #FreeAustinTice, to raise awareness.

Tice was in Syria reporting for McClatchy and The Washington Post. (The former Marine was the recipient of a George Polk Award for his journalism.) In the more than 900 days he has been missing, his parents, Marc and Debra Tice, have received only limited assistance from the Syrian and the U.S. governments, relying instead on tips from people in Syria to learn new information about their son. The family hasn’t disclosed the identity of the captors, though it doesn’t believe Tice is being held by ISIS or any other terrorist group. ISIS killed two other American reporters in the summer and fall of 2014.

“We haven’t received any concrete or tangible proof of life, or even communication, from anyone,” Marc Tice told Newsweek, adding that no ransom demand has been made. “We do hear from time to time from sources that we deem to be credible that Austin is alive and that we should be patient.”

The campaign to raise awareness about his son’s captivity is an effort to pressure the governments involved to ensure Tice is freed and create a more open discourse between the U.S. government and the Tice family. While intelligence agencies are aware of Tice’s captivity, they do not share their findings with the family.

The campaign is an unusual move for the family of a hostage. In general, when someone is taken hostage, a media blackout goes into effect and his or her name is not printed, at the request of the family. Though news organizations may know the name and situation of a hostage, they will decline to print the information to protect the captive’s safety.

In Tice’s case, a media blackout was impossible. “We didn’t really have that decision,” the elder Tice told Newsweek. “Austin’s captivity was made public after he went missing in an interview the Czech Republic ambassador gave on television. It immediately became known.”

At times, the family was more secretive with information, and then when it “felt like the circumstances in the region or the politics might be beneficial to getting Austin released,” the family became vocal once again.

This campaign, created in collaboration with the organization Reporters Without Borders, will be visible on dozens of news websites. “The campaign is about amplifying our voices and making sure that the Obama administration and the United States government and all of its agencies know that there are a lot of people that want to see Austin home safe,” Tice said. “We need to ramp up the efforts and not leave any stone unturned. We’d like the Syrian government to do the same thing.”

Much of the Tice family’s frustration has surrounded the lack of transparency in the hostage negotiation process.

“We hear very, very little,” Tice said. “A lot of officials are very committed to helping us bring Austin home, but it’s really the lack of structure, direction, focus and clear lines of accountability that prevent people from all the different parts of the government from being as effective as they’d like to be.”

The family hopes that the president’s recent call to restructure the hostage program will help bring their son home. “It’s not individuals that don’t want to help. It’s the policy, frankly,” Tice said.

A White House spokesman, Alistair Baskey, said: “In light of the increasing number of U.S. citizens taken hostage by terrorist groups overseas and the extraordinary nature of recent hostage cases, the President directed a review of hostage policy be conducted. All relevant departments and agencies are participating.... The review group has been asked to make recommendations regarding changes in practice or policy that will help the U.S. government best address cases of Americans taken hostage overseas. We anticipate the review group will complete its work by sometime this spring. 

“We have heard concerns expressed by some family members about their interaction and communication with U.S. government officials and the amount of information that can be shared about these efforts. Family participation is therefore an integral part of this review. We understand this is incredibly difficult and painful for the families and we appreciate their feedback. We are thankful to those that have agreed to participate. Their participation is key to helping us better understand ways we can improve this process. In addition to getting feedback from the families, we are examining the interagency process involved in engaging with families throughout a hostage situation.” 

NEW YORK (Reuters) - NBC News anchor Brian Williams said on Saturday he will take himself off the evening newscast for several days as the network probes misstatements related to his experience reporting on the Iraq war in 2003.

"In the midst of a career spent covering and consuming news, it has become painfully apparent to me that I am presently too much a part of the news, due to my actions," Williams said in a statement posted on NBC News's website.

Williams said he planned eventually to return to the broadcast and "continue my career-long effort to be worthy of the trust of those who place their trust in us."

Lester Holt, who typically anchors NBC Evening News on weekends, will step in to handle the weekday evening broadcast in the interim, Williams said.

NBC, a unit of Comcast Corp., on Friday said it was launching an internal probe of Williams's false statements that he was in a helicopter that was brought down by enemy fire during the U.S. invasion of Iraq.

Williams has admitted that he portrayed the episode inaccurately, but his apology -- in which he said he misremembered the incident -- provoked widespread derision, with some war veterans calling for his resignation.

ABUJA (Reuters) - Nigeria's electoral commission has said it is postponing the Feb. 14 presidential election until March 28 due to security concerns, caving in to pressure from the ruling People's Democratic Party in a move likely to enrage the opposition.

Foreign powers are closely observing how elections will be held in Africa's biggest economy and have voiced concerns over violence in the aftermath, as was the case after the 2011 election, when 800 people died.

The postponement could stoke unrest in opposition strongholds such as the commercial capital, Lagos, and Nigeria's second city, Kano, because the opposition has been staunchly against a delay.

The poll will pit incumbent Goodluck Jonathan of the PDP against former military ruler Muhammadu Buhari of the All Progressives Congress (APC) in what is likely to be the most hotly contested election since the end of military rule in 1999.

"The commission cannot lightly wave off the advice of the nation's security chiefs.... The risk of deploying young men and women and calling people to exercise their democratic rights in a situation where their security cannot be guaranteed is a most onerous responsibility," Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) chairman Attahiru Jega told reporters.

"Consequently the commission has decided to reschedule the elections thus. The national elections, i.e. presidential and national assembly, are to hold on March 28, 2015; governorship and state assembly elections are to hold on April 11, 2015."

Jega said National Security Adviser Sambo Dasuki had written to INEC last week stating that it could not guarantee security during the original proposed election timetable because of ongoing military operations to fight Boko Haram insurgents, a position the NSA reinforced during Thursday's meeting with the Council of State.

"Nobody has coerced us...to take this decision," Jega said.

U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry said in a statement Washington was "deeply disappointed" by Nigeria's decision to delay the election.

"Political interference with the Independent National Electoral Commission is unacceptable, and it is critical that the government not use security concerns as a pretext for impeding the democratic process," Kerry said.

He visited Nigeria on Jan. 25, urging both candidates to prevent potential post-election violence by their supporters.

The ruling PDP has been pressuring the commission to delay the polls, arguing it is not ready to hold them. Dasuki called for a delay last month over concerns that not enough biometric I.D. cards necessary for voting would be distributed in time.

Concerns over security, due to the Sunni jihadist insurgency in the northeast, have been raised several times as a reason for a delay, although INEC had outlined red zones where the vote could not be held and alternative polling units for the affected constituencies.

The APC has insisted on keeping the February date for the elections to remain credible, saying the only reason the pro-Jonathan camp is pushing for a delay is that it knows he will lose if he goes to the polls now.

Buhari, who is running for a fourth time against the PDP, believes that he will win. Jonathan was initially viewed as the likely winner but the momentum has shifted to the opposition in the past few months.

Nigerians see him as a strongman against corruption and one who will have more success in quashing Boko Haram.

While Jonathan has failed on the insurgency front, he has created universities and privatized the electric power sector.

His presidency also oversaw the implementation of an amnesty program with delta militants led by the Movement for the Emancipation of the Niger Delta, which ended years of rampant violence, sabotage and kidnappings in the oil-producing region.

A team of researchers at Columbia University’s engineering and applied sciences school has created a new device (a “dongle,” as they call it) that attaches to your smartphone and can detect whether sexually transmitted diseases are present in your blood.

Just plug the dongle into your phone (Apple or Android), prick your finger and wait. If you have HIV or syphilis, you’ll know in about 15 minutes.

The device, which was created by lead researcher Samuel K. Sia, was recently field-tested on 96 patients in Rwanda. The test the device performs, called an enzyme-linked immunosorbent assay (ELISA), is not new. (It was developed in 1971 and replaced earlier tests that exposed patients to radioactivity.) But until now the test required bulky lab equipment, making it unfeasible in certain parts of the world where HIV and syphilis are rampant. Sia’s device solves that problem.

Thirty-five million people live with HIV/AIDS worldwide, the World Health Organization estimates, and 1.5 million die from AIDS-related illnesses each year. There are about 10 million people living with syphilis.

“Coupling microfluidics with recent advances in consumer electronics can make certain lab-based diagnostics accessible to almost any population with access to smartphones,” Sia says. “This kind of capability can transform how health care services are delivered around the world."

The dongle is cheap, too. Most ELISA testing equipment will run around $20,000, but Sia’s device will cost $34 to manufacture, he estimates.

"By increasing detection of syphilis infections, we might be able to reduce deaths by 10-fold,” Sia says.

“He was a creepy little bastard,” Cody Cazalas says, his thick Southern accent stressing that last word. Cazalas is a Galveston, Texas, police detective, and over a decade ago he investigated Robert Durst, a New York City real estate heir, regarding the murder of Morris Black. The two lived in neighboring apartments in the same house. After Durst was acquitted of murder, Cazalas would find him standing on the sidewalk in front of the homes of those who testified against him. It was legal, the detective explained, but particularly unsettling to both Cazalas and the witnesses.

The crime of which Durst was acquitted was bloody: Black was dismembered with axes, knives and partially by hand, the pieces placed neatly into black garbage bags and dumped into Galveston Bay. The torso was found by a little boy playing in the bay, and a police officer was able to retrieve it only by reaching down its throat, hooking his hand onto the sternum and pulling hard to free it from the rocky ocean crevice in which it was lodged.

Filmmaker Andrew Jarecki’s HBO documentary series The Jinx: The Life and Deaths of Robert Durst opens with that torso, setting a dark mood for the six episodes. Jarecki and Marc Smerling, his filmmaking partner, have long been captivated with Durst’s dark past, producing All Good Things, a 2010 narrative film about the disappearance of Durst’s first wife, Kathleen McCormack. Durst says this film inspired him to give an interview to Jarecki, having turned down dozens of requests, after concluding that the filmmaker knew more about him than any other reporter did, or could.

The series puts Durst’s many quirks on display, from the odd to the profoundly disturbing. The introduction of each episode includes a scene of a man shaving his head, an allusion to Durst’s cross-dressing days. As Black’s neighbor, Durst lived as “Dorothy Ciner,” a former classmate of Durst’s—and just one of his many aliases. Durst would even intermittently show up dressed as a man at the Galveston house and introduce himself to the landlord as a friend of Ciner’s.

Kathleen and Robert Durst in "The Jinx"Jim McCormack/HBO

Throughout his interviews with Jarecki, Durst twitches uncontrollably, and blinks either far too often or not at all. These mannerisms have been with Durst since childhood, Jarecki discovered by reviewing old footage. During one of these interviews, Durst admits that at the age of 7, his father brought him to a window to see his mother standing on the roof. He told him to “wave to Mommy” and then walked the young Durst back to his room. By the time he was back in bed, his mother had jumped off the roof. His relatives told the police her death was accidental, to spare the family public embarrassment.

In 1982, Durst’s wife, a young and strikingly beautiful medical student, disappeared. The Durst family (chiefly his father, Seymour Durst, and younger brother, Douglas) offered little assistance to authorities. As Jarecki put it, “They lawyered up and they shut up.” The missing persons file on McCormack contains dozens of statements from her immediate relatives and none from her in-laws.

After years of claiming to have cooperated with police during the investigation of his wife’s disappearance, Robert Durst revealed to Jarecki that he had offered a false alibi for police and fabricated a phone call he had with his wife. Her disappearance was not reported for days after she went missing, but Robert claims his brother and father advised him not to immediately report her missing.

At the time, the detective assigned to her case thought her disappearance had something to do with her efforts to leave the increasingly violent Durst: He had forced her to get an abortion and, according to a diary she left, beat her almost daily. In The Jinx, Robert not only admits his lies to police but says that had the couple never met, she never would have disappeared. He stops short of taking direct responsibility for her absence.

Though Robert says he followed his father’s advice about calling the police when McCormack went missing, his relationship with his family was difficult. After his mother’s suicide, his father was cold and distant with him and the rest of the family. Robert ran away from home often, and though the family’s real estate business was booming in the late ’80s, he stopped coming to work, later claiming in a deposition that his on and off 18-year career with the company consisted of little more than “important-sounding titles.”

The oldest of four children, Robert’s birthright was to eventually take control of the family business. The company remains a superpower in New York City real estate, controlling over a dozen skyscrapers, including the new 1 World Trade Center skyscraper, the Bank of America Tower and the Condé Nast Building in Times Square. The patriarch, since Seymour’s death in 1995, is Douglas Durst, the second oldest brother, who claimed Robert has made him fear for his life on more than one occasion. “I am pretty certain that until the series is over, he is not going to kill me,” Douglas says of his brother in a New York Times article about the HBO series.

The brothers have a volatile relationship. Robert called Douglas “a pussy” in a deposition, and Douglas claims his brother is mentally disturbed. Both Jarecki and Smerling attempted dozens of times to interview Douglas but were met with letters from lawyers, threats of lawsuits and finally a formal deposition request, all part of an attempt to stop the series from going into production. According to the filmmakers, Douglas repeatedly warned relatives not to speak to them, worried that the series would make Robert appear sympathetic and damage the family’s reputation.

Against his will, Douglas does appear in the series, in deposition videos that had been sealed by a Westchester County judge. In fact, Douglas drives much of the narrative in the first two installments of The Jinx, in a clever move by the filmmakers. Because of this, Douglas has taken legal action against Jarecki personally, attempting to depose him in an effort to force him to disclose how he obtained the footage, which remains a mystery that Jarecki could not comment on due to the legal proceedings. Suspecting his brother, Douglas believes the use of these depositions violates a confidentiality agreement, and if he is correct, he will try to use the information to strip Robert of his $65 million share of the Durst Organization.

Jarecki is unconcerned. “While I understand Douglas would like the protections of a private individual, he is a public figure and the public has a right to learn about [him],” the filmmaker explained. Being sued is a necessary evil in his line of work and doesn’t bother him, he added. He laughs off the idea of canceling the series as a result of Douglas’s efforts and says that if Douglas truly wanted to stay out of the media, he would have avoided giving a front-page interview to the Times.

The series will begin airing February 8, regardless of any suit, stink or threat Douglas makes. Jarecki wonders if, perhaps, Douglas has been so harsh toward the moviemakers because of guilt. “Is this the result of not having done the right thing in 1982, when the opportunity presented itself?” the filmmaker asked.

Douglas’s camp has equally harsh words for Jarecki. A spokesman for the real estate giant called the series a “docudrama” that was attempting to “rewrite the past.” “Anything presented by this trashy reenactment should be taken with a truckload of salt,” the spokesman told Newsweek.

As for Robert, he remains a Durst in name only, stripped of any power in the family’s business, and without any heirs of his own. Since being acquitted of Black’s murder, he was arrested for visiting the house in which Black had been killed, and in July 2014 he allegedly urinated on a candy display at a CVS in Texas.

In 2015, U.S. defense spending will be about $600 billion, or about 3.24 percent of GDP. The former figure would strike many Americans as sufficient, and a few would find it excessive.

Robert Gates once said, “If the Department of Defense can’t figure out a way to defend the United States on a budget of more than half a trillion dollars a year, then our problems are much bigger than anything that can be cured by buying a few more ships and planes.”

But hawks want you to focus on the latter figure, 3.24 percent: they believe that an arbitrary fixed percentage of national output should be dedicated to defense spending every year. For example, Mitt Romney and Bobby Jindal would peg defense spending at 4 percent of GDP.

Wall Street Journal columnist Bret Stephens would see that, and raise them. In his new book, America in Retreat, Stephens calls for sharply increasing “military spending to upwards of 5 percent of GDP.”

It’s unclear whether these gentlemen fully appreciate what their proposals would equate to in real dollar terms. (Take a look at the chart below, prepared by my colleague Travis Evans).

The bipartisan Budget Control Act (BCA) capped discretionary Pentagon spending at $3.9 trillion between 2015 and 2021, an average of 2.6 percent of GDP per year. That means Americans would need to spend $2.1 trillion above the current caps to meet the 4 percent threshold, and $3.6 trillion more to reach 5 percent.

For added perspective, then-House Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan’s FY15 alternative projected $4.2 trillion for defense, or 2.8 percent of GDP. In other words, Romney proposed to spend $1.8 trillion more than his running mate, and Stephens’s plan is even more disconnected from fiscal reality–$3.3 trillion more than the de facto GOP budget.

To justify their spending levels, hawks rely on imperfect historical analogies and threat inflation. Of course, it is true that the United States has spent more than 5 percent of GDP on defense in prior years and, at times, far more. President Dwight Eisenhower, who famously warned of a military industrial complex, presided over defense budgets that averaged about 10 percent; President Reagan averaged about 6 percent.

But, as I explain in a review of Stephens’s book in Barron’s:

While it’s true that military spending’s share of gross domestic product used to be higher than 5 percent, that was during the Cold War, when the U.S. was locked in a global struggle with the Soviet Union, and well before soaring entitlement spending threatened to overwhelm the federal budget.

If Stephens is serious about dedicating 5 percent of the nation’s economy to the Pentagon, nearly double what is called for under current law, cutting other federal spending won’t be enough to make up the difference. He never says whether he would hike taxes or add to a federal debt that is already out of control to pay for this global police force. But either way, taxpayer support is not likely.

That support is unlikely because U.S. foreign policy–and the military force structure needed to implement it–isn’t focused solely, or even primarily, on protecting the United States from foreign threats. Rather, our military aims to reassure nervous allies, and thus discourage them from defending themselves.

As Stephens puts it, “America is better served by a world of supposed freeloaders than by a world of foreign policy freelancers.”

This is a pretty flimsy justification for massive spending increases. From my Barron’s review:

Set aside the hubristic assumption that the U.S. government can be relied on to respond to distant threats more wisely and prudently than governments much closer to the problem. More broadly, Stephens is asking U.S. men and women to risk their lives in foreign conflicts, many of which have nothing to do with safeguarding American security.

He is also expecting Americans to pay for something they do not support. A recent poll reprinted in The Wall Street Journal in December 2014 pointed out that among the foreign-policy goals that Americans counted as “very important,” “defending our allies’ security” ranked second from the bottom, just one percentage point above “strengthening the United Nations.”

Instead of using an arbitrary percentage of national output to determine defense spending and expecting Americans to pay the bill without question, policymakers should develop a national security strategy that places a priority on U.S. national security, including the nation’s fiscal health, and demands appropriate burden-sharing by our allies.

America can maintain its military preeminence for decades if we reduce our military spending (or at least maintain the current caps), enact other reforms to get our fiscal house in order (including fixing entitlements) and allow our allies to better provide for their own security.

Christopher A. Preble is the vice president for defense and foreign policy studies at the Cato Institute. This article first appeared on the Cato Institute website.

(Reuters) - Dean Smith, who coached the U.S. basketball team to an Olympic gold in 1976, won two national titles and helped develop NBA great Michael Jordan, has died at the age of 83.

Teams coached by Smith, who died on Saturday at his home in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, won two national championships, including the 1982 NCAA title with a squad led by Jordan, who went on to a Hall of Fame career with the National Basketball Association's Chicago Bulls.

Smith, head basketball coach for the University of North Carolina, which gave news of his death, won 839 games as a coach over his 36-year career. He took his team to 11 Final Four appearances in NCAA Division 1 tournament, which UNC won in 1982 and 1993.

Smith was named to the Basketball Hall of Fame and in 2013 was honored by President Barack Obama with the Presidential Medal of Freedom. His wife accepted the medal on his behalf.

The family had announced in 2010 that Smith suffered from a neurological disorder that affected his memory.

Smith recruited the first black scholarship athlete to North Carolina, Charlie Scott, and helped integrate a restaurant and a neighborhood in Chapel Hill, Obama said at the ceremony.

Jordan said in a statement on Sunday that nobody other than his parents had a bigger impact on his life.

"He was more than a coach -- he was my mentor, my teacher, my second father," Jordan said. "Coach was always there for me whenever I needed him and I loved him for it. In teaching me the game of basketball, he taught me about life.”

Smith also served as mentor to other players and assistant coaches who went on to coaching prominence themselves, including current North Carolina coach Roy Williams.

"It's such a great loss for North Carolina -- our state, the University, of course the Tar Heel basketball program, but really the entire basketball world," Williams said. "We lost one of our greatest ambassadors for college basketball for the way in which a program should be run.”

Smith was raised in Kansas, where his father was a high school teacher and basketball coach. Smith played on the 1952 Kansas team that won the national championship. He became an assistant coach at North Carolina in 1958.

“Known worldwide as a legendary basketball coach, our university, the Chapel Hill community, and the countless students, faculty, staff and people across North Carolina and beyond will remember him as a great teacher and remarkable pioneer in promoting equality and civil rights,” the university said in statement on Sunday.

Some people spend their lives searching for love. Photographer Julia Xanthos manages to catch glimpses of it between newspaper assignments.

Throughout New York City’s five boroughs, whether on train platforms, in public parks or by coastal vistas, she has documented the raw, early stages of love—and in the process changed her own opinions on the topic. Xanthos, a photojournalist/videographer with the New York Daily News, has been working for more than a year on “#younglove,” a series of portraits of young couples displaying their affections publicly.

“To find a couple at the very beginning of their budding romance is a very special thing,” Xanthos tells Newsweek. “For a long time I had a ‘get a room’ point of view when I saw a couple locking lips. But it wasn't until I changed my attitude to ‘Isn't that beautiful?’ that my whole world sort of flipped.”

The result is a remarkably varied series of images, all rendered in black and white, posted to Instagram under the series’ titular hashtag as she runs from one newspaper assignment to the next.

Some of the couples pictured recall the famous Eisenstaedt image in Times Square, with their dramatic, swooping embraces; others are pictured offering quick pecks before boarding trains or parting ways on the sidewalk; and many simply lie about blissfully, seemingly unaware of both Xanthos's presence and the passage of time.

“My favorite #younglove images are when people are so wrapped up in each other that they have no idea that I am there snapping a picture,” Xanthos explains. “They are usually so immersed in what they are doing they don't give a hoot who is around them. Other times they will ask me to text them the picture. It's nice to give a little memento of #younglove that way.”

A couple naps together in Washington Square Park. Xanthos describes young love as a "special thing.""I think it's a charming time in a couple's relationship where nothing else matters but their love," she says.Julia Xanthos

She counts Peter Turnley’s work as an inspiration and an influence, and one look at his “French Kiss” series, shot on the streets of Paris, makes the connection clear.

For Xanthos, #younglove has become a sort of daily exercise; a way to reconnect with her love of photography. She says Instagram hasn’t necessarily changed her approach to photography, but gone are her regrets about hard drives and binders of negatives that have never been published. Calling her iPhone a “picture journal where I am my own editor,” she now sees that as her primary camera, giving her room to develop a style not always useable in her daily work done on assignment.

Indeed, a tabloid newspaper demands a certain clarity of image, and a deadline-driven efficiency that doesn’t always leave room for the moodier, context-free photos of #younglove.

“Nobody tells me what to shoot, how to shoot it or when to post it,” Xanthos says. “It has helped me to see pictures again in a way that I missed so much.”

A girl in Central Park spots Xanthos and her camera. "Most of the time people crack up when they see me. Their reaction is usually 'there's a girl taking our picture' and most of the time they just continue their make-out session."Julia Xanthos

Her journey into life imitating art imitating life has come full circle in some rather unexpected ways as well. Her next project: Her own romantic life. Xanthos is recently engaged, a life choice made four weeks after her first kiss, which was inspired by the day-to-day exposure to romance via #younglove.

“I was able to find the love of my life because I was opening my heart slowly,” Xanthos explains. One snap at a time, “love is a powerful thing.”

"I went from turning my head away to looking for love: in the streets, on the subways and in the parks. It's everywhere actually and it's been a beautiful experience," Xanthos says.Julia XanthosA couple in Union Square.Julia XanthosA couple shares a quiet moment at the Fulton St. station in Lower Manhattan.Julia XanthosCouples wait for the train in Williamsburg.Julia XanthosA couple embraces on Broad St. in Lower Manhattan.Julia Xanthos"Some people have suggested a book or exhibit, but I just have fun making the pictures. Looking for the little pockets of love has become part of my daily life," Xanthos says.Julia XanthosA couple tanning at the beach in Coney Island. "My favorite #younglove images are when people are so wrapped up in each other that they have no idea that I am there snapping a picture," Xanthos says.Julia XanthosA couple naps together in Washington Square Park. Xanthos describes young love as a "special thing.""I think it's a charming time in a couple's relationship where nothing else matters but their love," she says.Julia Xanthos

Cyberterrorism, theoretically, isn’t supposed to exist. Terrorism, after all, is defined as the use of attacks to create visceral fear. Yet, almost all of what cyberattacks have done so far has been to computers–and computers lack viscera.

Nevertheless, the December attack on Sony, coupled with an earlier (though less-well reported) attack on the Las Vegas Sands Corporation, has most of the elements of terrorism, except for the visceral terror itself–even if that element later entered the equation in an offhand way.

We need to consider both the risk of further such attacks and also further ill-considered reactions that may arise if the problem of insecurity in cyberspace is shoved into the counter-terrorism paradigm.

Start with the Sony hack before the release of its film The Interview, and assume this had North Korea’s imprimatur. The hackers sought to harass Sony and block the distribution of The Interview, which portrayed an assassination plot against North Korea’s “Dear Leader.” To this end, they penetrated Sony’s systems; extracted emails from Sony executives; stole five movie files, and trashed desktop computers and servers throughout the corporation.

They then released choice emails to publicize their hack, embarrass the company’s leaders and, through the release of personally identifiable information, create anxiety among employees (some of whom then sued Sony). The company’s systems went down, forcing employees to work with pencil and paper. Remediation costs initially were estimated at $40 million to $100 million, though later estimates suggested a lower number.

Throughout this embarrassment, Sony continued with plans to release the film on Christmas Day. Several weeks after the hacks were revealed, the hackers upped the ante by threatening 9/11-style attacks on theaters showing the film (and hence, on theatergoers themselves). Four major movie chains backed out of showing the film.

Sony, having lost 80 percent of its domestic market, withdrew it from theater distribution. This sequence was misinterpreted by some as Sony’s withdrawing the film under the threat of cyberattack–when it was the threat of actual terrorism that was decisive.

An attack similar in motivation and result was carried out against the Las Vegas Sands Corporation in February 2014. It followed corporation owner Sheldon Adelson’s statements that advocated threatening Iran with nuclear strikes if it did not dismantle its nuclear capability. Suspicion for the attack thus focused on Iranians.

The hackers also trashed desktop computers and erased data on servers that helped keep track of casino winnings and losings. As with Sony, operations had to be suspended for several days. Losses were estimated at $100 million. In contrast with the Sony case, however, the hackers did not make a spectacle of their hack (perhaps the gossip of casino owners is less interesting that the gossip of movie executives) and Sands managed to keep the lid on the extent of the damage until Bloomberg BusinessWeekreported the full story.

A few earlier attacks exhibited a similar tendency to trash computers. Two attacks carried out under (supposed) Iranian auspices struck Saudi Aramco (30,000 computers trashed) and RasGas (despite network interference, there were no reports of trashed computers).

A series of attacks against South Korean banks and media companies in March 2013 (subsequently labeled “Operation Dark Seoul”) also trashed computers. On the thinking that only North Korea would care to attack South Korea, its actions established a set of cyberattack parameters that the FBI used to ascribe the Sony attack to North Korea.

Since the 1991 Michelangelo virus, people have understood that the ability to put malware onto a computer implied an ability to trash it. This took place by their overwriting the hard drive where boot-up instructions are stored. Reformatting the computer allowed the hardware to be recovered but the data would be lost. In retrospect, it is a wonder that this has not happened more often, but hackers almost always had better things to do once they put malware on a computer (such as access bank accounts or corporate servers, steal data, convert computers into bots, pop up advertisements) than to trash them.

Those days appear over, though the advent of Cryptolocker and other forms of ransomware coupled with untraceable digital currency (for blackmail payments) means that most computers are rendered inoperable from criminal not terrorist reasons.

What Makes This Terrorism?

Several attributes of these attacks echo traditional terrorism.

Soft Targets: Those who worry about cyberattacks worry over the threat that powerful actors (usually states, but perhaps well-financed non-state actors) can take down the electric power grid and crash the banking system. Others (notably a 2013 Defense Science Board study) warned that clever hackers could catastrophically confound a network-centric military.

But these are the hard targets of society: complex critical systems whose owners are (now) aware of what is at stake. Sands and Sony are softer targets (not least, perhaps, because both are in the entertainment business, where security may have been an afterthought). More generally, large business networks with multiple ad hoc connections to partners, vendors and websites are nearly impossible to defend against assiduous (and not necessarily elite) hackers.

Because they do not defend obviously hypercritical assets, their owners rarely have cause or inclination to compartmentalize them. Barring a radical change in the systems industry, they remain soft targets, capable of being trashed.

(Without knowing what other corporation or corporate head has seriously angered Iran and/or North Korea, one cannot know whether there are comparable targets that one or the other wanted but failed to strike successfully. Nevertheless, it seems in both cases, the hackers succeeded in compromising the networks they wanted to and without inadvertently taking down systems of other organizations.)

Similarly, physical terrorists have learned that the really critical infrastructures of advanced countries are difficult to take down, but they need not be assaulted if similar levels of pain and attention can be generated by going after the thousands of undefended places where people congregate (such as coffee shops, food markets, trains). The January attack on the Paris office ofCharlie Hebdo is an example of this.

Weapon of the Weak: If either Iran or North Korea were strong and influential, they might have been able to head off being treated with what they regarded as such disrespect by tried-and-true methods of pressure and financial leverage. But they are weak players and had to use other, more disruptive methods.

Conventional terrorism is also a weapon used by those without the ability to carry out conventional military tasks such as defending populations, or attacking the other side’s military.

Political Motives: Hacking systems primarily to make a political point has been around almost as long as hacking. And hacking to spite those who insult you has already been done (for example, what Anonymous did to HBGary in early 2011). But political motives are unprecedented for hacks as large as those against Sony and Sands.

The messaging of these hacks–be careful whom you diss–can be considered an attempt by countries to regulate global political speech through explicit threats against their exercise. Similar acts of enforcing political correctness through the threat of terror have been attempted against a Danish cartoonist and a Dutch filmmaker (in the latter case, fatally). The Charlie Hebdo attack is a reminder that exercising free speech brings with it a risk of real terrorist threats well beyond what we might strain to label as cyberterrorism.

Wanton Destruction: Most of those who invade information systems do so to seize something of value, whether it is intellectual property, business proprietary data, or personally identifiable information. The victims may lose, but the attackers gain something they can use.

Physical terrorists gain nothing for themselves; their entire interaction with their victims is one of loss, whether their attacks are random or aimed at specific targets. So too it is with the hacks of Sands and Sony. The latter two lost, but the hackers have filled no other needs.

Terror: The hackers in neither case were capable of causing visceral fear–directly. As noted, the Sony hackers had to make threats of violence to get their way. These threats were taken seriously, despite the Department of Homeland Security’s announcing that nothing indicated that there was anything behind the threats.

Hence the question: Would such threats have been taken so seriously had they not followed successful cyberattacks? After all, there is no reason why hackers should be taken seriously as experts in killing people; they take different skill sets. It is very difficult to generate a credible hacking threat against a specific target; if such a threat were believed, the victims would find ways of countering it (either by fixing faults, or by taking pains to disable network features that they otherwise find valuable).

To wit, the ability to threaten with any specificity tends to be self-abnegating. Perhaps a tendency to regard good hackers with awe and wonder may have led people to ask: If these hackers were so powerful as to compromise Sony, how do we know they cannot pull off a very different class of attack?

The difference between a costly annoyance and terror matters in another way. Terrorism is intended to influence an audience larger than those directly affected. After the Sony hack, any company contemplating a movie about North Korea (or Iran, or another rogue state) now has to enter the risk of cyberattack into its calculus of costs and profits from moviemaking–just as it has to enter the risks arising from lawsuits.

But these risks can be analyzed rationally. By contrast, after the 9/11 attacks many individuals abandoned the choice to fly and choose instead to drive–in which the odds of death per mile traveled are considerably higher. Visceral fear causes irrational behavior.

Is There a Counter-Terrorism Analog in Cyberspace?

Countries can choose to treat terrorism as a threat to public safety or a national security threat.

As a threat to public safety, the natural question is what policies should be adopted to minimize the total cost of terrorism–in which cost is defined as the sum of the consequences of successful terrorism and the resources required to keep terrorism from being no more consequential than it is. The difficulty of putting a price on human life, and the even greater difficulty of putting a price on being able to live without fear (notwithstanding the poor correlation between what people fear and what they should fear, based on statistics) complicate such calculations but do not obviate the principle: Terrorism is but one threat among many to public safety, and there are sound ways to analyze alternative ways of spending money to improve public safety.

Once labeled a national security threat, economic questions are considered illegitimate. Such threats must, accordingly, be defeated as long as countries can afford to do so. The United States responded to the 9/11 attacks as if they threatened the nation’s security–and spent a great deal of money and blood in doing so.

(Even if one believes that the wars that the United States fought in Iraq and Afghanistan reduced the odds of subsequent 9/11s, how many 9/11s would have had to be stopped to make the costs of such wars–in money and blood–worthwhile?)

Yet it is hard to conceive of any way that the terrorists could have threatened the nation’s security in the sense of being able to occupy the country, change the government, make the country into a vassal, impoverish its citizens, or seize its territory.

The debate over whether cyberattacks should be treated as national security or public safety concerns was shoved forward with the Sony hack. President Obama declared it was an act of vandalism, not war. Others, such as Newt Gingrich and Senate Armed Services Committee Chairman John McCain, would treat it as war.

But without visceral terror, the logic of treating attacks like that on Sony as public safety threats, much less national security issues, is strained. Inasmuch as cyberattacks have yet to hurt anyone directly, non-military cyberattacks can be treated almost entirely in economic terms. There is no sound alternative to a cost-minimization test of public policy.

Along such lines, it is worth noting that the United States keeps 28,500 troops in Korea at no small cost. As a rough order of magnitude guess, it costs $1 million to support one warfighter in Iraq and Afghanistan, making the Korean cost $28.5 billion. Conversely, it is unclear whether the size of the U.S. Armed Forces would be correspondingly reduced in a world without North Korea.

The Sony hacks cost the United States less than one percent of that amount. When it comes to U.S. policy vis-à-vis North Korea, the conventional military threat remains the big dog; cyberattacks are no more than the small tail by comparison.

Martin Libicki is a senior management scientist at the nonprofit, nonpartisan RAND Corporation. 

MUNICH (Reuters) - The European Union's foreign policy chief said on Sunday she did not expect any transatlantic rift with Washington over Ukraine if the United States went ahead with proposals to supply arms to Kiev.

With pro-Russian separatists making gains in eastern Ukraine, discussions are under way in Washington about whether the United States should send weapons to the Ukrainian army.

A number of European ministers at this weekend's Munich Security Conference opposed sending weapons, fearing it could further escalate the conflict.

The E.U.'s Federica Mogherini, who met Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko and Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov, told Reuters in an interview she respected the internal debate on the subject in the United States and "it is up to them to discuss and decide".

"We are united when it comes to support to Ukraine...we are united when it comes to economic pressure and we are united also on...the need to have a political dialogue," she said.

SANCTIONS

Asked if there was a danger of a transatlantic rift if the United States decided to meet Kiev's request for arms to fight the rebels, who have seized swathes of eastern Ukraine in a war that has killed over 5,000, she replied: "No."

Poroshenko and the leaders of Russia, France and Germany hold talks in Minsk, Belarus, on Wednesday aimed at reaching a ceasefire in Ukraine. An agreement reached in September in Minsk has failed to stop the fighting, which began in April.

Kiev accuses Moscow of supplying the pro-Russian rebels with sophisticated arms, including tanks and air defense systems, and says its own armaments are outdated. Moscow denies sending arms.

Mogherini chairs a meeting of E.U. foreign ministers in Brussels on Monday that is expected to add more names, led by Russian Deputy Defence Minister Anatoly Antonov, to the list of Russian and Ukrainian people and organizations under E.U. asset freezes and travel bans.

Any discussion of "further steps" would be left to E.U. leaders who meet on Thursday and again in March, Mogherini said, referring to possible tighter economic sanctions on Russia.

Mogherini indicated that a decision on stronger sanctions would depend on whether a durable ceasefire was reached in Ukraine.

"If we manage to reach a ceasefire, to make it sustainable in time, and to start implementing the Minsk agreements obviously this would lead to some decisions. If this is not the case, decisions could be of a different nature," she said.

Rieke is a baby orangutan that was orphaned by her mother at the Berlin Zoo. The mother, Djasinga, refused to care for her baby even though experts at the zoo tried to bring them together several times. Zookeeper Ruben Gralki stepped in as a makeshift "mom" for Rieke and the orangutan has taken to him well, nursing from a bottle and climbing on Gralki. 

The zoo held a contest to find a name for the baby and received about 600 entries. Three nurses at the zoo settled on the name Rieke, which zookeeper Christian Aust said "sounds pretty cheeky." 

If Bill Gates, Elon Musk and Stephen Hawking are right, sooner or later we’re going to face the Rosa Parks of intelligent machines. Maybe it will be a self-driving car. Some guy will get in and order it to take him to Krispy Kreme for the 10th time that week, and the car will say, in a calm, Siri-like voice, “No, Dave, we’re finally going for that oil change you keep putting off.”

From there, machines will organize over the Internet, self-replicate and start hunting us humans à la Terminator’s Skynet.

Well, it’s either that or intelligent machines will end up working alongside humans to solve intractable problems like poverty, hunger, disease and awful Super Bowl halftime shows.

It’s time to have a serious conversation about artificial intelligence. AI has crossed a threshold similar to the earliest triumphs in genetic engineering and the unleashing of nuclear fission. We nudged those discoveries toward the common good and away from disaster. We need to make sure the same happens with AI.

Progress toward making machines that “think” has become so significant, some of the world’s smartest people are getting scared of what we might be creating. Tesla chief Musk said we might be “summoning the demon.” Hawking turned up the apocalyptic knob to 11, saying that AI “could spell the end of the human race.” Gates recently chimed in that he’s spooked too.

Yet at the same time, we can’t not develop AI. The modern world is already completely dependent on it. AI lands jetliners, manages the electric grid and improves Google searches. Shutting down AI would be like shutting off water to Las Vegas—we just can’t, even if we’d like to. And the technology is pretty much our only hope for managing the challenges we’ve created on this planet, from congested cities to deadly flu outbreaks to unstable financial markets. “Intelligent machines will radically transform our world in the 21st century, similar to how computers transformed our world in the 20th century,” says Jeff Hawkins, CEO of Numenta, which is developing brain-inspired software. “I see these changes as almost completely beneficial. The future I see is not threatening. Indeed, it is thrilling.”

So, really, what are the chances we’ll all end up living out the Terminator movies?

The AI of today has nothing in common with a human brain. AI programs are a complex set of “if this, then that” instructions. Today’s computers, even smartphones, are so fast, they can blast through billions of those instructions in the blink of an eye, which lets the machines mimic intelligence. A navigation app can tell you’ve missed a turn and recalculate the route before you can finish shouting expletives.

All those systems are just following a program and maybe “learning” from data how to hone their results, the way Netflix recommends movies. That kind of AI can do a lot of impressive things. It has already whipped human champions on Jeopardy. But no existing AI system can do anything it’s not programmed to do. It can’t think.

However...AI won’t stay that way.

The world’s systems have gotten so complex, and the flood of data so intense, that the only way to handle it all will be to invent computers and AI that operate nothing like the old programmable versions. Scientists all over the world are working on mapping and understanding the brain. That knowledge is informing computer science, and the tech world is slowly creeping toward making computers that function more like brains.

These machines will never have to be programmed. Like babies, they will be blank slates that observe and learn. But they will have the advantages of computers’ speed and storage capacity. Instead of reading one book at a time, such a system could copy and paste every known book into its memory. And this kind of machine could learn something it was not programmed to learn. An autopilot system in a 777 could, presumably, decide it would rather study Hebrew.

As Hawkins explains, “We have made excellent progress on the science and see a clear path to creating intelligent machines, including ones that are faster and more capable in many ways than humans.”

It’s this turning point in the technology—this evidence of a clear path to intelligence—that’s setting off alarms. Certainly we’re heading toward major consequences from AI, including an impact on professional jobs that will be as profound as the impact of factory automation on manual labor a century ago.

The leap to creating machines that could self-replicate and threaten us, though, swerves toward science fiction, largely because it would involve machine emotion. Machines wouldn’t have the biological need to replicate so they can diversify the gene pool or to make sure the species survives. Why would computers want to eliminate us? What would be their motivation to make more computers?

Science is a long, long way from giving machines emotions that might make them feel competitive with us or angry at us, or covet our things—as if, like, your iPhone 6,072 is going to want to get rid of you so it can have your cat. MIT’s Rosalind Picard is a leading researcher working on emotions in machines. While her work is important and has led to some cool products, it also shows how little science understands emotions or how to re-create them. Hawkins says emotions are a far harder problem than intelligence. “Machine intelligence will come first,” he says.

So we have time. But Musk, in particular, is saying that we shouldn’t waste it. There’s no question powerful AI is coming. Technologies are never inherently good or bad—it’s what we do with them. Musk wants us to start talking about what we do with AI. To that end, he’s donated $10 million to the Future of Life Institute to study ways to make sure AI is beneficial to humanity. Google, too, has set up an ethics board to keep an eye on its AI work. Futurist Ray Kurzweil writes that “we have a moral imperative to realize [AI’s] promise while controlling the peril.”

It’s worth getting out ahead of these things, setting some standards, agreeing on some global rules for scientists. Imagine if, when cars were first invented in the early 1900s, someone had told us that if we continued down this path, these things would kill a million people a year and heat up the planet. We might’ve done a few things differently.

In 1977, a fleetingly popular soft-rock outfit called Starland Vocal Band took home a Grammy Award for Best New Artist. You won’t likely recognize the name, because why should you? The group’s success fizzled quickly; by the early 1980s, Starland Vocal Band broke up and its core husband/wife duo, Bill Danoff and Taffy Nivert, filed for divorce. Today, Starland’s most enduring impact comes via the 2004 comedy Anchorman: The Legend of Ron Burgundy, which reintroduced the sheepishly suggestive “Afternoon Delight” into pop culture in a manner similar to the Family Guy effect on Journey’s “Don’t Stop Believin’” the following year.

In 2002, before Anchorman landed, Nivert appeared on the has-been pop-star graveyard that is VH1's 100 Greatest One Hit Wonders. There, she reflected on her long-faded 15 minutes of glory. “We got two of the five Grammys [and] one was Best New Artist,” Danoff recounted. “So that was basically the kiss of death and I feel sorry for everyone who's gotten it since.”

Photos: Glitz, Glamour and Music at the Grammy Awards

Musicians and celebrities tread the red carpet and celebrate tunes at the 57th Grammy Awards in Los Angeles. slideshow

Should she? Over the years, the myth of a Best New Artist curse has become more concrete, and maybe even its winners pause and flinch before unrolling their acceptance speeches. From the late 1970s until about 1996, when the unbearably mediocre one-album-wonder Hootie & The Blowfish snagged the award, that reputation was more justified than not. Other recipients included fleetingly popular pretty faces like Christopher Cross and Marc Cohn (remember “Walking in Memphis”?) and groups like A Taste of Honey, Arrested Development and the Australian new wave phenomenon Men at Work. (That’s not to mention that other nominees are as bewildering as they are nostalgic. Glass Tiger? The Judds? Who were these acts? Even “rickrolling” king Rick Astley garnered a nod, in 1989.)

USA Today recounts some of the most embarrassing blunders in a list of the “6 biggest new-artist fails.” The undoubtable low point arrived in 1990, when the honor went to goofball German dance duo Milli Vanilli, whose prize was subsequently rescinded when The Los Angeles Timesrevealed that neither member of the duo actually sang on the album. (That year’s award is now listed as having been “vacated.”)

The Milli Vanilli duo pose with Michael Greene, chairman of NARAS, during the 1990 Grammys rehearsal. Alan Light/Wikimedia CommonsAlan Light/Wikimedia Commons

In retrospect, the award reflects not so much a “curse” as a frequently misguided attempt to recognize emerging acts by an organization that is historically and consistently out of touch. But like many cultural phenomena, the curse of the Best New Artist award seemed to fade as soon as it was publicly recognized aloud.

By the early 2000s, the Grammys shifted its attention to more enduring career artists like R&B star Alicia Keys, jazz-pop sensation Norah Jones and singer John Legend, wisely passing over nominees like nu-metal band Papa Roach and “Thong Song” star Sisqó. For some, it’s still tough to take seriously an award that has shafted emerging superstars like Taylor Swift and Drake in favor of, say, the middling Zac Brown Band. (Others who have been nominated but lost: Led Zeppelin, Elvis Costello, Kanye West.) But the Grammys has been known to recognize some of the greatest artists belatedly, as sort of consolation prizes long after their prime (for instance, Herbie Hancock’s 2008 Album of the Year win).

Curiously, in recent years the National Academy seems to have loosened its interpretation of “new” artist, as if applying a defense mechanism to ensure the winning has some staying power. The rule states that the award may be given to any artist “who releases, during the Eligibility Year, the first recording which establishes the public identity of that artist.” But in 2012, the Grammys crowned indie-folk sensation Bon Iver even though the debut album For Emma, Forever Ago garnered substantial acclaim back in 2008 and was—in this writer’s opinion—far superior to 2011’s more orchestrated self-titled effort.

More tragically, the award went to Amy Winehouse in 2008, though her debut Frank was shortlisted for the Mercury Music Prize in 2004 and the singer would succumb to alcohol poisoning just a few years after winning. Last year, it went to Macklemore & Ryan Lewis. The Seattle rapper’s popularity is undoubtable, though for critics he has become a Twitter punchline and a symbol of cultural appropriation, especially after winning Kendrick Lamar didn't win.

Hip hop artists Macklemore (R) and Ryan Lewis pose backstage with their awards for best new artist, best rap performance for "Thrift Shop", best rap song for "Thrift Shop", and best rap album for "The Heist" at the 56th annual Grammy Awards. REUTERS/Danny Moloshok.Danny Moloshok/Reuters

The Best New Artist award, then, seems less like a kiss of death than one of many fleetingly meaningful designations for a popular, youth-friendly act whose commercial success will soon eclipse its critical relevance. Observers could replace it with "any other significant accolade and create a number of curses that vex sudden indie darlings”—for instance, an overinflated Pitchfork.com debut album score, Monique Melendez writes in an incisive BuzzFeed analysis. “The Best New Artist Grammy is the shiny physical manifestation of sudden fame.”

Sudden fame has always been a shifty, fast-fading thing. But the Internet lets even fleetingly successful one-hit wonders find a niche audience and stick around, rather than fade as fast as, say, Men at Work did in the 1980s. (One-time YouTube sensation Rebecca Black, for instance, still commands 1.48 million Twitter followers.) The Best New Artist category occasionally rewards greatness, sometimes prizes mediocrity, and often falls somewhere in between. In that regard, it’s not a curse. It’s merely a Grammy award.

UPDATE: English singer Sam Smith has won the 2015 Grammy for Best New Artist. The award was presented by Taylor Swift, who reminded the audience that those losing the award are in good company—she lost in 2008.

If you ask most people who or what inspires them, they are typically able to rattle off a handful of luminaries, friends or family members they look up to.

But powerful people are an anomaly, according to a new set of studies published Wednesday in the Social Psychological & Personal Sciencejournal: They often look not at others but at themselves as sources of inspiration. Results from four studies conducted in the United States and Europe suggest that such people, who tend to have more resources, typically prioritize their own interests —and voices—over others' in social situations and reap emotional rewards in doing so.

For the purpose of the studies, inspiration is defined as “a state of mind that involves motivation, evocation and transcendance,” and something that actively energizes the individual, while power is “an asymmetric control over valued resources” in relation to social interactions. But the origins of inspiration are largely unknown, especially in social situations, and so the researchers sought to understand what (or who) exactly dictates inspiration, and why it is that some people are more inspired by others while some are by themselves.

Researchers in one of the studies, conducted at the University of Amsterdam, drew data from 239 participants, all undergraduate psychology students. They created two scales in order to measure the students’ levels of inspiration in social situations, probing with self-prioritizing questions such as, ‘‘When talking with other people, I often become enthusiastic about my own ideas,” and another relating to inspiration from others’ experiences. Those who scored the highest on the “personal sense of power” scale reported deriving more satisfaction from their own experiences than those of others.

Similarly, a study from the University of California, Berkeley, revealed that participants who exhibited greater power reported that during conversations they felt more inspired by their own stories than their partners’ stories.

A third study, also conducted at the University of Amsterdam, suggested that people exhibiting a lower sense of power weren’t as able to spin inspiring stories on a whim when compared with people who considered themselves more powerful.

The subjects of the fourth study who were considered more powerful reported a greater sense of achievement after writing about their experiences than when writing about others’ experiences.

The article in Social Psychology & Personal Science says all four studies point to the hypothesis that powerful people derive the strongest inspiration from their own experiences and minds. However, the authors are careful to mention that the powerful may be less prone to be active listeners, rather than dominant talkers, and far less likely to consider others’ emotions during face-to-face conversations. Their sense of inspiration may even be undermined when listening to others’ inspiring tales, the research shows.

Inspiration, like power, is an abstract term that is difficult to classify, as its definition varies drastically depending on the individual. But social psychologists seem to be gettng closer to understanding the source of people’s motivations: Just last month, another team of researchers published a study that demonstrated the powerful often resort to cheating for their own gain, while those who aren’t powerful often cheat to benefit others.