ABCDE OUTLOOK sunday, july 18, 2010 INSIDE
The kids are all right Alfie Kohn debunks the idea of a coddled Generation Me. B2
Over the borderline An immigration policy backfires. B4
BOOK WORLD, B6-8 One nation, in downward-facing dog How the USA learned to say namaste to yoga. B6 Eating good in the neighborhood New York’s Lower East Side and the birth of American cuisine. B7 A real-life “To Kill a Mockingbird” The tale of Mississippi’s Willie McGee. B7
5 B DC MD VA B
myths about the death penalty. B3
MICHAEL MORGENSTERN AMERICA’S PETRO-STATE
Environmental ruin. Poverty. Corruption. What Louisiana has in common with the world’s oil-rich nations. by Steven Mufson
H by Elizabeth Fraterrigo
he stock certificates for the initial public offering in 1971 featured — what else? — a se- ductively posed bare-breast- ed woman positioned over
the name Playboy Enterprises Inc. Seri- ous investors snapped up the stock, and the novelty factor also prompted the purchase of a lot of single shares, priced at $23.50. Even then, Hugh Hefner — founder of the company’s flagship publication, Playboy magazine — had second thoughts about taking his company public. It meant increased scrutiny and a loss of control of the business he’d built from scratch. But the stock of- fering came on the heels of the com- pany’s dizzying success over the previ- ous decade and seemed to portend only further triumph as Playboy assumed a ubiquitous place in the American land- scape. Nearly 40 years later, Hefner — who remains the company’s chief creative officer and still owns most of its voting stock — issued a proposal last week to purchase the remaining shares of his once far-flung empire and take it pri-
uey P. Long, the famous Louisiana popu- list, launched his political career by wag- ing war on the big oil companies, espe- cially what he called Standard Oil’s “in- visible empire.” “I would rather go down to a thousand impeachments than to admit that I am the governor of the state that does not dare to call the Standard Oil Company to ac- count,” he declared in a 1929 campaign cir- cular.
But the threat of a thousand impeach- ments notwithstanding, Long later built his own invisible oil empire: In 1934, while he was a senator, he and his political asso- ciates formed the Win or Lose Corp. The company — which had a reputation of never losing — bought up state mineral leases and resold them to oil companies at
a healthy profit, while keeping a share for itself. Although Long died in 1935, his fam- ily and friends received royalties for dec- ades. This dividend came at a price for the rest of Louisiana. The oil leases Long and his associates sold were generally in wet- lands; in the process of tapping the oil and gas below, oil companies built a sprawling network of roads and canals, leaving be- hind a trail of damaged marshes. Wildcat wells came to dot the state’s landscape, and refineries and port facilities followed. Today, thousands of wells have been drilled within three miles of the far-from- pristine shoreline. But it was a price Louisianans went along with: Since oil was first discovered there, the state has produced 159.5 trillion
cubic feet of natural gas and 17.5 billion barrels of oil, according to the Louisiana Department of Natural Resources. That’s as much oil as the entire United States has produced over the past nine years. Americans may be torn up by the BP oil
spill and its destruction of the Gulf of Mexico’s natural habitat — and torn up we should be — but that habitat has not been pristine for decades. In many ways, Louisi- ana made its deal with the devil long ago. And what a bad deal it was. Long before the oil spill, the state’s embrace of the pe- troleum industry cast it under what econ- omists call “the resource curse”: the para- dox that countries rich in minerals or pe- troleum tend to grow more slowly and have lower living standards than other na- tions. Simply put, Louisiana is the closest
thing America has to a petro-state. Instead of blessing Louisiana with pros-
perity, the oil industry fostered depen- dency, corruption and an indifference to environmental damage. Our Cajun sheik- dom’s oil and gas riches — like those of the Niger Delta, the Orinoco belt in Venezuela and the Iraqi marshes — also stunted its development, leaving it far behind states with fewer natural resources.
According to the Census Bureau and
Harvard University health data, Louisiana ranks 49th among the states in life expec- tancy, has the second-highest rate of in-
oil continued on B5
Steven Mufson covers energy for The Washington Post.
Still living in a Playboy world T
JOHN BARR FOR THE WASHINGTON POST Hugh Hefner and his Playmates in 1979, eight years after Playboy went public.
vate, in an offer that puts the com- pany’s value at about $185 million. He is concerned, he says, about Playboy’s legacy. But he won’t reclaim that legacy without a fight. On Thursday, Friend- Finder Networks, which owns rival Penthouse magazine, announced a competing bid of $210 million.
Hefner’s effort to regain full control
of Playboy Enterprises follows more than a year of downsizing, outsourcing and talk of selling the company. Taking the company private would give him the chance to watch over Playboy
playboy continued on B4
Elizabeth Fraterrigo is an assistant professor of history at Loyola University Chicago and the author of “Playboy and the Making of the Good Life in Modern America.”
BOOK REVIEW
Upgrading our phones, downgrading our brains
by Jennifer Howard
I’m your only friend I’m not your only friend But I’m a little glowing friend But really I’m not actually your
friend. —They Might Be Giants
The song is about a nightlight, but it might just as well be about a smart- phone, that little glowing friend so many of us thumb lovingly all day and sleep next to at night.
Are our iPhones and BlackBerrys and Droids — and their larger brethren, iPads and netbooks and notebooks — really our friends? Or are they false (if sometimes useful) friends, as the tech- nology writer Nicholas Carr argues? In “The Shallows,” which builds off his rather alarming 2008 Atlantic article “Is Google Making Us Stupid?” he attempts to explain what he sees as the brain- corroding side effects of our digital de- vices. To make the case that the Net is
THE SHALLOWS What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains
By Nicholas Carr Norton. 276 pp. $26.95 HAMLET’S BLACKBERRY A Practical Philosophy for Building a Good Life in the Digital Age By William Powers Harper. 267 pp. $24.99
scrambling our neurons and eviscerat- ing our ability to think long and hard about anything, Carr draws on studies of neuroplasticity and the sweep of hu- man intellectual and technical history, from Socrates to Gutenberg to Marshall McLuhan. The hyperconnected mediasphere
that Carr knows so well has been blog- ging “The Shallows” to death. You could say the book has hit a nerve, with the likes of Steven Johnson and Steven Pinker weighing in to defend the cre-
blackberry continued on B5 Jennifer Howard is a senior reporter for the Chronicle of Higher Education.
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