Slate Articles

The Real Problem With Google’s New Privacy Policy

Thomas Gideon — Fri, 10 Feb 2012 15:55:06 GMT

When Google announced impending changes to its privacy policy, users and the media alike were focused on one thing: the inability to opt-out, short of deleting your account. Though Congress keeps pushing Google for more clarification, many users have grumpily acknowledged the Gmail notifications and moved to new privacy concerns like an iPhone app that copied and uploaded users' contacts.

How To Win the Westminster Dog Show

Josh Dean — Fri, 10 Feb 2012 12:15:00 GMT

For his new book, Show Dog: The Charmed Life and Trying Times of a Near-Perfect Purebred, Josh Dean spent more than a year following Jack, a champion Australian Shepherd. What follows is an excerpt from the book, adapted from a chapter on the world of show-dog backers. Also see our Magnum Photos gallery on dog shows.

A Bettor’s Guide to Westminster

Evan Dahl — Fri, 10 Feb 2012 12:08:00 GMT

Also see our Magnum Photos gallery on dog shows.

A Shunning in Seattle

Ruth Graham — Fri, 10 Feb 2012 12:00:00 GMT

Until last fall, a 25-year-old Seattle man named Andrew was happily committed to Mars Hill Church, one of America’s fastest-growing megachurches with more than 5,000 members. He volunteered weekly for security duty at his branch of the church, joined a Bible study group, and had recently become engaged to the daughter of a church elder. Then he made a mistake that found him cast out: He cheated on his fiancee with a community college classmate. The fury over Andrew’s experience—and his decision to publicize the church’s internal disciplinary procedures—has led to accusations by other Christians that one of the most powerful evangelical voices in the country, Mars Hill pastor Mark Driscoll, employs a cultlike leadership style. Now, for the first time, Mars Hill is speaking out in response to its former member’s charges.

Comic Book Men

Troy Patterson — Fri, 10 Feb 2012 11:45:00 GMT

Comic Book Men (AMC, Sundays at 10 p.m. ET), a reality show about a crew of perfectly nice geeks, boasts competent production values. Thus, it is jarring to see Kevin Smith's name attached. As Sam Adams wrote in a recent Slate piece, Smith "once said he wasn’t particularly interested in how his films looked." The director of Clerks and Chasing Amy is, in purely cinematic terms, an auteur without a vision.

Corrections

Fri, 10 Feb 2012 11:30:00 GMT

In the Feb. 9 “Moneybox,” Matthew Yglesias misspelled the last name of Chipotle founder Steve Ells.

Bad Cop

Dana Stevens — Fri, 10 Feb 2012 01:35:33 GMT

With Rampart, the Israeli director Oren Moverman shifts into an idiom that’s more likely to appeal to American audiences than the quiet, downbeat social realism of his first film, The Messenger (2009). The partly-true story of a very bad cop brought down by the LAPD corruption scandals of the late ’90s, Rampart is much louder, jazzier, and more directorially show-offy than The Messenger (and, in part for those reasons, not nearly as good a movie). But at times this gritty, intermittently gripping police drama feels like a follow-up to The Messenger—not just because of the thematic overlap (both films deal with grief, substance abuse, and self-destructive masculinity), but because Rampart’s main character, the cynical, drug-abusing cop played by Woody Harrelson, might be the long-lost twin of the alcoholic Army captain Harrelson played in the earlier Moverman film.

The Last, Best Hope for Conservatives

John Dickerson — Fri, 10 Feb 2012 00:36:27 GMT

At CPAC in 2011, Newt Gingrich took the stage to the stirring sound of Survivor's 1980’s rock anthem "Eye of the Tiger." He walked deliberately through the crowd. Here was Caesar returning from the wars. Tomorrow Gingrich will speak again at the same gathering, but the conservative who most deserves the dramatic, fist-pumping greeting is his presidential rival Rick Santorum: the lonely warrior who has triumphed without playing a soundtrack of self-regard, without the ready millions of Gingrich's gambling-magnate patron, and despite more derision from the elite media than Gingrich has faced.

Is That All You Got?

Dahlia Lithwick — Fri, 10 Feb 2012 00:05:33 GMT

One of the most remarked-upon aspects of the first round of Prop 8 litigation, that concluded this week with a 2-1 defeat for the initiative at the 9^th Circuit Court of Appeals, was the weakness of the case against gay marriage. As Andrew Cohen explained at the time, at every turn Judge Vaughn Walker, who presided over the trial, expressed frustration at the fact that the opponents of gay marriage either had no case or couldn’t be bothered to make one. Arguing for the gay marriage ban, seasoned attorney Charles Cooper called only two witnesses (the plaintiffs called 17), one of whom was not deemed qualified to testify as an expert. As Cooper finally explained in his closing argument, "Your honor, you don't have to have evidence for this. … You only need to go back to your chambers and pull down any dictionary or book that defines marriage," Cooper told the judge. "You won't find it had anything to do with homosexuality."

How Did Washington State and Washington, D.C., Get the Same Name?

Brian Palmer — Thu, 09 Feb 2012 23:06:45 GMT

The Washington state Legislature approved gay marriage Wednesday. When Gov. Chris Gregoire signs the bill into law, her state will become the second Washington to recognize gay marriage since Washington, D.C., did so in 2009. Why do we have two Washingtons?