Salon.com // Current TV

Why we say yes to drugs

Resistance to mind-altering substances is futile, according to a new "Secret... more

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What's the baby sitter up to?

She's the source of fear, frustration and sexual fantasy. A new social history... more

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Why America is flunking science

Don't just blame poor education for our nation's scientific illiteracy --... more

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Will the White House garden change food policy?

It's yielded pounds of produce, and good will from activists, but will the White... more

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How blogs changed everything

As old media struggles for relevance, the once-maligned blogosphere proves it's... more

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Neocons are Ahmadinejad's useful idiots

Iranian-American journalist Hooman Majd separates facts from fantasies about the Iranian protests

"A friend once told me that I was the only person he knew who was both 100 percent American and 100 percent Iranian," writes Hooman Majd in his book on Iranian culture, "The Ayatollah Begs to Differ: The Paradox of Modern Iran."

The consummate insider and outsider, Majd served as the English-language translator for Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's now infamous 2006 speech at the United Nations, and also wrote about the experience for the New York Observer.

The son of an Iranian diplomat under the shah, and grandson of a powerful ayatollah, Majd grew up mainly in the United States where he worked for many years in the entertainment industry before launching his career as a journalist and author. Although openly linked with the reformists -- he wore green Iranian slippers on Bill Maher's program last week and has also translated for former President Mohammed Khatami (to whom he is related by marriage) -- Majd's views on Iran are distinguished by their nuance and fierce independence. Indeed, in his status as a sophisticated global citizen and Iranian American sympathetic to the core ideals of the Islamic Republic, he embodies the paradox of contemporary Iran that is the subject of his book.

Majd was in Iran in April for a recent Newsweek cover story about his journey from his ancestral home of Yazd through the Iranian heartland to the sprawling capital city of Tehran. He returned again in May during the run-up to the elections and has since been in daily contact with friends and family about the crisis in the country from his home in New York City.

Salon spoke to Majd (who has been a regular contributor to these pages) by phone about whether or not the Ahmadinejad victory was rigged (yes), what reform candidate Mir Hossein Mousavi really wants (Islamic democracy), and why the neocons are Ahmadinejad's best friend.

How are you getting most of your news? From family? Are you following Twitter?

I'm not following Twitter so much. I get reports from people I trust and the media to the extent they are covering it. The rest is all from family and friends in Tehran. They tell me what they feel and what they know, as much as they can. People have to be careful with phones given since many phones are tapped now. I speak to Tehran at least once a day.Iranian-American journalist Hooman Majd separates facts from fantasies about the... more

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Why are conservatives such hypocrites about sex?

"Ask a Wingnut" is written by a real live conservative and former Bush... more

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In a downturn, is sex work better than McDonald's?

Castro Valley, Calif. -- "Boob play," "pics of kitty," "topless housecleaning" and "hypno role play." The list, scribbled in a lined yellow notebook, is followed by a double-underlined figure: $725.

It's 9 a.m. on a Friday and 30-year-old Marie is sitting on her couch clad in Donald Duck pajamas, munching on buttered toast and staring at her cellphone like she can will it to ring. If someone calls in response to the ad she posted this morning on Craigslist, she can add $75 to her projected income for the month.

Five months ago, before being laid off, Marie was bringing in $45,000 a year at Enterprise Rent-A-Car. Now, she operates out of two offices: her living room and a regularly changing hotel room. Her uniform is different, too: Instead of conservative business attire, she dons a lace bra and booty-hugging capris. The former corporate supervisor has become a sex worker.

She's applied for every strait-laced office gig she can find -- regardless of hours, pay or whether her University of California degree makes her absurdly overqualified. She went from being a manager to fighting for personal assistant positions. But last month, after innumerable unanswered cover letters, overdue bills and a delay in her unemployment checks, she entered a world of code words and cash wads. It was baptism by -- bodily fluids: She peed on a guy in her own bed for $100. Since then, she's been paid more times than she can count, or cares to count, for sex, blow jobs, hand jobs and sensual massage.

Of course, Marie is far from the only woman pushed into the sex industry by these harsh economic times. Strip clubs, X-rated Web cam companies and escort managers across the country have reported an increase in job applications in the last several months -- ironically, at the same time that business is largely going down. The same phenomenon was seen after the dot-com bust, when out-of-work techies turned to everything from S/M dungeons to porn sets. Both booms saw a series of salacious news items about good girls gone bad, a narrative that is at least as old as the Bible -- but I wanted to know what was unique about this particular cultural moment.

Industry insiders like to say that they're seeing more "normal" people, girls "with good minds." Mike of A&M Studios, a producer of X-rated video chats, says: "A couple years ago, we'd have a lot of strippers or people who might be on meth -- a lot of shiftier people." He continues, "Now we're seeing performers who are more educated and used to working on a regular schedule. There's been a shift to a very different class of people." Much as his phrasing gives me chills, it isn't just a cliché that women with limited job opportunities often turn to sex work.

The difference in these dark days is that middle-class advantages, like a solid college education and professional work experience, don't offer the same level of protection that they once did from being pushed to make such a choice. Not to mention, it's easier now to make the decision because the Internet has bulldozed the barrier of entry into the sex industry. Just a few clicks away from Craigslist's job board is an array of immediate, cash-upfront adult gigs.

Last month, it looked like that might change: Craigslist announced it would replace its raunchy erotic services section with a costlier and human-monitored "adult" section to appease a threatening state attorney general -- but, so far, the only difference is that there are fewer ads and more euphemisms. Instead of hand jobs and BJs, women offer "sweet treats," "pleasure," "play" or, most popular of all, sensual or erotic "massage." Those looking to hire simply put out a call for a "personal assistant" or a "female teacher" under "adult gigs." Craigslist still allows "normal" girls like Marie to easily gauge the going rates, pick up the lingo and become plucky entrepreneurs, soCastro Valley, Calif. -- "Boob play," "pics of kitty,"... more

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Scholarships for virgins?

Girls living in a small province of Sierra Leone called northern Biriwa are being... more

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Why we can't eat just one

We do it for the bDr. David Kessler, 58, says that when he looks at a huge plate of... more

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Movies online: The future is (almost) here

For the better part of a decade, people like me have been pronouncing that theatrical motion-picture distribution, at least when it came to independent films, was going the way of the passenger pigeon and the daily print newspaper. (You won't believe this, kids, but somebody used to come to your house every single morning with a rolled-up log of paper wrapped in plastic and rubber bands!) Some mystical convergence of the Internet, cable TV, the hand-held SmartHooble and other, yet-to-be-invented networks and devices would open the doors to a hellish new Nirvana of unlimited, 24/7 hi-def cinema, from the most massive Hollywood spectacles to the most obscure art-house offerings.

Well, the future is here, sort of. And as usual with the future, it's not a yes-or-no proposition. Online movie delivery has exploded in the last year, at least compared to its virtual nonexistence before that. Within a few clicks from this page, you could be watching a documentary about barehanded fishing in Oklahoma, the Soviet-era magic-realist classic "Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors" or "Hotel for Dogs." Come September, Sally Potter's new film "Rage" will premiere as a series of episodes on Babelgum, at the same time it's released in theaters and on DVD. The Palestinian film "Laila's Birthday," an international festival favorite with no theatrical deal, was recently made available for three weeks on the Auteurs, a new cinephile streaming site that's currently in beta.

Those are just examples; I could pick dozens more. But online distribution remains an insignificant factor in the film economy (if anything, movie theaters are thriving in the current recession), and it represents a tiny proportion of the video watched on computer screens. One could argue, in fact, that feature films and the Internet are mismatched forms of media; the former demands long stretches of undivided attention while the latter thrives on multitasking, rapid response time and brief info-bursts. When was the last time you spent 90 minutes or more sitting at your computer and looking at the same thing?

Still, more and more movies are available online every month, and new modes of delivering them seem to crop up almost as fast. Last October marked a turning point of sorts. That was when YouTube streamed the week-long premiere of indie pioneer Wayne Wang's "The Princess of Nebraska" (as a companion piece to his theatrical release, "A Thousand Years of Good Prayers") and Hulu streamed its first full-length feature, the George W. Bush-related documentary "Crawford."

Those examples represent one model for online distribution: streaming video-on-demand, or VOD, that's free to the user and best understood as a promotional opportunity for the filmmaker and distributor. In the case of Hulu, some advertising revenue presumably flowed back to the makers of "Crawford" -- probably in the range of a few cents per viewer -- but the real value lay in getting the movie out to a large audience during an election season. (A Hulu source reports that "Crawford" remains the most-discussed video in the site's history.) YouTube's Screening Room site is not ad-supported, but Wang's film got 153,000 views in a week, far more eyeballs than he could likely have gotten from a small-scale, bicoastal theatrical release. DVD and television deals followed, so quite possibly the experiment paid off.

Free VOD streaming definitely isn't the only game in town. There are three basic themes in digital distribution -- the other two, essentially, being online video rental (paid VOD streaming) and online video purchase (paid downloads) -- and many variations upon them. Some online exhibitors, including iTunes, Netflix, Amazon and IndiePix, try to enable various ways of leapfrogging their content over the Berlin Wall between your computer and your TV set. Others, including Hulu, Joost, Jaman and the Auteurs, deliver content to your laptop and leave the rest to you. Yes, I hear you, technophiles: It's easy to connectFor the better part of a decade, people like me have been pronouncing that theatrical... more