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The Look of Love

Director: Michael Winterbottom

Genre: Biography, Comedy, Drama

Running Time: 101 minutes

Not Rated

With: Imogen Poots, Anna Friel, Tamsin Egerton

A recent spike in mortgage rates has created a new predicament for potential homebuyers: Forge ahead and try to lock in now? Or hold off?

Dhruv Gupta was quoted a 3.5 percent rate in May while searching for a place to buy in the San Francisco area. Less than two months later, he's looking at 5.2 percent for the same loan. But this trend has not deterred Gupta.

"It's a fact of life," he says. "I mean I can't control them, so what do you do?"

Over the weekend, Gupta bit the bullet and put a down payment on a two-bedroom condo in Oakland. It's so hard to find anything available and in his price range, he says, so he just went for it. He hopes rates will decline again, and that he'll be able to refinance. But for now, Gupta doesn't know how he feels about his decision.

"I'm more anxious than excited because of the commitment," he says.

Downstate in Temecula, Juan Johnson has had the opposite reaction to the market. "I learned that the interest rates had changed significantly enough where it made me reconsider my offer," he says.

He was in the process of making an offer on a house when his loan officer told him rates had suddenly jumped half a percentage point from the last quote he'd received.

"I was shocked," Johnson says. "You know, I said, 'You've got to be kidding me right?' And he said, 'Nope ... and they're supposed to continue to rise.' "

It was challenging enough trying to find a home his family likes, Johnson says, much less compete against investors making cash offers. Now, he's battling interest rates too.

"Bummed would be a, uh, a kind way to put it," Johnson says.

So, while Gupta jumped in, Johnson held back. Those differing reactions are reflected in the data as well. On one hand, the Mortgage Bankers Association says purchase applications rose 7 percent between early May and last week. But, according to the real estate website Redfin, the number of clients making offers declined more than 10 percent from May to June. Fewer people are requesting home tours, as well.

Market experts have long said rates would eventually rise, from their unprecedented 3 1/2 percent levels. But what touched off the jump was speculation the Federal Reserve would begin unwinding the stimulus programs that had been depressing rates.

Then, on June 19, Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke put a specific time frame on it, saying the central bank would wind down one of its bond-buying programs by the middle of next year if the economy continued showing signs of strength. Investors reacted as if Bernanke had sounded a siren.

"Almost as soon as the words left his mouth during that press conference, you had a big run-up in rates," says Michael Fratantoni, vice president of research for the Mortgage Banks Association.

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All this week, NPR is taking a look at the demographic changes that could reshape the political landscape in Texas over the next decade — and what that could mean for the rest of the country.

For most of the 20th century, Texas was a stronghold for Democrats. But Republicans have dominated the state for decades now.

An organization created by veterans of President Obama's presidential campaigns wants to change that. The group says the state's shifting demographics — including a fast-growing Hispanic population — combined with an intense grass-roots effort can create an opportunity for Democrats.

A New Campaign

It's 4 p.m. on a weekday afternoon in downtown Houston, where about 200 volunteers have gathered in a union hall to hear from a 34-year-old political whiz and data cruncher.

Jeremy Bird's skill at identifying potential voters, getting them registered and turning them out was a key part of Obama's election — and re-election.

Bird asks the group, "Are you fired up?" and they respond: "Ready to go!"

Clearly old habits die hard for the 2012 Obama campaign's national field director.

But Bird is in Houston to talk about his new mission: Battleground Texas. He tells his audience it will be very hard work, but that it's OK to believe that Texas is a place where Democrats can win.

More 'Texas 2020'

It's All Politics

How To Turn A Red State Blue: California Edition

Here's how Big Brother works.

Producers throw a bunch of people into a house, where they're stuck for about three months. All day and all night, they're watched by cameras, and they can be watched online — these are the so-called "live feeds," which are sort of like watching the security cameras in the most boring juice bar in Los Angeles. (I wrote about touring the house in 2010; it's very creepy.)

Three nights a week, CBS edits together some of the footage and creates the prime-time television show Big Brother, which obviously includes only a tiny percentage of what they've collected. Of course, the difference between this show and other reality shows is the measure of transparency: people who watch the live feeds (and yes, a significant number of people watch them, meticulously log them, and discuss them all summer) know a lot more about what happened than what's put on the broadcast, and they can get very angry when they feel like the editing has hidden the truth.

But this isn't the only thing that distinguishes this particular show. More and more, Big Brother has set itself apart by the sheer average hatefulness levels among its casts. Shows like Survivor always combine a few jerks with a good number of normals, because those are the people you're supposed to root for, and they're the ones who often win. Big Brother doesn't really bother with the normals anymore, nor does it bother with many people who don't look good in bikinis.

If you think about it, most reality shows require a commitment of maybe a month; Big Brother requires that you be able to be locked up all summer. That, too, encourages it to be full of idle people who don't really do anything with their lives to begin with. There are exceptions, but the rule is that people are on Big Brother specifically because nobody and nothing will miss them. They don't have the desire of Amazing Race contestants to see the world, or of Survivor contestants to compete physically and try life out in the elements. They just want to sit here, on television, on a big set, doing nothing.

But in the last few seasons especially, it's become a regular ritual that every summer, people watching the live feeds report on breathtaking examples of racist, sexist, homophobic, and other outbursts that you can clearly watch if you're a feed viewer but that you will never see if you're tuning in on television.

Reality television blogger Andy Dehnart is among those who have followed this issue over the last few years, and he's actually asked executive producer Alison Grodner why racist rants are cut from the show in ways that sanitize players' behavior for broadcast watchers. Her argument was that when people say things that the producers "don't necessarily agree with and condone and want to put out there further," they don't show them. "And so for the most part, when this goes down," she said, "we keep that out of the show."

Whether or not you want to swallow that explanation of the motive for excising bigotry from the broadcast version of the show, the effect is to perpetuate a pernicious untruth: that the producers throw a variety of largely shallow, thoughtless people from different ethnic backgrounds and sexual orientations into a house, lock them up for three months, and ask them to play a social game with a huge amount of real money at stake, and those differences never come up, and even behind closed doors, in secret, when they're whispering at night, that kind of ugliness doesn't come out.

If you've been following this issue this season — which is only a couple of weeks old! — you know that there have already been reports of what Dehnart deemed "a torrent of racist, sexist and homophobic comments" from "almost half the cast." They include racial slurs (including, yes, some n-words), a couple of angry references to an Asian cast member suggesting she should go cook some rice, gay slurs, comments about a black woman making a bed smell bad (in which she was referred to as "black Candice" in case anyone missed it), references to not being able to see a black woman in the dark, and comments that black players were "tokens" who would always stick together. That's not all of it, but it's some of it.

It's not just that it sanitizes people who deserve scorn when this stuff doesn't make the show, though it does that. It's that it creates an actively dishonest narrative about the roles of race, class, gender and sexuality in the ways that people act in frivolous but also dead-serious situations in which they are frivolously grabbing for attention but dead-seriously trying to win a lot of money. What makes a show like Survivor, for instance, fun is figuring out the personal dynamics that cause rifts between people or bonds between them. And when race comes up on Survivor, they're not afraid to show it — they've done it. They've talked about how it affects relationships. They have people talk about tensions that come up over sexuality and gender and religion as well.

It's completely dishonest, even by the standards set by other similar competition shows, if they're removing the fact that people are making all kinds of racist comments about Candice, for instance, when they present the story of how she gets along with the group. Nobody who thinks black women smell bad can turn around and interact with them as if he doesn't. Nobody who calls you "Kermit the F-g" is otherwise treating you the same way they'd treat anybody else.

Removing this stuff leaves a giant sucking void where the prejudices in play here should rightfully be, and makes it appear that personalities are simply clashing, or that strategies are in conflict, when in fact, part of the reason some of these people don't get along with or don't trust the cast members of color may be that some of them are racists. The same goes for some of the men in their dealings with women and some of the straight people in their dealings with some of the gay people. Where that's the case, it's wrong to hide that; it's wrong to lie about it; it's important not to. It's incredibly unfair, for instance, to put a black woman in the house and make it look like she's not fighting people's preexisting prejudices when you know she is, or to put a gay man in the house and make it look like everybody's cool with him when you know they're not. It's bad enough to pack your cast with jerks; it's quite another to conceal the burdens you've put on the people those jerks treat poorly.

Bizarrely enough, this currently hideous exercise has the capacity to be interesting, because the cameras are on these people so much, so relentlessly, for so long, that they really do have no choice but to give in and act in ways they would really act. People might be able to hold back for as long as they're on TV for Top Chef or even The Amazing Race, but when you're in a human terrarium for 24 hours a day for months, people eventually see who you really are. And if a part of a person's pedestrian foolishness and superficiality regularly includes bigotry, it's a lie to say it doesn't; it's a lie to protect those comments from being revealed as a part of what drives the personal dynamics on the show.

It's seeing the way these underlying assumptions are woven into day-to-day interactions of respect, trust, social bonds, and other matters that ultimately casts some light on how they work in the real world. Live feed viewers pick up on really interesting things sometimes — they've been talking about the fact that a white woman who's been making nasty, racially insensitive remarks about a black woman behind her back stopped in the middle of an argument between them to correct her that it's "ask," not "ax", for instance. That — the analysis, not the comment — is kind of great stuff, sociologically speaking, if you're looking at the ways that prejudices creep into conversations that seem not to be about race. This is how it really works in a lot of situations; people know what they're supposed to say, and then there are the things they say to their friends when they're mad. There's the overt and the covert, and if you watch people for hours and hours — silly as it sounds — you'll ultimately see both.

It's a really dumb show, but it doesn't have to be evil. Nobody assumes the show is endorsing the rest of these dopey people's comments and behaviors and approaches to being a human being. It's not necessary to snip out this stuff. And, in fact, it's better not to.