This week has vaulted far beyond my limited abilities to keep up with it. I once again recommend that you check out (or, better yet, subscribe to) Torie Rose DeGhett's This Week In War for one-sentence rundowns with links to in-depth coverage from a wide variety of English-language sources.
Anne Barnard and Jodi Rudoren are still reporting from Gaza City and Israel, respectively, for the NYT. From Wednesday, here is their look at the not-my-fault arguments being passed around between Israel and Hamas on the carnage in Gaza.
"As the sun begins to sink over the Mediterranean, groups of Israelis gather each evening on hilltops close to the Gaza border to cheer, whoop and whistle as bombs rain down on people in a hellish warzone a few miles away." From last Sunday, Harriet Sherwood at the Guardian.
"'One night the shell will go a bit further and hit the building where we are sleeping and we will all be dead,' said Aboujad. 'Death finds you anywhere in Gaza, there is nowhere safe.'" Sheera Frenkel at BuzzFeed.
"It is not anti-Semitic to say 'not in my name'." Laurie Penny at the New Statesman.
"Egypt's police are back to the most brutal practices of the Mubarak era, and deaths in custody have surged once again. But this time popular anger is muted, as many swing behind a repressive security state as a bulwark against the chaos and sectarianism that came in Mubarak's wake, particularly after police retreated from the streets. Louisa Loveluck at The Christian Science Monitor.
"Tripoli's main airport, which is the centre of the latest conflict, resembles a scrap yard." Rana Jawad reports from Libya for the BBC.
Hey! What does the city of Detroit (or its hired henchmen) have in common with ISIS in Iraq and Syria? Compare and contrast an op-ed at the Detroit Free Press by Maude Barlow, Lynna Kaucheck, Maureen Taylor, and Melissa Damaschke with an article by Sarah Goodyear at Next City, and decide for yourself.
"But at the moment, for Hala, Sara and hundreds of thousands of men and women in many of the towns and villages that have fallen out of Syrian and Iraqi government control, the ISIL-Qaeda social order is slowly becoming a lived reality." Rania Abouzeid at Al Jazeera America.
"Forty-five-year-old Hayat Mohsen's family of four were gathered for their evening meal when their living room imploded around them, the doors and windows blown in. It's the third time her apartment has been damaged in a blast. She says she can't afford to move." Loveday Morris reports from Iraq for The Washington Post.
"In the capital, another battle is taking place. Weeks earlier, somebody paid to erect 30 mobile campaign billboards for the president’s expected 2015 re-election bid surround the park where the Abuja Family gathers. Two giant screens now flash pro-Jonathan messages, while the president’s face beams down from three hot-air balloons." Monica Mark at the Guardian on the struggle of the families of the abducted girls from Chibok, Nigeria. (Via Rukmini Callimachi.)
And also Monica Mark with the intensely alarming news that "A man has died of ebola in Lagos, the first confirmed case of the highly contagious and deadly virus in Africa's most populous metropolis."
"'There's no one doing research on this. No one's testing what's going on,' she said. 'I'm not against oil and gas drilling. I'm a Republican…I just think you need to do it safely, and you need to know what you're doing, and I don't think either of those things is happening right now.'" Lisa Song reports for Inside Climate News on preliminary research and health care for residents of southwest Pennsylvania's communities affected by fracking.
"But for them — and most farmers around here — the answer is no. They all listen to a local meteorologist named Brian Bledsoe, who calls the phenomenon 'government warming,' and broadcasts his climate change skepticism on the local radio station, through his Web site and on speaking gigs around the region." At The Washington Post, Lydia DePillis reporting from the drought-stricken fields of Colorado.
"The Court ruling also included language that seemed to assert that only wetlands with a 'significant nexus' to traditional navigable waterways would be protected under the Clean Water Act. The Court did not make clear the meaning of the term 'significant nexus.'" Naveena Sadasivam at ProPublica reports on how lobbying and the Supreme Court have hobbled the EPA's ability to fine water polluters.
"While its Colombian operations quickly became a significant revenue stream for the company, security issues and labor disputes have always been substantial obstacles for Drummond’s business. And, according to its workers, intimidation has become routine in a country where trade union leaders are often viewed as subversives." Rosalind Adams reports for The Center for Public Integrity on a lawsuit alleging that a U.S. coal company bankrolls paramilitary violence against labor organizers in Colombia. (Via Lisa Song.)
"Until last year, any 14-, 15-, or 16-year-old accused of murder in Massachusetts was tried as an adult and sentenced as an adult. Seventeen-year-olds were tried and sentenced as adults no matter the charge. Anyone convicted of first-degree murder got life without parole. No exceptions." Beth Schwartzapfel at Boston Magazine on a 50-year-old murderer sentenced to life when he was 17.
"Morris said he is not surprised to hear Khadr is eligible for full parole and could be released this year. 'On some level, you have to say, OK, the kid was 15 and regardless of what he’s become he at least deserves a chance,' Morris said." Michelle Shephard at The Toronto Star on her newspaper's lawsuit against the Canadian government for denying reporters any access to former Guantanamo prisoner Omar Khadr.
"I think what’s scary about it is thinking about how long does it take for all this change to happen and all the people who get ground up waiting? We are still a work in process. I use process instead of progress because I am not sure about the progress." Damn, this Nikole Hannah-Jones' interview at ProPublica with Rita Bender, who was widowed at 22 when her husband, Michael Schwerner, was murdered at the start of Freedom Summer in Mississippi.
"One after another, white mothers confessed the trouble their children had gotten into. Some of the behavior was similar to JJ’s; some was much worse. Most startling: None of their children had been suspended." Tunette Powell at The Washington Post on racism and preschool discipline. (Via Audrey Watters.)
"Thus, how would he have been 'helped' by this lady if indeed the cop had arrested us? J would have been left alone, needing his pain medicine for his gut and confused and stressed. It would have taken a difficult but stable everyday situation and made it terrible for all parties — and for no reason." Marie Myung-Ok Lee at Salon. (Via @prisonculture.)
"It’s clear that the war on drugs—and the subsequent war on pregnant women of color who have used drugs—is motivated by ideology and profit, not actually care for the wellbeing of mothers and their children." Miriam Zoila Pérez at Colorlines on Tennessee's new punitive law on narcotic use during pregnancy. (Via @prisonculture.)
"The author gives the example of Japan as forefront of this development, because, she says, of 'workforce shortages.' It’s a good example because it really highlights what shortage of humans actually means: a deep hostility to the 'wrong' kind of humans." I don't agree with every single bit of this Zeynep Tufekci essay at Medium — if you've ever been cared for by an abusive human, robot caregivers don't sound like such a bad idea in comparison — but it is, as always, a piece that will ask you to think deeply about labor, culture, and value.
"And then it becomes this question of management. Can I convince this entity to do for me what I want it to do and what the entire company is telling it it should be doing? And so when I see it rebel, or when I personify it in such a way that I perceive its actions as rebellion, it becomes much more so that I perceive an actual relationship with it." Diana Clarke at The Toast with "Tending the Robots: An Interview About Labor, Technology, and Sexuality."
"The researchers found canvas fingerprinting computer code, primarily written by a company called AddThis, on 5 percent of the top 100,000 websites. Most of the code was on websites that use AddThis’ social media sharing tools." Julia Angwin at ProPublica.
"Zoom in on the Mandelbrot set and the same shapes repeat themselves over and over infinitely. This characteristic is known as self-similarity, and it occurs, at least above the molecular scale, many times in nature. Fractal patterns have been found in coastlines, lightning bolts, vegetables, and even the timing of heartbeats." On turbulence and coffee. By Nicole Sharp at Nautilus.
"We are a congregation of two – a tiny fraction of the Muslim Ummah, isolated by a culture of segregation and orthodoxy. We’re the transgender Muslims of Chicago." Fascinating short personal essay by Mahdia Lynn at The Toast.
"'Goodnight nobody' is an author’s inspired moment that is inexplicable and moving and creates an unknown that lingers. How wonderful that this oddly compassionate moment, where even nobody gets a good night, shows up in the picture book that is the most popular!" More like this, please! Aimee Bender in the NYT with an appreciation of one of the small masterworks of literature in English. (Via Vivian Schiller.)
Sunday, July 27, 2014
Sunday, July 20, 2014
Links for the week ending 20 July 2014
"Asked what he would miss most about his brother, Ramzi looked at the ground. 'Kul,' he whispered in Arabic. 'Everything.'" Anne Barnard is in Gaza and reporting for the NYT along with Jodi Rudoren in Jerusalem.
"In the wreckage of the home on Friday morning, Salem Entez, 29, Mohamed Salem's father, approached the Guardian with a plastic bag, which he opened to reveal pieces of flesh he was collecting for burial. 'This is my son,' he said." Dude Peter Beaumont and Harriet Sherwood for the Guardian. Also, from this morning, the same team reported, "All morning, terrified people ran from their homes, some barefoot and nearly all empty-handed. Others crowded on the backs of trucks or rode on the bonnets of cars in a desperate attempt to flee. Sky News reported that some had described a 'massacre' in Shujai'iya." In addition, Harriet Sherwood reports on the Israeli military's use of anti-personnel ammunition in Gaza.
"They described hours of terror, as tank shells slammed into homes, with no electricity and no way to escape. They called ambulances, but there was no way for the vehicles to get in under the constant fire. So in the end, thousands of desperate residents fled on foot at first light, walking two hours or more into Gaza City." Sara Hussein reports for AFP.
"There were strong indications that those responsible may have errantly downed what they had thought was a military aircraft only to discover, to their shock, that they had struck a civilian airliner. Everyone aboard was killed, their corpses littered among wreckage that smoldered late into the summer night." Sabrina Tavernise is reporting from Ukraine for the NYT along with some dudes.
"Scientists have, for the first time, linked hundreds of earthquakes across a broad swath of Oklahoma to a handful of wastewater wells used by the fracking industry." From two weeks ago, but still news you can use, from Suzanne Goldenberg at the Guardian.
"This begged a larger question: How many of those 70,000 American plants offshored in recent decades, those millions of American jobs lost, had been the result not of a ruthless commitment to the bottom line, but of a colossal failure of due diligence?" Esther Kaplan with a longread at the Virginia Quarterly Review. (Hat tip to Jill Heather.)
"That means a rep could get all the way to the second-to-last day of the pay period only to have a customer cancel four products. Suddenly the rep is below her goal, losing $800 to $1,000 off her paycheck." Adrienne Jeffries at The Verge with "Here's why your Comcast rep is yelling at you." (Via David Hull.)
"Waller reminded him that Parks was a 'sanctuary,' a 'safe haven' for the community. If the school didn’t meet its targets, Waller explained, the students would be separated and sent to different schools, outside Pittsburgh. Lewis said he felt that 'it was my sole obligation to never let that happen.'" Rachel Aviv at The New Yorker with the tragedy of Atlanta's school-testing cheating scandal.
"This is a story about what happened when I tried to use big data to help repair my local public schools. I failed. And the reasons why I failed have everything to do with why the American system of standardized testing will never succeed." Meredith Broussard at The Atlantic. (Via Audrey Watters.)
"All of the highways out of the Valley have checkpoints like the one in Sarita. When the checkpoint means they can't drive to San Antonio, some women go through with pregnancies they don't want. Others turn to Cytotec. Still others find out about unlicensed providers who perform cheap abortions out of their homes. Jill Filopovic at Cosmopolitan, and this is why our feminism had better be intersectional or it is complete bullshit. (Via Cory Ellen.)
"It’s a microcosm of the ways that beauty is about more than who we are just “naturally attracted to”. It’s a kind of oppression with far-reaching consequences for black women that leave us with almost negligible wealth, criminal justice battle stories, mass media accounts of our undesirability, poor health, and impoverished golden years." Tressie Cottom McMillan at her blog on a casting call for a new NWA video.
"Summer was the worst. Holiday weekends were full of needless shootings — arguments, stray bullets, kids finding their parents’ guns. Compiling weekend reports took me 10 hours every Sunday. It was a slog, but it was necessary. This is exactly why I went to journalism school. It’s rare that you get to effect change on such a big stage." Jennifer Mascia at RawStory with the behind-the-scenes story of the Gun Report, which tracked news reports of gun violence over a year and a half.
"But underneath all her work is the question posed in Ursula K LeGuin's well-known story The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas: if you know that the beautiful manner of living you yourself enjoy is built on a foundation of misery deliberately imposed on innocents, can you in conscience do nothing? Her own answer was always no." Margaret Atwood at the Guardian on the late Nadine Gordimer. (Via Jody T.)
"I can’t situate my thoughts in the topography of a big book the same way when I'm able to see the text only through a keyhole, as it were, unable to feel with my hands whether I'm a third or a tenth of the way through; I feel as if I’m on the surface of the text, rather than in it. That hard, glossy surface!" Maria Bustillos at The Awl with a meditation on the latest way to Disrupt Reading.
"I’m reminded here of viruses, which, as Wikipedia points out, can only replicate inside the living cells of other organisms. Facebook benefits when this relationship remains invisible. When we make the mistake that I made—when we forget that Facebook is using our friendships as hosts, and not the other way around—our forgetting is very convenient for Facebook." Jessica Ferris from two weeks ago at Medium.
"But Ebola, far away and ripe for the imagination, has grown legendary—and, like most legends, the truth is not quite as awesome as the tale. But before we wake ourselves up from this nightmare, let’s bask in the mechanics of this notorious killer." Leigh Cowart at Hazlitt (Random House Canada). (Hat tip to Jill Heather.)
"A powerful new technology could be used to manipulate nature by 'editing' the genes of organisms in the wild, enabling researchers to block mosquitoes’ ability to spread malaria, for example, or to make weeds more vulnerable to pesticides, Harvard scientists said Thursday." Carolyn Y. Johnson at The Boston Globe, where the zombie movie plots practically write themselves.
"But he positively bounded toward the Popemobile at the end, like a child who has unexpectedly been offered his favorite peanut-butter sandwich. Refusing assistance, he climbed on energetically, as if to say, Let’s go!" Wow, Matter (Medium) brings in Alma Guillermoprieto (usually at the NYRB) for this nuanced and moving profile of Pope Francis.
"It was there, in 1974, that some co-workers, prodding to know how tall she really was, kicked off their pumps and climbed on desks and chairs and dangled a tape measure down. They sent the figure to Guinness, in London, which replied that she was taller than any woman they had on record but the measurement needed to be verified by a medical professional. Sandy got in her car — which was hard-earned, and into which she barely fit — and drove to her family physician, where the figure was confirmed." Another moving profile, by Sandra Allen at BuzzFeed about another Sandra Allen, who just happened to be the tallest woman in the world.
"I wish that every woman whose actions and worth are parsed and restricted, congratulated and condemned in this country might just once get to wheel around—on the committee that doesn’t believe their medically corroborated story of assault, or on the protesters who tell them that termination is a sin they will regret, or on the boss who tells them he doesn’t believe in their sexual choices, or on the mid-fifties man who congratulates them, or himself, on finding them appealing deep into their dotage—and go black in the eyes and say, 'I don’t fucking care if you like it.'" Deeply, deeply satisfying piece from Rebecca Traister at TNR. (Via Betsy Phillips.)
"Gleaners meet, then carpool to a designated farm, and over a few hours, harvest the seasonal crop — strawberries and peas in spring, corn in August, and root vegetables in winter. After enough boxes of produce are harvested to fill a van, the day’s pickings are driven directly to local food pantries and shelters." Perhaps for some reason you need to fortify your faith in humanity this week? This might help. Kathy Shiels Tully writes for the Boston Globe about a revival of gleaning.
"As it turned out, Brill, his wife, and I were early, so I had a chance to ask how a middle-aged research associate at a giant pharmaceutical company with a degree in history became the Rube Goldberg of rice." Sheer delight: Nicola Twilley (from Edible Geography) at The New Yorker. (Via Paige Morgan.)
It has been a rough week out there. Here is your reward: Caity Weaver at Gawker with "My 14-Hour Search for the End of TGI Friday's Endless Appetizers."
"When I was growing up, my father kept a pronunciation dictionary of the English language by his seat at the table. Finally, this gorgeous essay by Mattie Wechsler on language, the autism spectrum, and her father. (Grateful hat tip to Els Kushner.)
"In the wreckage of the home on Friday morning, Salem Entez, 29, Mohamed Salem's father, approached the Guardian with a plastic bag, which he opened to reveal pieces of flesh he was collecting for burial. 'This is my son,' he said." Dude Peter Beaumont and Harriet Sherwood for the Guardian. Also, from this morning, the same team reported, "All morning, terrified people ran from their homes, some barefoot and nearly all empty-handed. Others crowded on the backs of trucks or rode on the bonnets of cars in a desperate attempt to flee. Sky News reported that some had described a 'massacre' in Shujai'iya." In addition, Harriet Sherwood reports on the Israeli military's use of anti-personnel ammunition in Gaza.
"They described hours of terror, as tank shells slammed into homes, with no electricity and no way to escape. They called ambulances, but there was no way for the vehicles to get in under the constant fire. So in the end, thousands of desperate residents fled on foot at first light, walking two hours or more into Gaza City." Sara Hussein reports for AFP.
"There were strong indications that those responsible may have errantly downed what they had thought was a military aircraft only to discover, to their shock, that they had struck a civilian airliner. Everyone aboard was killed, their corpses littered among wreckage that smoldered late into the summer night." Sabrina Tavernise is reporting from Ukraine for the NYT along with some dudes.
"Scientists have, for the first time, linked hundreds of earthquakes across a broad swath of Oklahoma to a handful of wastewater wells used by the fracking industry." From two weeks ago, but still news you can use, from Suzanne Goldenberg at the Guardian.
"This begged a larger question: How many of those 70,000 American plants offshored in recent decades, those millions of American jobs lost, had been the result not of a ruthless commitment to the bottom line, but of a colossal failure of due diligence?" Esther Kaplan with a longread at the Virginia Quarterly Review. (Hat tip to Jill Heather.)
"That means a rep could get all the way to the second-to-last day of the pay period only to have a customer cancel four products. Suddenly the rep is below her goal, losing $800 to $1,000 off her paycheck." Adrienne Jeffries at The Verge with "Here's why your Comcast rep is yelling at you." (Via David Hull.)
"Waller reminded him that Parks was a 'sanctuary,' a 'safe haven' for the community. If the school didn’t meet its targets, Waller explained, the students would be separated and sent to different schools, outside Pittsburgh. Lewis said he felt that 'it was my sole obligation to never let that happen.'" Rachel Aviv at The New Yorker with the tragedy of Atlanta's school-testing cheating scandal.
"This is a story about what happened when I tried to use big data to help repair my local public schools. I failed. And the reasons why I failed have everything to do with why the American system of standardized testing will never succeed." Meredith Broussard at The Atlantic. (Via Audrey Watters.)
"All of the highways out of the Valley have checkpoints like the one in Sarita. When the checkpoint means they can't drive to San Antonio, some women go through with pregnancies they don't want. Others turn to Cytotec. Still others find out about unlicensed providers who perform cheap abortions out of their homes. Jill Filopovic at Cosmopolitan, and this is why our feminism had better be intersectional or it is complete bullshit. (Via Cory Ellen.)
"It’s a microcosm of the ways that beauty is about more than who we are just “naturally attracted to”. It’s a kind of oppression with far-reaching consequences for black women that leave us with almost negligible wealth, criminal justice battle stories, mass media accounts of our undesirability, poor health, and impoverished golden years." Tressie Cottom McMillan at her blog on a casting call for a new NWA video.
"Summer was the worst. Holiday weekends were full of needless shootings — arguments, stray bullets, kids finding their parents’ guns. Compiling weekend reports took me 10 hours every Sunday. It was a slog, but it was necessary. This is exactly why I went to journalism school. It’s rare that you get to effect change on such a big stage." Jennifer Mascia at RawStory with the behind-the-scenes story of the Gun Report, which tracked news reports of gun violence over a year and a half.
"But underneath all her work is the question posed in Ursula K LeGuin's well-known story The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas: if you know that the beautiful manner of living you yourself enjoy is built on a foundation of misery deliberately imposed on innocents, can you in conscience do nothing? Her own answer was always no." Margaret Atwood at the Guardian on the late Nadine Gordimer. (Via Jody T.)
"I can’t situate my thoughts in the topography of a big book the same way when I'm able to see the text only through a keyhole, as it were, unable to feel with my hands whether I'm a third or a tenth of the way through; I feel as if I’m on the surface of the text, rather than in it. That hard, glossy surface!" Maria Bustillos at The Awl with a meditation on the latest way to Disrupt Reading.
"I’m reminded here of viruses, which, as Wikipedia points out, can only replicate inside the living cells of other organisms. Facebook benefits when this relationship remains invisible. When we make the mistake that I made—when we forget that Facebook is using our friendships as hosts, and not the other way around—our forgetting is very convenient for Facebook." Jessica Ferris from two weeks ago at Medium.
"But Ebola, far away and ripe for the imagination, has grown legendary—and, like most legends, the truth is not quite as awesome as the tale. But before we wake ourselves up from this nightmare, let’s bask in the mechanics of this notorious killer." Leigh Cowart at Hazlitt (Random House Canada). (Hat tip to Jill Heather.)
"A powerful new technology could be used to manipulate nature by 'editing' the genes of organisms in the wild, enabling researchers to block mosquitoes’ ability to spread malaria, for example, or to make weeds more vulnerable to pesticides, Harvard scientists said Thursday." Carolyn Y. Johnson at The Boston Globe, where the zombie movie plots practically write themselves.
"But he positively bounded toward the Popemobile at the end, like a child who has unexpectedly been offered his favorite peanut-butter sandwich. Refusing assistance, he climbed on energetically, as if to say, Let’s go!" Wow, Matter (Medium) brings in Alma Guillermoprieto (usually at the NYRB) for this nuanced and moving profile of Pope Francis.
"It was there, in 1974, that some co-workers, prodding to know how tall she really was, kicked off their pumps and climbed on desks and chairs and dangled a tape measure down. They sent the figure to Guinness, in London, which replied that she was taller than any woman they had on record but the measurement needed to be verified by a medical professional. Sandy got in her car — which was hard-earned, and into which she barely fit — and drove to her family physician, where the figure was confirmed." Another moving profile, by Sandra Allen at BuzzFeed about another Sandra Allen, who just happened to be the tallest woman in the world.
"I wish that every woman whose actions and worth are parsed and restricted, congratulated and condemned in this country might just once get to wheel around—on the committee that doesn’t believe their medically corroborated story of assault, or on the protesters who tell them that termination is a sin they will regret, or on the boss who tells them he doesn’t believe in their sexual choices, or on the mid-fifties man who congratulates them, or himself, on finding them appealing deep into their dotage—and go black in the eyes and say, 'I don’t fucking care if you like it.'" Deeply, deeply satisfying piece from Rebecca Traister at TNR. (Via Betsy Phillips.)
"Gleaners meet, then carpool to a designated farm, and over a few hours, harvest the seasonal crop — strawberries and peas in spring, corn in August, and root vegetables in winter. After enough boxes of produce are harvested to fill a van, the day’s pickings are driven directly to local food pantries and shelters." Perhaps for some reason you need to fortify your faith in humanity this week? This might help. Kathy Shiels Tully writes for the Boston Globe about a revival of gleaning.
"As it turned out, Brill, his wife, and I were early, so I had a chance to ask how a middle-aged research associate at a giant pharmaceutical company with a degree in history became the Rube Goldberg of rice." Sheer delight: Nicola Twilley (from Edible Geography) at The New Yorker. (Via Paige Morgan.)
It has been a rough week out there. Here is your reward: Caity Weaver at Gawker with "My 14-Hour Search for the End of TGI Friday's Endless Appetizers."
"When I was growing up, my father kept a pronunciation dictionary of the English language by his seat at the table. Finally, this gorgeous essay by Mattie Wechsler on language, the autism spectrum, and her father. (Grateful hat tip to Els Kushner.)
Sunday, July 6, 2014
Links for the week ending 6 July 2014
"It doesn’t matter what women choose to do with the opportunities provided by birth control—what matters is that women are allowed to make these choices for ourselves." Best pop star ever Cyndi Lauper at The Daily Beast. (Via Anna Limontas-Salisbury.)
"I have come to the point that, whenever I read the word dignity in a majority opinion, I start to flop sweat." Dahlia Lithwick signing off after the Supreme Court equivalent of "Oscar week." But before she goes, catch up on her take on the Hobby Lobby decision's, er, highlights: "For one thing we are—going forward—no longer allowed to argue the science." Fabulous. At Slate. (Via Jody T.)
"She added, “I would like to see the Supreme Court get its fanny out here and talk to these people.”" Jess Bigood and dude John Schwartz reporting for the NYT on the scene at a Boston abortion clinic after the Supreme Court struck down buffer laws.
"'But thinking one’s religious beliefs are substantially burdened … does not make it so.' She added, 'Not every sincerely felt "burden" is a "substantial" one, and it is for courts, not litigants, to identify which are.'" Irin Carmon at MSNBC covering the "open revolt" on the court evinced by a dissent issued by Justices Sotomayor, Kagan, and Ginsburg. You yourself may have some revolt to express. Katherine Fritz at Ladypockets has some crafting solutions for you. (Hat tip to Sheila Avelin.)
"Roberts explicitly rejects the idea that there are simple analogies between the search of physical objects (tangible things) and the data to which a phone is a portal." Amy Davidson at The New Yorker on the not-bad-news decision the Supreme Court made unanimously on the need for a warrant before searching a cellphone.
"The FBI conducts a “substantial” number of warrantless queries for Americans’ e-mails and phone calls in a special database of intercepted communications, but it does not track exactly how often, an intelligence official said in a letter released Monday." Ellen Nakashima at The Washington Post.
Can't keep up with what NSA program you should be outraged about today? Julia Angwin and dudes Jeff Larson and Albert Cairo have for you special this handy chart. At ProPublica.
"Operational security and data journalism are just plain hard. But they are the realities of accountability journalism today. Not just the accountability that journalists bring to those in power, but the responsibility journalists have to their subjects, their readers, and especially their sources." Quinn Norton at Columbia Journalism Review describing the process by which a Syrian hacker got documents revealing Russian support of the Assad regime to ProPublica.
Keep up to date on Iraq by checking in with Loveday Morris at The Washington Post.
"Meera completed a BA from Jhansi in 2006; Kavita (32) has had no formal education. Both of them have children. When Meera’s daughter calls her, she gently chides her. 'You know I am working on the field, I will be late.'" At The Hindu Business Line, Priyanka Kotamraju profiles two intrepid reporters for a local weekly tabloid in the Indian state of Uttar Pradesh. (Via Sonia Faleiro.)
"But perhaps more subtly too, 'Spent' sells another idea being brought home by fast food and other low-wage worker protests around the country: Working class and low income Americans just are not earning enough money." At Colorlines last month, Carla Murphy reviews a YouTube documentary on poverty and the financial services industry.
"'But I don’t know why anyone has the right to use the power of the state to force their religious views on other people. If your god doesn’t want you to end your life early when you have a terminal disease, then… don’t! This law wouldn’t require anyone to do anything. But don’t tell someone else who has different religious beliefs that they can’t live their lives according to their own beliefs.'" Very long piece by Emily Guendelsberger on Pennsylvania's attempt to prosecute on homicide charges a woman who handed her 93-year-old father (then in hospice care) the bottle of morphine that hastened his death. At Philadelphia City Paper.
"It is now a crime to use drugs if you are pregnant in Tennessee." Katie Zezima at The Washington Post.
"'I felt like this was my opportunity to basically improve life for all of us, and the one key part of it is now not available, so what do I do now?' Ms. Taylor said. 'That was my only thought: "What do I do now? What do I do now?" That was kind of what started the whole chain of events that day.'" If you didn't read the NYT piece about Shanesha Taylor from two weeks ago, it is heartbreaking. By Shaila Dewan. (Via @prisonculture.)
"This week the university billing itself as the “New American University” is back in the news with a more personal story about class (and race and gender). ASU campus police arrested professor Ersula Ore for jaywalking on a campus street." From last week, Tressie McMillan Cottom at her blog.
"Weaving scholarly analysis with interviews of leading black environmentalists and ordinary Americans, Finney traces the environmental legacy of slavery and Jim Crow segregation, which mapped the wilderness as a terrain of extreme terror and struggle for generations of blacks—as well as a place of refuge." Francie Latour at The Boston Globe interviews geographer Carolyn Finney about the hidden history of African-American engagement with environmental stewardship. (Hat tip to Jill Heather.)
"If Alice is happier when she is oblivious to Bob’s pain because Facebook chooses to keep that from her, are we willing to sacrifice Bob’s need for support and validation? This is a hard ethical choice at the crux of any decision of what content to show. And the reality is that Facebook is making these choices every day without oversight, transparency, or informed consent." danah boyd at Medium with incisive commentary on the FB research study uproar.
"If Facebook is a country, then it is a corporate dictatorship. This is not a metaphor. I believe that it is beyond time that we began to hold social networking not just to the laws of the market, but to the common laws of the societies we live in and the societies we want to see." Laurie Penny at the New Statesman.
"States can make minor modifications in the Pearson contract. For instance, the contract anticipates a shift to grading student essays by computer algorithm, assuming the technology pans out, but lets states pay more to have them scored by a human reader." Count me as overwhelmed by enthusiasm to think of my kids spending the school year prepping for an essay test that will be graded by computer algorithm! By Stephanie Simon and Caitlin Emma for Politico. (Via Audrey Watters.)
"While technology has often been hailed as the great equalizer of educational opportunity, a growing body of evidence indicates that in many cases, tech is actually having the opposite effect: It is increasing the gap between rich and poor, between whites and minorities, and between the school-ready and the less-prepared." You don't say. Annie Murphy Paul at Slate.
"Hospitals across the country are struggling to deal with a shortage of one of their essential medical supplies. Manufacturers are rationing saline — a product used all over the hospital to clean wounds, mix medications and treat dehydration." Yay, free-market health care! By April Dembosky for KQED.
"s if the threat of Lyme disease weren’t enough, a new study finds that a deer tick carrying the potentially debilitating illness has a good chance of toting some other malady, too — and that may be especially true if the tick hails from the suburbs." Yay! Now enjoy summer! By Claire Hughes at boston.com.
"It is one of the highest-profile retractions of the last decade, and several stem-cell researchers said they are now convinced that the stunningly simple method for producing stem cells, reported in two papers in January, won’t work." Carolyn Y. Johnson at the Boston Globe, following up on her excellent coverage of the stem-cell-discover-that-wasn't.
"Overall at the top US research institutions, male professors employed 11 percent fewer female graduate students and 22 percent fewer female postdoctoral researchers than do women professors." Also by Carolyn Y, Johnson at the Globe. Sigh.
"I wasn't hired to talk to the men." An illustrated interview with a woman in tech by Ariel Schrag, at Medium. (Via Susie Cagle.)
"It’s hard to believe this is what actually happened, but Patience Wright pulls from her skirts a bust of William Pitt from his head down to his navel, so it looks like they’re in an act of congress. And Jane Franklin thinks this is like the coolest thing she’s ever heard of." I just finished reading Jill Lepore's fantastic biography of Benjamin Franklin's sister Jane, so, in honor of Independence Day and all, here is a wonderful interview with Lepore by Joy Horowitz at the LARB from last November.
"Tampons were packed with their strings connecting them, like a strip of sausages, so they wouldn’t float away. Engineers asked Ride, 'Is 100 the right number?' She would be in space for a week. 'That would not be the right number,' she told them." At The American Prospect, Ann Friedman on a new biography of Sally Ride. (Hat tip to Jill Heather.)
"People of all genders deal with unwanted attention, but women are especially likely to be regarded as resources rather than people. It is unfair, according to many a manbaby I have spoken to, that I’m selfishly hogging my goodies. Such a shame that only I get to be in my body." Julie Decker at The Toast.
"Several years later, after my banking days were long over, my dad called me, laughing, and told me the news that a pair of robbers had walked down the line of cars waiting at the drive up window at my favorite bank, and had methodically robbed them all." Lovely essay about paranoia, risk assessment, and bank robbery by Kathleen Cooper at Medium. (Via Nicole Cliffe at The Toast.)
"Here was a game not unlike Clue—the object being to solve, from a rogue’s gallery of Cabot Cove’s finest, whodunnit—with an added twist: one of the players WAS the murderer. If you drew the murderer card, you visited people around the Cove spaces on the board and replaced their alive character tile with a dead one, thereby secretly MURDERING." For a certain child of my acquaintance, this great piece from Kate Racculia on her girlhood devotion to the doyenne of the murder capital of the world, Cabot Cove, ME.
Continuing on the theme of "things a certain child (and I) would love to own," Maria Popova at Brainpickings with some sublime illustrations from the Tove Jansson edition of Alice's Adventures in Wonderland.
"We both love Philly, and also live with a constant, yawning void of homesickness and alienation. We both tend to fill that void with junk food." Really great essay from May on dislocation, nostalgia, and junk food, by Virginia C. McGuire at Medium.
"The use of a SWAT team to execute a search warrant essentially amounts to the use of paramilitary tactics to conduct domestic criminal investigations in searches of people’s homes." Finally, I am taking next week off, so keep yourself busy next weekend reading this pdf on the militarization of law enforcement from the ACLU by a team of authors, including Kara Dansky, Sarah Solon, Allie Bohm, Emma Andersson, Jesselyn McCurdy, and dude Will Bunting. (Via Meghna Chakrabarti.)
"I have come to the point that, whenever I read the word dignity in a majority opinion, I start to flop sweat." Dahlia Lithwick signing off after the Supreme Court equivalent of "Oscar week." But before she goes, catch up on her take on the Hobby Lobby decision's, er, highlights: "For one thing we are—going forward—no longer allowed to argue the science." Fabulous. At Slate. (Via Jody T.)
"She added, “I would like to see the Supreme Court get its fanny out here and talk to these people.”" Jess Bigood and dude John Schwartz reporting for the NYT on the scene at a Boston abortion clinic after the Supreme Court struck down buffer laws.
"'But thinking one’s religious beliefs are substantially burdened … does not make it so.' She added, 'Not every sincerely felt "burden" is a "substantial" one, and it is for courts, not litigants, to identify which are.'" Irin Carmon at MSNBC covering the "open revolt" on the court evinced by a dissent issued by Justices Sotomayor, Kagan, and Ginsburg. You yourself may have some revolt to express. Katherine Fritz at Ladypockets has some crafting solutions for you. (Hat tip to Sheila Avelin.)
"Roberts explicitly rejects the idea that there are simple analogies between the search of physical objects (tangible things) and the data to which a phone is a portal." Amy Davidson at The New Yorker on the not-bad-news decision the Supreme Court made unanimously on the need for a warrant before searching a cellphone.
"The FBI conducts a “substantial” number of warrantless queries for Americans’ e-mails and phone calls in a special database of intercepted communications, but it does not track exactly how often, an intelligence official said in a letter released Monday." Ellen Nakashima at The Washington Post.
Can't keep up with what NSA program you should be outraged about today? Julia Angwin and dudes Jeff Larson and Albert Cairo have for you special this handy chart. At ProPublica.
"Operational security and data journalism are just plain hard. But they are the realities of accountability journalism today. Not just the accountability that journalists bring to those in power, but the responsibility journalists have to their subjects, their readers, and especially their sources." Quinn Norton at Columbia Journalism Review describing the process by which a Syrian hacker got documents revealing Russian support of the Assad regime to ProPublica.
Keep up to date on Iraq by checking in with Loveday Morris at The Washington Post.
"Meera completed a BA from Jhansi in 2006; Kavita (32) has had no formal education. Both of them have children. When Meera’s daughter calls her, she gently chides her. 'You know I am working on the field, I will be late.'" At The Hindu Business Line, Priyanka Kotamraju profiles two intrepid reporters for a local weekly tabloid in the Indian state of Uttar Pradesh. (Via Sonia Faleiro.)
"But perhaps more subtly too, 'Spent' sells another idea being brought home by fast food and other low-wage worker protests around the country: Working class and low income Americans just are not earning enough money." At Colorlines last month, Carla Murphy reviews a YouTube documentary on poverty and the financial services industry.
"'But I don’t know why anyone has the right to use the power of the state to force their religious views on other people. If your god doesn’t want you to end your life early when you have a terminal disease, then… don’t! This law wouldn’t require anyone to do anything. But don’t tell someone else who has different religious beliefs that they can’t live their lives according to their own beliefs.'" Very long piece by Emily Guendelsberger on Pennsylvania's attempt to prosecute on homicide charges a woman who handed her 93-year-old father (then in hospice care) the bottle of morphine that hastened his death. At Philadelphia City Paper.
"It is now a crime to use drugs if you are pregnant in Tennessee." Katie Zezima at The Washington Post.
"'I felt like this was my opportunity to basically improve life for all of us, and the one key part of it is now not available, so what do I do now?' Ms. Taylor said. 'That was my only thought: "What do I do now? What do I do now?" That was kind of what started the whole chain of events that day.'" If you didn't read the NYT piece about Shanesha Taylor from two weeks ago, it is heartbreaking. By Shaila Dewan. (Via @prisonculture.)
"This week the university billing itself as the “New American University” is back in the news with a more personal story about class (and race and gender). ASU campus police arrested professor Ersula Ore for jaywalking on a campus street." From last week, Tressie McMillan Cottom at her blog.
"Weaving scholarly analysis with interviews of leading black environmentalists and ordinary Americans, Finney traces the environmental legacy of slavery and Jim Crow segregation, which mapped the wilderness as a terrain of extreme terror and struggle for generations of blacks—as well as a place of refuge." Francie Latour at The Boston Globe interviews geographer Carolyn Finney about the hidden history of African-American engagement with environmental stewardship. (Hat tip to Jill Heather.)
"If Alice is happier when she is oblivious to Bob’s pain because Facebook chooses to keep that from her, are we willing to sacrifice Bob’s need for support and validation? This is a hard ethical choice at the crux of any decision of what content to show. And the reality is that Facebook is making these choices every day without oversight, transparency, or informed consent." danah boyd at Medium with incisive commentary on the FB research study uproar.
"If Facebook is a country, then it is a corporate dictatorship. This is not a metaphor. I believe that it is beyond time that we began to hold social networking not just to the laws of the market, but to the common laws of the societies we live in and the societies we want to see." Laurie Penny at the New Statesman.
"States can make minor modifications in the Pearson contract. For instance, the contract anticipates a shift to grading student essays by computer algorithm, assuming the technology pans out, but lets states pay more to have them scored by a human reader." Count me as overwhelmed by enthusiasm to think of my kids spending the school year prepping for an essay test that will be graded by computer algorithm! By Stephanie Simon and Caitlin Emma for Politico. (Via Audrey Watters.)
"While technology has often been hailed as the great equalizer of educational opportunity, a growing body of evidence indicates that in many cases, tech is actually having the opposite effect: It is increasing the gap between rich and poor, between whites and minorities, and between the school-ready and the less-prepared." You don't say. Annie Murphy Paul at Slate.
"Hospitals across the country are struggling to deal with a shortage of one of their essential medical supplies. Manufacturers are rationing saline — a product used all over the hospital to clean wounds, mix medications and treat dehydration." Yay, free-market health care! By April Dembosky for KQED.
"s if the threat of Lyme disease weren’t enough, a new study finds that a deer tick carrying the potentially debilitating illness has a good chance of toting some other malady, too — and that may be especially true if the tick hails from the suburbs." Yay! Now enjoy summer! By Claire Hughes at boston.com.
"It is one of the highest-profile retractions of the last decade, and several stem-cell researchers said they are now convinced that the stunningly simple method for producing stem cells, reported in two papers in January, won’t work." Carolyn Y. Johnson at the Boston Globe, following up on her excellent coverage of the stem-cell-discover-that-wasn't.
"Overall at the top US research institutions, male professors employed 11 percent fewer female graduate students and 22 percent fewer female postdoctoral researchers than do women professors." Also by Carolyn Y, Johnson at the Globe. Sigh.
"I wasn't hired to talk to the men." An illustrated interview with a woman in tech by Ariel Schrag, at Medium. (Via Susie Cagle.)
"It’s hard to believe this is what actually happened, but Patience Wright pulls from her skirts a bust of William Pitt from his head down to his navel, so it looks like they’re in an act of congress. And Jane Franklin thinks this is like the coolest thing she’s ever heard of." I just finished reading Jill Lepore's fantastic biography of Benjamin Franklin's sister Jane, so, in honor of Independence Day and all, here is a wonderful interview with Lepore by Joy Horowitz at the LARB from last November.
"Tampons were packed with their strings connecting them, like a strip of sausages, so they wouldn’t float away. Engineers asked Ride, 'Is 100 the right number?' She would be in space for a week. 'That would not be the right number,' she told them." At The American Prospect, Ann Friedman on a new biography of Sally Ride. (Hat tip to Jill Heather.)
"People of all genders deal with unwanted attention, but women are especially likely to be regarded as resources rather than people. It is unfair, according to many a manbaby I have spoken to, that I’m selfishly hogging my goodies. Such a shame that only I get to be in my body." Julie Decker at The Toast.
"Several years later, after my banking days were long over, my dad called me, laughing, and told me the news that a pair of robbers had walked down the line of cars waiting at the drive up window at my favorite bank, and had methodically robbed them all." Lovely essay about paranoia, risk assessment, and bank robbery by Kathleen Cooper at Medium. (Via Nicole Cliffe at The Toast.)
"Here was a game not unlike Clue—the object being to solve, from a rogue’s gallery of Cabot Cove’s finest, whodunnit—with an added twist: one of the players WAS the murderer. If you drew the murderer card, you visited people around the Cove spaces on the board and replaced their alive character tile with a dead one, thereby secretly MURDERING." For a certain child of my acquaintance, this great piece from Kate Racculia on her girlhood devotion to the doyenne of the murder capital of the world, Cabot Cove, ME.
Continuing on the theme of "things a certain child (and I) would love to own," Maria Popova at Brainpickings with some sublime illustrations from the Tove Jansson edition of Alice's Adventures in Wonderland.
"We both love Philly, and also live with a constant, yawning void of homesickness and alienation. We both tend to fill that void with junk food." Really great essay from May on dislocation, nostalgia, and junk food, by Virginia C. McGuire at Medium.
"The use of a SWAT team to execute a search warrant essentially amounts to the use of paramilitary tactics to conduct domestic criminal investigations in searches of people’s homes." Finally, I am taking next week off, so keep yourself busy next weekend reading this pdf on the militarization of law enforcement from the ACLU by a team of authors, including Kara Dansky, Sarah Solon, Allie Bohm, Emma Andersson, Jesselyn McCurdy, and dude Will Bunting. (Via Meghna Chakrabarti.)
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