"If the survivors’ accounts are correct, it would make Sunday the most disastrous day for the Iraqi army since several divisions collapsed in the wake of the Islamic State’s capture of the northern city of Mosul amid its cross-country sweep in June." Loveday Morris at The Washington Post.
"It is not clear whether the incomplete border crackdown has halted the flow of fighters flocking to Isis and other armed opposition groups. But it has certainly made things much more difficult for civilians trying to flee the relentless violence in Syria. Constanze Letsch at the Guardian.
"“The way the wars of our time are fought, as punishing, sustained attacks on neighbourhoods, towns, cities, means assaults on families and childhood,” Doucet says. “Most places I cover young children are everywhere, in Gaza they are pouring out of every crevice.”" At the Guardian, Maggie Brown talks to the BBC's Middle East correspondent Lyse Doucet.
"Children are killed often enough in Gaza that there is an established protocol to mark their absence at schools. Usually, says Marzouk, students make a sign with the name of the dead student and place it on the desk where they used to sit, which is left empty." Laura Dean at Global Post. (Via Louisa Loveluck.)
"It is not focused on the kind of 'culture war' issues that might characterize a sectarian conflict, but rather seeks to achieve several genuinely popular reforms sidelined by the transitional government. That it was accomplished at the point of a gun speaks as much to the failures of the transitional framework as to Houthi ideology." Know a lot more than you did about what's happening in Yemen, courtesy of Stacey Philbrick Yadav at The Washington Post. (Via Michelle Shephard.)
Know a lot more about conflict around the world courtesy of Torie Rose DeGhett's This Week In War.
"As the Editors Guild of India complained in a letter published Tuesday, much of the bureaucracy has gone silent, and journalists have found themselves scrambling to get even basic information from the prime minister’s office, which has yet to appoint a contact person for the news media." Ellen Barry at the NYT on India under Modi.
"Whalen’s case is the only prosecution I could find involving a pregnancy in the first trimester, the early stage at which at least 88 percent of abortions in the United States take place. But it may not be the last. What Whalen did in trying to help her daughter — order pills online — is probably an increasingly common response to the rising wave of abortion restrictions that has rolled across the states in the last four years. " Emily Bazelon at the NYT on the Pennsylvania woman sentenced to jail time for obtaining abortion pills over the internet for her pregnant teenage daughter.
"But the footage shows definitively that Crawford wasn't brandishing the toy gun when he was shot — and that he dropped it, ran, and came back before he died." Dara Lind and dude German Lopez at Vox.
" 'At one point I asked one of the cops, when did people stop being human to you. He said "when they got locked up." Not when they committed a crime, not when they were convicted of a crime. When they got locked up.'" Emanuele Berry reporting from Ferguson for St. Louis Public Radio.
"'Nobody’s been surprised,' at Gonzalez's case, he said. 'What they’re really surprised is he got to the front door because we’re all security experts. We know there are a lot of veterans who are extremely ill and are severely injured and feel lost.'" Katie Zezima at The Washington Post.
"Where is the President, senator, or governor who feels not just disappointment but a desperate failure to connect when encountering young (or old) people who want to know why more isn’t being done about climate change? Which ones, looking at the pictures of the crowds in Manhattan on Sunday, will feel lonely?" Amy Davidson at The New Yorker.
"According to new research by scientists at two British universities, China’s CO2 emissions in 2013 reached 7.2 tons per capita—topping, for the first time, the EU’s per capita emissions of 6.8 tons. Meanwhile, Americans were responsible for 16.4 tons of CO2 per capita. And India lagged far behind, at 1.9 tons per capita." Christina Larson at Business Week. (Via Kate Sheppard.)
"It will ban commercial fishing and deep sea mining in about 490,000 square miles around remote tropical atolls and islands in the south-central Pacific Ocean, a White House fact sheet said." Suzanne Goldenberg at the Guardian on President Obama's enlarging of what will be the world's biggest marine reserve.
"If the surgery had been for a Medicare patient, the assistant would have been permitted to bill only 16 percent of the primary surgeon’s fee. With current Medicare rates, that would have been about $800, less than 1 percent of what Dr. Mu was paid." First, do no harm… except to the national pocketbook, which is there to be plundered, amirite? Elisabeth Rosenthal for the NYT.
"Many geriatric experts say that if the wasteful medical spending on this stage of life could be redirected, it could pay for all the social supports and services actually needed by today’s fragile elders and their families. Instead, public money has been shuffled in the same system, benefiting health care businesses but not necessarily patients." Nina Bernstein at the NYT. Seriously, burn the health care system to the ground.
"Many of the people living with HIV/AIDS in the South are desperately poor. Many live in rural areas miles from a clinic — and they don’t have access to a car. Others have no running water, or even homes. A study by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention released last year found that more than 40 percent of those infected have an annual household income of $10,000 or less." Teresa Wiltz for The Washington Post.
"Should that child get in trouble, the principal may rely on discipline software to dole out her punishment. Some software advertises that it can save time by automating discipline consequences." Adriene Hill on data mining children at school. From two weeks ago at Marketplace. (Via Audrey Watters.)
"Students’ labor – students’ test results, students’ content, students’ data – feeds the measurements used to reward or punish teachers. Students’ labor feeds the algorithms – algorithms that further this larger narrative about teacher inadequacies, sure, and that serve to financially benefit technology, testing, and textbook companies, the makers of today’s 'teaching machines.'" Audrey Watters' excellent review of Dana Goldstein's new book. At Hack Education.
"In the 2012-2013 school year, there were 1,258,182 homeless students, according to newly released data from the National Center for Homeless Education." Bryce Covert at ThinkProgress.
"Some borrowers say their cars were disabled when they were only a few days behind on their payments, leaving them stranded in dangerous neighborhoods. Others said their cars were shut down while idling at stoplights." Dude Michael Corkery and Jessica Silver-Greenberg at the NYT.
"One Midwestern rabbi in the Conservative movement, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because he is raising money from Jewish donors, said he was rejected for a position at a temple after he told the board that 'there’s not just one Jewish point of view' on Israel. Another rabbi’s board put a note in her file saying she cannot speak about Israel." Laurie Goodstein at the NYT on censorship in the American Jewish community.
"Social networks are like languages — they are only worthwhile when they are broadly adopted. This makes an incredibly compelling case for user tracking and advertising, since success as a broad network makes the most sense by giving network access away and then selling the people to companies. This is a hard model to escape." Quinn Norton at Medium.
"The question of how to interview her in a way that doesn't ignore interesting characteristics of her work and doesn't pretend we're in a post-racial landscape where none of this exists but also doesn't treat her as solely Shonda Rhimes The Black Female Showrunner is related to the question of how to receive female characters of color and acknowledge that their race is part of their identity without thinking of them as primarily in terms of what kind of Black Female Character they are or how they fit into the picture of diversity." Linda Holmes at NPR reflecting on the racist NYT essay by Alessandra Stanley and her own experience interviewing Shonda Rhimes. (Via Jody T.)
"If a passenger reaches out to her in any way — say he invites her to dinner — she’s expected to respond with a thank you and give him a business card with her company email address on it. Once somebody sent her a bra with a note saying it would make her look more sexy. She was instructed to send a thank you. Because it might have come from a corporate VIP." Heather Poole on sexual harassment in the not-so-friendly skies. At Mashable. (Via Jim Roberts.)
"While they lived in different suburbs of Morgantown, they were living together virtually in the digital realm. They spent their waking lives posting, texting, tweeting, retweeting—having whole conversations in 140 characters, emoting in emoticons. As Skylar tweeted on April 4, 2012: twitter seems to like, swallow me, at times." Holly Millea at Elle with a longread about teens, Twitter, and murder in West Virginia. (Via Rebecca Traister.)
"When you quiz me on genocide highlights — Were those smallpox blankets real? I’ve always wondered about that — to sate your hunger for facts, I do not owe you a free education of the kind that my university students pay for, and I am not so flattered by your interest in my people that I might unfurl a lecture on 500 years of colonization for your edification." Elissa Washuta at BuzzFeed. (Via Sarah McCarry.)
"Now, I am all of five feet tall and pudgy. With my penchant for pastels and bright complementary colors, I look more like a giant Easter egg than like whatever it was my aunt and uncle were picturing when they read the word 'butch.'" Caroline Narby at The Toast with "On My Butchness."
"The words 'introvert' and 'extrovert' are just shorthands for larger experiences, a quick way for someone else to know what you’re about without having to get into specifics ('I’ve been out for four nights in a row and I usually need to be home to recharge every other night unless I’m going out with particular people and that’s why I can’t concentrate'). But if you break past the labels and listicles, everyone understands that sometimes enough is enough, that sometimes you just don’t have enough lightning bolts." Jaya Saxena at Medium.
"And when Al pointed that out, it finally hit me that even if I did miss out on the greatest love you can possibly know as a human being, I was actually just fine with the amount I already had." Great essay from Kate Harding at DAME on being okay with not having it all.
"I really just wanted her to be happy. I thought summer should be fun, and I didn't like the parts of it — cutting fucking green beans! — that weren't fun. And she was an adult. She could actually choose what she wanted. She could choose fun, and it seemed like maybe she didn't know that, so I was telling her." Sarah Miller at Cafe with "To Cook or Not to Cook?" (Hat tip to Els Kushner.)
"Food is one art form where texture and flavour are paramount; nobody expects their sandwich to have a driving beat or comprehensible narrative. As an eater, you expect to savour the contrasting flavours and interplay of textures. A particularly good meal may be evocative of some emotion or significant moment in your life." Rachel Hartman at her blog on Yes. Because I am signing up to be the first subscriber to her Journal of Crackpot Musicology.
"People have asked if anyone around me could tell I was having a stroke. 'Weren’t you acting weird?' they’d ask, and my husband’s mouth would turn into a thin line, and my friends who joined us for New Year’s would lower their eyes. I was acting weird, yes. But it was New Year’s Eve." Christine Hyung-Oak Lee at BuzzFeed on the stroke that felled her when she was 33, and the long road back. (Via Roxane Gay.)
"I can’t remember when I read, or was told, that he considered it a good thing to spend a short time every day thinking about death, thus getting used to its inevitability and coming to understand that something inevitable is natural and can’t be too bad, but it was in my early teens, and it struck me as a sensible idea." Finally, as the antithesis of that horrifying Nina Bernstein story, here is 96-year-old Diana Athill at the Guardian with, "It's silly to be frightened of being dead." (Via Nilanjana Roy.)
Sunday, September 28, 2014
Sunday, September 21, 2014
Links for the week ending 21 September 2014
"This was the decision, then, and a large part of me felt relief, not so much for the outcome, but more for the fact that I wasn’t responsible. I could continue being the kind of person who supports the radical movement without having to deal with the consequences. I hated myself a little bit, and I slept again." Lovely personal essay from Morven Crumlish at the Guardian about voting in the Scottish independence referendum.
"Health workers, who have, according to the Ministry of Health, accounted for 8 percent of all Ebola cases and 6 percent of all Ebola-related deaths in Liberia, are scared to come in to the clinics." Just one of many alarming statistics from Sara Jerving's piece at The Nation about the making of Liberia's Ebola disaster. (Via @fpinterrupted.)
"This now truly is a type of epidemic that the world has never seen before. " It won't help you sleep at night, but Maryn McKenna's take on the Ebola epidemic is worth reading nonetheless. At Wired.
"While the combatants scrambled on the battlefield, the chairman of a United Nations investigatory panel on human rights said in Geneva that he 'had run out of words to depict the gravity of the crimes committed inside Syria.'" Anne Barnard and Hwaida Saad for the NYT.
"But on the front lines of Thuluyah, Sunni tribesmen, the police and the Iraqi army fight side-by-side. In recent weeks they have been joined by Shiite militias that are notorious for revenge killings against the Sunni sect." Loveday Morris reporting from Iraq for The Washington Post.
"Some of the men shared idle banter with the police officers, speaking laconically of this year's grape harvest in neighbouring districts. The police officers let them pass; if they had looked more carefully they may have spotted the guns and ammunition hidden under the shipments of grapes." May Jeong reporting from Afghanistan for the Guardian. (Via Margherita Stancati.)
"But in the 10 years since the previous ban lapsed, even gun control advocates acknowledge a larger truth: The law that barred the sale of assault weapons from 1994 to 2004 made little difference." Lois Beckett at ProPublica.
"'In local elections in St. Louis County in general, the typical turnout as measured as percentage of registered voters is between 10 and 15 percent,' said Jones. 'Sometimes if there is a hotly contested issue, they might get into the low 20s, but that is the exception, not the rule.'" Emanuele Berry reports for St. Louis Public Radio on grassroots drives to register voters in Ferguson.
"Speaking to Reuters in a group interview, the heads of police of Dallas, Chicago, Austin, Houston, Elk Grove, California, Boston, and Toronto, Canada said that every police shooting since Ferguson has been followed by protests." Fiona Ortiz for Reuters. (Via Alice Speri.)
"Because there has never been a time in history when we’ve successfully eliminated the abuses that take place in these facilities, no matter how many investigations and reports and waves of reform there have been, I don’t believe they can be eliminated." At The Awl, Sarah Mayeux interviews Nell Bernstein on "The Case for Abolishing Juvenile Prisons."
"The story of Alameda’s mandatory pregnancy tests is really the story of how U.S. prisons have grappled with an influx of young women over the past four decades: with supreme incompetence and intermittent malice." From earlier this month, Susie Cagle at RH Reality Check.
"NPR investigated these tools, also known as spyware, and spoke with domestic violence counselors and survivors around the country. We found that cyberstalking is now a standard part of domestic abuse in the U.S." Aarti Shahani at NPR. (Via Sarah Jeong.)
"There’s not much difference to me between the adjunct crisis in higher education and the labor conversations that fast food and other low wage workers are having. It’s just that we like to see ourselves as different. We like to see our destinies as different. But they’re the same thing." Carla Murphy interviews Tressie McMillan Cottom at Colorlines.
"Working minimum wage for eight hours per day would earn a worker $1,386 per month, less than half of the current median average rent in Brooklyn." Olga Khazan at The Atlantic. (Via Amanda Watson.)
"On November 4, North Dakotans will vote on Measure 1, a human life amendment that says, 'The inalienable right to life of every human being at any stage of development must be recognized and protected.'" At Cosmopolitan, Robin Marty on the abortion amendment even North Dakotans haven't heard of. (Via Garance Francke-Ruta.)
"As we all stood on the steps with our hands in the air so a group photo could be taken, passing white affluent students, who’d largely previously treated our group like an obstacle to be avoided, began to take notice. Immediately out came the I-Phones to post Tweets and Vines." At The Toast, Rose Espinoza "On Being Brown and Alive" at the University of Michigan.
"And there is a translation process that happens there, where this set of ideas of was mostly being used by teachers of color with children of color. Now a multi-racial group of teachers is using these strategies. When someone from your community says to you, 'Look, there are no excuses,' that is very different from when someone from outside your community is telling you 'no excuses.' Although these are very old ideas, what they mean in practice today is has changed." Miriam Zoila Pérez interviews Dana Goldstein at Colorlines.
"The myth of the monochrome Middle Ages, in which the medieval is originary, pure, and white, transcends geographical and temporal boundaries. It is attached, through supposed biological descent, to white bodies, wherever and whenever they go, even into the apparently non-corporeal digital realms of fan-forums, television and video-games." From last month, Helen Young at the medieval studies blog In The Middle. (Via Rachel Hartman.)
"Basement Floor C resembled a boiler room, yet I felt that I had entered a commune of unicorns." So many great lines in this excellent profile of ballerina Misty Copeland, by Rivka Galchen at The New Yorker.
"Expertly employing the tips on how to take control of an interview, he looked this reporter straight in the eye and, with the utmost politeness, expertly skirted all the hard questions about specific parts of the program. Then he shook hands firmly, said thank you and loped out of the room, ready for the big leagues." Sarah Lyall on the NBA's training program for rookies. At some odd corner of the NYT.
"If you send your children to school this week with cheese and crackers for lunch, you may not be providing the healthiest or most well-rounded of meals, but you will be continuing a longtime classic of basic sustenance for travelers." From last week, a short history of cheese and crackers, by Abigail Carroll for The Boston Globe.
"What we found is that the people who were taking acetaminophen reported less hurt feelings than people who were taking placebo, and they showed less pain related activity to social exclusion, just as a function of taking acetaminophen. We see this crossover effect in some ways, that this agent, which known to reduce physical pain, also seems to affect social pain." Naomi Eisenberger at Edge. (Via Nilanjana Roy.)
"Even a relatively light-on-ideas speculative novel for young people (Divergent, say) is about a thousand miles ahead of half the 'adult' stuff on the bestseller lists—get-saved or get-rich Life Full of Purpose snake oil, dumb, pompous narcolepsy-inducing would-be Literary Fiction, warmed-over Dean Koontz etc., etc., etc. I mean this not just in terms of entertainment—although, that too—but in terms of providing useful, interesting moral and philosophical questions for the reader to think about, and test against his own ideas." Maria Bustillos at The Awl.
"'O, I see my mistake, you cannot know our customs, as you were never here before. We shut our men indoors.'" 1905 pioneering misandrist SF by Rokheya Shekhawat Hossein, digitized at UPENN. (Via Nicole Cliffe at The Toast.)
"On my way down Franklin Street, I pass the bar where X. and I were hanging out the evening before he raped me. It’s still there, on the same street as the place where I’m going to report being raped." Brave piece at The Toast by Katie Rose Guest Pryal.
"Sexual assault is a pernicious and formidable barrier to women in science, partly because we have consistently gifted to it our silence. I have given it 18 years of my silence and I will not give it one day more." Also brave: Hope Jahren at the NYT. (Hat tip to Jenevieve.)
"BRING ME STANDARD OIL
I’M GOING TO PUNCH IT MANFULLY IN THE FACE" Dear god, Dirtbag Teddy Roosevelt. Mallory Ortberg strikes again at The Toast.
"As Twitter expanded and my own little slice of it grew as well, I called it my front porch and defended its quirks and downsides. But now the magic has turned, in ways that have felt irrevocable." Thoughtful piece by Erin Kissane at her website, and one that will resonate for all of you who participated this week in a short Twitter requiem for an even earlier social media era. (Oh, days of blogger yore!)
"That is the helpful thing with codes; they make their users citizens of two countries, one public, the other a private place where the code is spoken and understood by an exclusive bonded few." Finally, petition to make the event of a new published piece by Carrie Frye a national holiday. Who's with me? At Gawker. (Via Nicole Cliffe at The Toast.)
"Health workers, who have, according to the Ministry of Health, accounted for 8 percent of all Ebola cases and 6 percent of all Ebola-related deaths in Liberia, are scared to come in to the clinics." Just one of many alarming statistics from Sara Jerving's piece at The Nation about the making of Liberia's Ebola disaster. (Via @fpinterrupted.)
"This now truly is a type of epidemic that the world has never seen before. " It won't help you sleep at night, but Maryn McKenna's take on the Ebola epidemic is worth reading nonetheless. At Wired.
"While the combatants scrambled on the battlefield, the chairman of a United Nations investigatory panel on human rights said in Geneva that he 'had run out of words to depict the gravity of the crimes committed inside Syria.'" Anne Barnard and Hwaida Saad for the NYT.
"But on the front lines of Thuluyah, Sunni tribesmen, the police and the Iraqi army fight side-by-side. In recent weeks they have been joined by Shiite militias that are notorious for revenge killings against the Sunni sect." Loveday Morris reporting from Iraq for The Washington Post.
"Some of the men shared idle banter with the police officers, speaking laconically of this year's grape harvest in neighbouring districts. The police officers let them pass; if they had looked more carefully they may have spotted the guns and ammunition hidden under the shipments of grapes." May Jeong reporting from Afghanistan for the Guardian. (Via Margherita Stancati.)
"But in the 10 years since the previous ban lapsed, even gun control advocates acknowledge a larger truth: The law that barred the sale of assault weapons from 1994 to 2004 made little difference." Lois Beckett at ProPublica.
"'In local elections in St. Louis County in general, the typical turnout as measured as percentage of registered voters is between 10 and 15 percent,' said Jones. 'Sometimes if there is a hotly contested issue, they might get into the low 20s, but that is the exception, not the rule.'" Emanuele Berry reports for St. Louis Public Radio on grassroots drives to register voters in Ferguson.
"Speaking to Reuters in a group interview, the heads of police of Dallas, Chicago, Austin, Houston, Elk Grove, California, Boston, and Toronto, Canada said that every police shooting since Ferguson has been followed by protests." Fiona Ortiz for Reuters. (Via Alice Speri.)
"Because there has never been a time in history when we’ve successfully eliminated the abuses that take place in these facilities, no matter how many investigations and reports and waves of reform there have been, I don’t believe they can be eliminated." At The Awl, Sarah Mayeux interviews Nell Bernstein on "The Case for Abolishing Juvenile Prisons."
"The story of Alameda’s mandatory pregnancy tests is really the story of how U.S. prisons have grappled with an influx of young women over the past four decades: with supreme incompetence and intermittent malice." From earlier this month, Susie Cagle at RH Reality Check.
"NPR investigated these tools, also known as spyware, and spoke with domestic violence counselors and survivors around the country. We found that cyberstalking is now a standard part of domestic abuse in the U.S." Aarti Shahani at NPR. (Via Sarah Jeong.)
"There’s not much difference to me between the adjunct crisis in higher education and the labor conversations that fast food and other low wage workers are having. It’s just that we like to see ourselves as different. We like to see our destinies as different. But they’re the same thing." Carla Murphy interviews Tressie McMillan Cottom at Colorlines.
"Working minimum wage for eight hours per day would earn a worker $1,386 per month, less than half of the current median average rent in Brooklyn." Olga Khazan at The Atlantic. (Via Amanda Watson.)
"On November 4, North Dakotans will vote on Measure 1, a human life amendment that says, 'The inalienable right to life of every human being at any stage of development must be recognized and protected.'" At Cosmopolitan, Robin Marty on the abortion amendment even North Dakotans haven't heard of. (Via Garance Francke-Ruta.)
"As we all stood on the steps with our hands in the air so a group photo could be taken, passing white affluent students, who’d largely previously treated our group like an obstacle to be avoided, began to take notice. Immediately out came the I-Phones to post Tweets and Vines." At The Toast, Rose Espinoza "On Being Brown and Alive" at the University of Michigan.
"And there is a translation process that happens there, where this set of ideas of was mostly being used by teachers of color with children of color. Now a multi-racial group of teachers is using these strategies. When someone from your community says to you, 'Look, there are no excuses,' that is very different from when someone from outside your community is telling you 'no excuses.' Although these are very old ideas, what they mean in practice today is has changed." Miriam Zoila Pérez interviews Dana Goldstein at Colorlines.
"The myth of the monochrome Middle Ages, in which the medieval is originary, pure, and white, transcends geographical and temporal boundaries. It is attached, through supposed biological descent, to white bodies, wherever and whenever they go, even into the apparently non-corporeal digital realms of fan-forums, television and video-games." From last month, Helen Young at the medieval studies blog In The Middle. (Via Rachel Hartman.)
"Basement Floor C resembled a boiler room, yet I felt that I had entered a commune of unicorns." So many great lines in this excellent profile of ballerina Misty Copeland, by Rivka Galchen at The New Yorker.
"Expertly employing the tips on how to take control of an interview, he looked this reporter straight in the eye and, with the utmost politeness, expertly skirted all the hard questions about specific parts of the program. Then he shook hands firmly, said thank you and loped out of the room, ready for the big leagues." Sarah Lyall on the NBA's training program for rookies. At some odd corner of the NYT.
"If you send your children to school this week with cheese and crackers for lunch, you may not be providing the healthiest or most well-rounded of meals, but you will be continuing a longtime classic of basic sustenance for travelers." From last week, a short history of cheese and crackers, by Abigail Carroll for The Boston Globe.
"What we found is that the people who were taking acetaminophen reported less hurt feelings than people who were taking placebo, and they showed less pain related activity to social exclusion, just as a function of taking acetaminophen. We see this crossover effect in some ways, that this agent, which known to reduce physical pain, also seems to affect social pain." Naomi Eisenberger at Edge. (Via Nilanjana Roy.)
"Even a relatively light-on-ideas speculative novel for young people (Divergent, say) is about a thousand miles ahead of half the 'adult' stuff on the bestseller lists—get-saved or get-rich Life Full of Purpose snake oil, dumb, pompous narcolepsy-inducing would-be Literary Fiction, warmed-over Dean Koontz etc., etc., etc. I mean this not just in terms of entertainment—although, that too—but in terms of providing useful, interesting moral and philosophical questions for the reader to think about, and test against his own ideas." Maria Bustillos at The Awl.
"'O, I see my mistake, you cannot know our customs, as you were never here before. We shut our men indoors.'" 1905 pioneering misandrist SF by Rokheya Shekhawat Hossein, digitized at UPENN. (Via Nicole Cliffe at The Toast.)
"On my way down Franklin Street, I pass the bar where X. and I were hanging out the evening before he raped me. It’s still there, on the same street as the place where I’m going to report being raped." Brave piece at The Toast by Katie Rose Guest Pryal.
"Sexual assault is a pernicious and formidable barrier to women in science, partly because we have consistently gifted to it our silence. I have given it 18 years of my silence and I will not give it one day more." Also brave: Hope Jahren at the NYT. (Hat tip to Jenevieve.)
"BRING ME STANDARD OIL
I’M GOING TO PUNCH IT MANFULLY IN THE FACE" Dear god, Dirtbag Teddy Roosevelt. Mallory Ortberg strikes again at The Toast.
"As Twitter expanded and my own little slice of it grew as well, I called it my front porch and defended its quirks and downsides. But now the magic has turned, in ways that have felt irrevocable." Thoughtful piece by Erin Kissane at her website, and one that will resonate for all of you who participated this week in a short Twitter requiem for an even earlier social media era. (Oh, days of blogger yore!)
"That is the helpful thing with codes; they make their users citizens of two countries, one public, the other a private place where the code is spoken and understood by an exclusive bonded few." Finally, petition to make the event of a new published piece by Carrie Frye a national holiday. Who's with me? At Gawker. (Via Nicole Cliffe at The Toast.)
Sunday, September 14, 2014
Links for the week ending 14 September 2014
"These old men, their eyes clouded by cataracts and their ears hacked by machete blades, sit on dirty straw mats at a church and gather the names of the dead from broken survivors. They write each name carefully in Arabic with faded blue ink on lined paper, neatly folded and stored in the pocket of one man's tattered kaftan. The list is four pages long." Incredible writing and reporting from the AP's Krista Larson in the Central African Republic.
"The only government forces with the resources to react, it seems, are the police. A body may wait for days before a lab worker or ambulance shows up, but when neighbors protest the wait by blocking traffic in the streets, police in riot gear respond within the hour." Jina Moore for BuzzFeed, continuing to report from the front lines of the Ebola catastrophe in Liberia.
"But after hours upon hours of scrolling through the documents, it became clear that the ISIS laptop contains more than the typical propaganda and instruction manuals used by jihadists. The documents also suggest that the laptop's owner was teaching himself about the use of biological weaponry, in preparation for a potential attack that would have shocked the world." Dude Harald Doornbos and Jenan Moussa for Foreign Policy.
"But the aftermath is far from what the Americans envisioned. Smoke now rises from those Sunni villages, where some houses have been torched by Shi'ite militia. Others are abandoned, the walls daubed with sectarian slogans." Isabel Coles for Reuters. (Via Torie Rose DeGhett.)
"In common with their fear of the Islamic State, however, the region’s leaders also share a deep mistrust of the Obama administration, rooted in the past three years of increasing disengagement from the Middle East as the United States has sought to distance itself from the turmoil engendered by the Arab Spring revolts." Liz Sly for The Washington Post.
"Essentially, the administration is arguing that the 2001 AUMF authorizes the president to go to war against any organization that ever temporarily worked with al-Qaeda, even if the group in question didn't actually exist in 2001, and even if any subsequent collaboration has turned to enmity by the time the US takes military action." Amanda Taub at Vox.
"A law like this one also makes it easier to deport people legally living in the U.K. on tenuous grounds, and opens up the possibility of McCarthy-style witch hunts against people of Middle Eastern or African descent." Atossa Araxia Abrahamian at Medium.
"Some people told the Council of what they called routine mistreatment by the police and indifference from city officials. Debora Young of Ferguson said that when she called the police last year to report that her car was stolen, 'they came and locked me up.'" Julie Bosman for the NYT.
Elsewhere in Missouri Goddam: "In other words, the Wielands are asking the federal government to enforce their parental guidelines on their daughters. It may sound outlandish, but plenty of people thought Hobby Lobby and related cases were outlandish when they were filed, too." Irin Carmon at MSNBC. And "Backers say the law is needed to protect gun rights, and to prevent frivolous arrests of people carrying firearms. Rep. Rick Brattin, R-Harrisonville, recommended that all Missourians be armed. 'We live in a world that's evil, that wants to harm each and every one,' he said." Jo Mannies for St. Louis Public Radio. (Via Sarah Goodyear.)
"With more information, Watts decided that focusing on access to guns, not types of guns, was a smarter approach. She came to the same conclusion that other gun control groups had reached even before the Sandy Hook shootings: 'Ultimately,' she said, 'what's going to save the most lives are background checks.'" Lois Beckett at ProPublica on the death of a push to ban assault weapons.
"This year’s high school seniors, born in 1998 or 1997 or maybe 1996, have lived their entire lives in the aftermath of that burst bubble in a world with few illusions about what their mere presence in school might protect them from. The kids just starting kindergarten, I suspect, will have even fewer." Rachel Maddux at Matter on growing up in the era of the active shooter.
"Holtzclaw’s 'mistake' — the slip-up that prosecutors said landed him in orange jail scrubs in an unremarkable fluorescent-lit courtroom on Wednesday — was believing J.L. was similar to his other alleged victims: all black middle-aged women, but women of a lower social status and with reason to fear the authorities." Jessica Testa at BuzzFeed.
"In a state where hundreds of roadless communities are scattered across hundreds of thousands of miles, and where the storied rates of violence against women can hit 100 percent in some villages, silence is the norm, and violence is almost expected." Sara Bernard at The Atlantic on Alaskan rape culture.
"The arrangement is so common there's a slang term for it—'cuerpomátic,' or 'cuerpomático' (an apparent wordplay on Credomatic, a Central American credit-card processing firm), which means to use one's body — or cuerpo — as a source of currency." Deborah Bonello and Erin Siegal McIntyre for Fusion on high rates of sexual assault against migrant girls and women. (Via Sheera Frenkel.)
"From that moment, Jackie knew that she was entirely on her own, that she had no home, no money and no family who would help her – and that this was the terrible price she'd pay for being a lesbian." Hard-hitting and heartbreaking, Alex Morris' longread at Rolling Stone on the kids for whom it's not getting better: LGBTQ teens from religious families.
"The only thing that binds the bacha posh girls together is their families’ need for a son in a society that undervalues daughters and demands sons at almost any cost. They disguised their girls as boys because the family needed another income through a child who worked and girls aren’t allowed to, because the road to school was dangerous and a boy’s disguise provided some safety, or because the family lacked sons and needed to present as a complete family to the village." Jenny Nordberg at The Atlantic on "The Afghan Girls Who Live as Boys."
"'But what I hear in the street is, "He’s a liar. We elected him, and he’s given us nothing but deportations,"' he said. 'There’s going to be a lot of activists—the next generation of leaders of the Latino community—who are never going to forget that Democrats found them inconvenient.'" Molly Ball at The Atlantic on the deep disillusionment of immigration reformers.
"There has been little public outrage over the case involving McDonald, who is 6 feet 3 and 290 pounds. McDonald was arrested at his San Jose, Calif., home Aug. 31, and the police said there were visible injuries on his pregnant wife." Karen Crouse at the NYT on the only way that Ray Rice is an outlier in professional sports.
"The air bag explosion sent a two-inch piece of shrapnel flying. When highway troopers found Ms. Griffin, then 26, with blood gushing from a gash in her neck, they were baffled by the extent of her injuries." Oh hey great. Hiroko Tabuchi for the NYT on the slim but existent possibility that your car's air bag will explode.
"If your goal is to be happy, the next time you’re not happy, you’ll feel like you failed. Emotional life doesn’t work that way. There are inevitably things that are going to make us unhappy, and that’s not pathology or failure when you feel that way." Olga Khazan interviews Julie Norem at The Atlantic on "defensive pessimism" FTW.
"The multiverse ennui can’t last forever." Defensive pessimism in action? Natalie Wochover at Quanta Magazine on the possible failure of supersymmetry theory, and the search for a new model.
" His experiment, which other scientists say is unprecedented in scale, seeks to gain insight into a question that has long bedeviled biologists: If we could start the world over again, would life evolve the same way?" Emily Singer, also at Quanta Magazine.
"I picked up stones and put them down again, and still not knowing how to talk to men, I informed him that as a kid, I’d named rocks, invented complicated societies and biographies for them. It had seemed as plausible as giving life to a doll, and more readily available." Erica Watson at Vela, with "The Postcard Days."
"Paternalism has fallen out of favor in medicine, just as the approach to fathering that depends on absolute authority no longer dominates parenting. But how we should care for other people remains a question." Spoiler: doctors' children have a complicated relationship with medical care. Eula Biss at Guernica.
"Dancer Bettijane Sills remembered a lobby the size of Grand Central Station, with elevators that could move cattle. One of the middle floors was inaccessible from the elevator, and the dancers surmised it to be the location of the hotel’s listening equipment." Portrait of a vanished era: Rachel Marcy at The Appendix with a history of the New York City Ballet's 1962 tour of the Soviet Union. (Via Nicole Cliffe's daily links at The Toast.)
"Feminists control everything. This just proves that we need a by-men-for-men Patty Cake community. We need to insulate ourselves against feminist lies…about Patty Cake." Finally, Jaya Saxena at The Toast with "I'm A Gamer."
"The only government forces with the resources to react, it seems, are the police. A body may wait for days before a lab worker or ambulance shows up, but when neighbors protest the wait by blocking traffic in the streets, police in riot gear respond within the hour." Jina Moore for BuzzFeed, continuing to report from the front lines of the Ebola catastrophe in Liberia.
"But after hours upon hours of scrolling through the documents, it became clear that the ISIS laptop contains more than the typical propaganda and instruction manuals used by jihadists. The documents also suggest that the laptop's owner was teaching himself about the use of biological weaponry, in preparation for a potential attack that would have shocked the world." Dude Harald Doornbos and Jenan Moussa for Foreign Policy.
"But the aftermath is far from what the Americans envisioned. Smoke now rises from those Sunni villages, where some houses have been torched by Shi'ite militia. Others are abandoned, the walls daubed with sectarian slogans." Isabel Coles for Reuters. (Via Torie Rose DeGhett.)
"In common with their fear of the Islamic State, however, the region’s leaders also share a deep mistrust of the Obama administration, rooted in the past three years of increasing disengagement from the Middle East as the United States has sought to distance itself from the turmoil engendered by the Arab Spring revolts." Liz Sly for The Washington Post.
"Essentially, the administration is arguing that the 2001 AUMF authorizes the president to go to war against any organization that ever temporarily worked with al-Qaeda, even if the group in question didn't actually exist in 2001, and even if any subsequent collaboration has turned to enmity by the time the US takes military action." Amanda Taub at Vox.
"A law like this one also makes it easier to deport people legally living in the U.K. on tenuous grounds, and opens up the possibility of McCarthy-style witch hunts against people of Middle Eastern or African descent." Atossa Araxia Abrahamian at Medium.
"Some people told the Council of what they called routine mistreatment by the police and indifference from city officials. Debora Young of Ferguson said that when she called the police last year to report that her car was stolen, 'they came and locked me up.'" Julie Bosman for the NYT.
Elsewhere in Missouri Goddam: "In other words, the Wielands are asking the federal government to enforce their parental guidelines on their daughters. It may sound outlandish, but plenty of people thought Hobby Lobby and related cases were outlandish when they were filed, too." Irin Carmon at MSNBC. And "Backers say the law is needed to protect gun rights, and to prevent frivolous arrests of people carrying firearms. Rep. Rick Brattin, R-Harrisonville, recommended that all Missourians be armed. 'We live in a world that's evil, that wants to harm each and every one,' he said." Jo Mannies for St. Louis Public Radio. (Via Sarah Goodyear.)
"With more information, Watts decided that focusing on access to guns, not types of guns, was a smarter approach. She came to the same conclusion that other gun control groups had reached even before the Sandy Hook shootings: 'Ultimately,' she said, 'what's going to save the most lives are background checks.'" Lois Beckett at ProPublica on the death of a push to ban assault weapons.
"This year’s high school seniors, born in 1998 or 1997 or maybe 1996, have lived their entire lives in the aftermath of that burst bubble in a world with few illusions about what their mere presence in school might protect them from. The kids just starting kindergarten, I suspect, will have even fewer." Rachel Maddux at Matter on growing up in the era of the active shooter.
"Holtzclaw’s 'mistake' — the slip-up that prosecutors said landed him in orange jail scrubs in an unremarkable fluorescent-lit courtroom on Wednesday — was believing J.L. was similar to his other alleged victims: all black middle-aged women, but women of a lower social status and with reason to fear the authorities." Jessica Testa at BuzzFeed.
"In a state where hundreds of roadless communities are scattered across hundreds of thousands of miles, and where the storied rates of violence against women can hit 100 percent in some villages, silence is the norm, and violence is almost expected." Sara Bernard at The Atlantic on Alaskan rape culture.
"The arrangement is so common there's a slang term for it—'cuerpomátic,' or 'cuerpomático' (an apparent wordplay on Credomatic, a Central American credit-card processing firm), which means to use one's body — or cuerpo — as a source of currency." Deborah Bonello and Erin Siegal McIntyre for Fusion on high rates of sexual assault against migrant girls and women. (Via Sheera Frenkel.)
"From that moment, Jackie knew that she was entirely on her own, that she had no home, no money and no family who would help her – and that this was the terrible price she'd pay for being a lesbian." Hard-hitting and heartbreaking, Alex Morris' longread at Rolling Stone on the kids for whom it's not getting better: LGBTQ teens from religious families.
"The only thing that binds the bacha posh girls together is their families’ need for a son in a society that undervalues daughters and demands sons at almost any cost. They disguised their girls as boys because the family needed another income through a child who worked and girls aren’t allowed to, because the road to school was dangerous and a boy’s disguise provided some safety, or because the family lacked sons and needed to present as a complete family to the village." Jenny Nordberg at The Atlantic on "The Afghan Girls Who Live as Boys."
"'But what I hear in the street is, "He’s a liar. We elected him, and he’s given us nothing but deportations,"' he said. 'There’s going to be a lot of activists—the next generation of leaders of the Latino community—who are never going to forget that Democrats found them inconvenient.'" Molly Ball at The Atlantic on the deep disillusionment of immigration reformers.
"There has been little public outrage over the case involving McDonald, who is 6 feet 3 and 290 pounds. McDonald was arrested at his San Jose, Calif., home Aug. 31, and the police said there were visible injuries on his pregnant wife." Karen Crouse at the NYT on the only way that Ray Rice is an outlier in professional sports.
"The air bag explosion sent a two-inch piece of shrapnel flying. When highway troopers found Ms. Griffin, then 26, with blood gushing from a gash in her neck, they were baffled by the extent of her injuries." Oh hey great. Hiroko Tabuchi for the NYT on the slim but existent possibility that your car's air bag will explode.
"If your goal is to be happy, the next time you’re not happy, you’ll feel like you failed. Emotional life doesn’t work that way. There are inevitably things that are going to make us unhappy, and that’s not pathology or failure when you feel that way." Olga Khazan interviews Julie Norem at The Atlantic on "defensive pessimism" FTW.
"The multiverse ennui can’t last forever." Defensive pessimism in action? Natalie Wochover at Quanta Magazine on the possible failure of supersymmetry theory, and the search for a new model.
" His experiment, which other scientists say is unprecedented in scale, seeks to gain insight into a question that has long bedeviled biologists: If we could start the world over again, would life evolve the same way?" Emily Singer, also at Quanta Magazine.
"I picked up stones and put them down again, and still not knowing how to talk to men, I informed him that as a kid, I’d named rocks, invented complicated societies and biographies for them. It had seemed as plausible as giving life to a doll, and more readily available." Erica Watson at Vela, with "The Postcard Days."
"Paternalism has fallen out of favor in medicine, just as the approach to fathering that depends on absolute authority no longer dominates parenting. But how we should care for other people remains a question." Spoiler: doctors' children have a complicated relationship with medical care. Eula Biss at Guernica.
"Dancer Bettijane Sills remembered a lobby the size of Grand Central Station, with elevators that could move cattle. One of the middle floors was inaccessible from the elevator, and the dancers surmised it to be the location of the hotel’s listening equipment." Portrait of a vanished era: Rachel Marcy at The Appendix with a history of the New York City Ballet's 1962 tour of the Soviet Union. (Via Nicole Cliffe's daily links at The Toast.)
"Feminists control everything. This just proves that we need a by-men-for-men Patty Cake community. We need to insulate ourselves against feminist lies…about Patty Cake." Finally, Jaya Saxena at The Toast with "I'm A Gamer."
Sunday, September 7, 2014
Links for the week ending 7 September 2014
"The children, now young adults, journeyed with her back to the school, sometimes for the first time since the tragedy. In silence, with their eyes shut, they remembered." Almost unbearable photo essay by Diana Markosian on the tenth anniversary of the Beslan school siege and massacre. Text by Katya Cengel. At Time. (Via Torie Rose DeGhett's This Week In War.)
"Natalia Semeniuk, 14, had to flee her summer camp for orphans in the Donetsk Oblast town of Komsomolske along with other children on Aug. 28, when the shelling shattered all windows in the classroom." Oksana Grytsenko at Kyiv Post.
"In the seventeen years between 1992 and 2009, the Russian population declined by almost seven million people, or nearly 5 percent—a rate of loss unheard of in Europe since World War II. Moreover, much of this appears to be caused by rising mortality." Grim and beautifully written, Masha Gessen at the NYRB with "The Dying Russians." (Via Betsy Phillips.)
"When Adeba Shaker arrived at a house in Raabia, Iraq, after being kidnapped by Islamic State militants last month, one of her captors received a phone call." Benedetta Argentieri for Reuters on the escape of a 14-year-old Yazidi girl, and the plight of the women and girls still held captive. (Link via This Week In War again.)
"'At the moment they feel the law won’t protect them, because the other victims weren’t protected, so why would they be?'" Nuanced piece on the horrifying child-rape scandal in the South Yorkshire town of Rotherham. By Homa Khaleeli at The Guardian.
"The law gives police incredibly wide latitude to use force against civilians if they feel they're under threat. In theory, it's the job of police departments to come up with policies that hold cops to a higher standard for using force." Dara Lind at Vox about the wide variability in training procedures for police in the use of force.
"The young Abu Khieder men who have been arrested, and their families, deny that they did anything illegal. They insist that those arrested had attended protests peacefully or were bystanders." Anne Marie O'Connor at The Washington Post on the Israeli arrests of up to 30 members of a single Palestinian-American family whose crime may be in being related to the Palestinian teen burned alive by Jews in a revenge killing earlier this summer.
"The federal officials said the probe will look not only at Ferguson but also at other police departments in St. Louis County. Some, like Ferguson, are predominantly white departments serving majority-African-American communities, and at least one department invited the Justice Department to look at its practices." Sari Horowitz, Carol D. Leonnig and Kimberley Kindy for The Washington Post.
"It’s hard to imagine how a small, low-income city like Ferguson can scrounge up anything close to $40 million should they end up settling the suit. The sum dwarfs the city’s total revenues for the fiscal year." Aviva Shen at ThinkProgress on how police misconduct drains public coffers — and rarely results in any penalty to the individuals or departments involved.
"Daniel Holtzclaw, the 27-year-old Oklahoma City police officer charged with sexually assaulting eight black women, is also a defendant in a wrongful death suit filed earlier this year." Aura Bogado at Colorlines.
"Not terribly long ago in a country that many people misremember, if they knew it at all, a black person was killed in public every four days for often the most mundane of infractions, or rather accusation of infractions – for taking a hog, making boastful remarks, for stealing 75 cents." Isabel Wilkerson, whose The Warmth of Other Suns would be on my shortlist for required reading, at The Guardian on police violence as a phenomenon best understood in the context of a culture that encouraged lynching.
"I know what I first felt when I saw each one, aside from sick: the urge—a gut instinct, a child’s fantasy, really—to leap into the picture, save everyone, and stop everything." Jill Lepore at The New Yorker.
"What’s interesting is that 76 percent of teachers are still women today. That’s because teaching remains the most common first step out of the working class and into the middle class. So we’re always having new generations of women who are, say, the first in their families to graduate from college." Dana Goldstein talks to Rebecca Traister at The New Republic about feminism and teaching.
"'I know that it’s difficult, because abortion is not accessible to them. But this is not our work. I think this is a problem the U.S. has to solve itself. There are so many resources, so much money available there for abortion rights groups, I think they should be able to work on this. Starting on paper, with changing the laws.'" Emily Bazelon at the NYT on the Dutch woman spearheading the "Dawn of the Post-Clinic Abortion." (Via Jenna Wortham.)
"In a similar study done in a laboratory, Ms. Correll asked participants how much they would pay job applicants if they were employers. Mothers were offered on average $11,000 less than childless women and $13,000 less than fathers." Claire Cain Miller at the NYT.
"In the final evolution of the meme, the soundbite falls away and ventriloquism robs these individuals of the ownership of their own words." Lauren Jackson on "Memes and Misogynoir" at The Awl.
"All I know is that crowds and intentions can turn on a dime and sometimes, like when they are erasing people who look like you or they call you by the wrong name, you can choose to not turn with them." Tressie McMillan Cottom at her blog, on an incident in the life of Black Twitter.
"What else will a curated feed optimize for? It will almost certainly look more like television since there is a reason television looks like television: that’s what advertisers like." Zeynep Tufekci at Medium on the prospect of an algorithmically arranged (as opposed to chronologically arranged) feed at Twitter. (I gotta say, for the purposes of this project, I will be stuck knowing more of what I already know rather than stumbling upon new-to-me voices and perspectives, should Twitter go that route.)
"Astronomers have mapped the cosmic watershed in which our Milky Way Galaxy is a droplet." Camille M. Carlisle for Sky and Telescope.
"Physarum is a gelatinous yellow decomposer which, though it’s single-celled, can grow to up to several square meters. Also, it’s smarter than you." Elizabeth Cutrone taking the Gal Science slot this week at The Toast.
"It did not have to be that way. If diagnostic facilities like those at Kenema had been more widely available, the virus could have been caught as it emerged." Also proving the point that slime mold is smarter than us, Pardis Sabeti on the loss of her colleagues in Sierra Leone. At the NYT.
"No one has ever conducted a physical search for 52 Blue. An entrepreneur named Dietmar Petutschnig is currently prowling the South Pacific in a small sailboat, but his hunt for the whale seems more metaphorical, a kind of personal branding." An excerpt at Slate last week from Leslie Jamison's new longread for The Atavist.
"Although they were quiet children, they seemed excited to see me, and, without saying very much at all they invited me to their camp. I followed them because those were the days I followed people without asking too many questions." Lovely short piece by Jami Attenberg at The Hairpin.
"One December evening, I used one of my most embarrassing moments as the basis for an essay for a 17-year-old Chinese girl who had never desired something she could not afford." Eunice Park at Vice on making a living — and losing a self — by ghostwriting college application essays for wealthy Chinese students. (Via David Hull.)
"They never put their needs first, unless it indirectly serves someone else — a manicure, some highlights. They make sure everyone around them is 100 percent satisfied. Like grocery-store managers. Like customer service reps. Like masseuses who also give free happy endings." Just reminding you-all that Heather Havrilesky's Ask Polly column is at The Cut now.
"I had often imagined what it would be like to be in the middle of an epidemic, a theme I had encountered in action movies and Edgar Allan Poe. But in reality it was different: Life changed gradually, until one day you suddenly realized that the effects of the sickness were everywhere." Finally, a rare personal essay from the NYT's Ellen Barry.
"Natalia Semeniuk, 14, had to flee her summer camp for orphans in the Donetsk Oblast town of Komsomolske along with other children on Aug. 28, when the shelling shattered all windows in the classroom." Oksana Grytsenko at Kyiv Post.
"In the seventeen years between 1992 and 2009, the Russian population declined by almost seven million people, or nearly 5 percent—a rate of loss unheard of in Europe since World War II. Moreover, much of this appears to be caused by rising mortality." Grim and beautifully written, Masha Gessen at the NYRB with "The Dying Russians." (Via Betsy Phillips.)
"When Adeba Shaker arrived at a house in Raabia, Iraq, after being kidnapped by Islamic State militants last month, one of her captors received a phone call." Benedetta Argentieri for Reuters on the escape of a 14-year-old Yazidi girl, and the plight of the women and girls still held captive. (Link via This Week In War again.)
"'At the moment they feel the law won’t protect them, because the other victims weren’t protected, so why would they be?'" Nuanced piece on the horrifying child-rape scandal in the South Yorkshire town of Rotherham. By Homa Khaleeli at The Guardian.
"The law gives police incredibly wide latitude to use force against civilians if they feel they're under threat. In theory, it's the job of police departments to come up with policies that hold cops to a higher standard for using force." Dara Lind at Vox about the wide variability in training procedures for police in the use of force.
"The young Abu Khieder men who have been arrested, and their families, deny that they did anything illegal. They insist that those arrested had attended protests peacefully or were bystanders." Anne Marie O'Connor at The Washington Post on the Israeli arrests of up to 30 members of a single Palestinian-American family whose crime may be in being related to the Palestinian teen burned alive by Jews in a revenge killing earlier this summer.
"The federal officials said the probe will look not only at Ferguson but also at other police departments in St. Louis County. Some, like Ferguson, are predominantly white departments serving majority-African-American communities, and at least one department invited the Justice Department to look at its practices." Sari Horowitz, Carol D. Leonnig and Kimberley Kindy for The Washington Post.
"It’s hard to imagine how a small, low-income city like Ferguson can scrounge up anything close to $40 million should they end up settling the suit. The sum dwarfs the city’s total revenues for the fiscal year." Aviva Shen at ThinkProgress on how police misconduct drains public coffers — and rarely results in any penalty to the individuals or departments involved.
"Daniel Holtzclaw, the 27-year-old Oklahoma City police officer charged with sexually assaulting eight black women, is also a defendant in a wrongful death suit filed earlier this year." Aura Bogado at Colorlines.
"Not terribly long ago in a country that many people misremember, if they knew it at all, a black person was killed in public every four days for often the most mundane of infractions, or rather accusation of infractions – for taking a hog, making boastful remarks, for stealing 75 cents." Isabel Wilkerson, whose The Warmth of Other Suns would be on my shortlist for required reading, at The Guardian on police violence as a phenomenon best understood in the context of a culture that encouraged lynching.
"I know what I first felt when I saw each one, aside from sick: the urge—a gut instinct, a child’s fantasy, really—to leap into the picture, save everyone, and stop everything." Jill Lepore at The New Yorker.
"What’s interesting is that 76 percent of teachers are still women today. That’s because teaching remains the most common first step out of the working class and into the middle class. So we’re always having new generations of women who are, say, the first in their families to graduate from college." Dana Goldstein talks to Rebecca Traister at The New Republic about feminism and teaching.
"'I know that it’s difficult, because abortion is not accessible to them. But this is not our work. I think this is a problem the U.S. has to solve itself. There are so many resources, so much money available there for abortion rights groups, I think they should be able to work on this. Starting on paper, with changing the laws.'" Emily Bazelon at the NYT on the Dutch woman spearheading the "Dawn of the Post-Clinic Abortion." (Via Jenna Wortham.)
"In a similar study done in a laboratory, Ms. Correll asked participants how much they would pay job applicants if they were employers. Mothers were offered on average $11,000 less than childless women and $13,000 less than fathers." Claire Cain Miller at the NYT.
"In the final evolution of the meme, the soundbite falls away and ventriloquism robs these individuals of the ownership of their own words." Lauren Jackson on "Memes and Misogynoir" at The Awl.
"All I know is that crowds and intentions can turn on a dime and sometimes, like when they are erasing people who look like you or they call you by the wrong name, you can choose to not turn with them." Tressie McMillan Cottom at her blog, on an incident in the life of Black Twitter.
"What else will a curated feed optimize for? It will almost certainly look more like television since there is a reason television looks like television: that’s what advertisers like." Zeynep Tufekci at Medium on the prospect of an algorithmically arranged (as opposed to chronologically arranged) feed at Twitter. (I gotta say, for the purposes of this project, I will be stuck knowing more of what I already know rather than stumbling upon new-to-me voices and perspectives, should Twitter go that route.)
"Astronomers have mapped the cosmic watershed in which our Milky Way Galaxy is a droplet." Camille M. Carlisle for Sky and Telescope.
"Physarum is a gelatinous yellow decomposer which, though it’s single-celled, can grow to up to several square meters. Also, it’s smarter than you." Elizabeth Cutrone taking the Gal Science slot this week at The Toast.
"It did not have to be that way. If diagnostic facilities like those at Kenema had been more widely available, the virus could have been caught as it emerged." Also proving the point that slime mold is smarter than us, Pardis Sabeti on the loss of her colleagues in Sierra Leone. At the NYT.
"No one has ever conducted a physical search for 52 Blue. An entrepreneur named Dietmar Petutschnig is currently prowling the South Pacific in a small sailboat, but his hunt for the whale seems more metaphorical, a kind of personal branding." An excerpt at Slate last week from Leslie Jamison's new longread for The Atavist.
"Although they were quiet children, they seemed excited to see me, and, without saying very much at all they invited me to their camp. I followed them because those were the days I followed people without asking too many questions." Lovely short piece by Jami Attenberg at The Hairpin.
"One December evening, I used one of my most embarrassing moments as the basis for an essay for a 17-year-old Chinese girl who had never desired something she could not afford." Eunice Park at Vice on making a living — and losing a self — by ghostwriting college application essays for wealthy Chinese students. (Via David Hull.)
"They never put their needs first, unless it indirectly serves someone else — a manicure, some highlights. They make sure everyone around them is 100 percent satisfied. Like grocery-store managers. Like customer service reps. Like masseuses who also give free happy endings." Just reminding you-all that Heather Havrilesky's Ask Polly column is at The Cut now.
"I had often imagined what it would be like to be in the middle of an epidemic, a theme I had encountered in action movies and Edgar Allan Poe. But in reality it was different: Life changed gradually, until one day you suddenly realized that the effects of the sickness were everywhere." Finally, a rare personal essay from the NYT's Ellen Barry.
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