Steve Dyer

Carlisia, designer and founder of MAC Fashion House, "It's still so new. And innovative and creative."

Skwerll, designer, Mad Swerll Designs, "Growing. Changing. Lots of opportunities for starters."

Tons more after the jump. Keep reading...

Shawna, model from Portland, Oregon (wearing Natalie Eidolon), "Up and coming. Eclectic. Very different than Portland."

Heather (left), designer, Alien Earth Designs, "Unique. Young. Fresh. We're getting there—this is just the beginning..."

Lizzy (wearing Twala Intimates), "Independent. Unique. Creative."

Noel (center), designer D.N.A. Fashions, "I think Seattle's scene is WEAK. Well, honestly, unless I'm involved."

Monica, model, (wearing Alien Earth), "Energized! And original."

"Miko (left), model, "It needs to flourish, because its awesome." Emily, model, "Developing. And important."

Juliette, model, "Being a petite model is really limiting. The Chance Fashion community is really open, and gives me great opportunity. Also, I think Seattle's scene, in general, is still evolving."

Kristen, designer, Citizeness Clothing, "It's diverse. Still pretty underground and hidden."

Jenny, designer, gerfer Handknits, "It's earthy. A little feisty. Industrial."

Some bonus photos from the runway show:

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Girl I’m tryin to kick it with ya

Hailey, Idaho, 1.39 pm

mubiblog:

Kyle MacLachlan as Special Agent Dale Cooper, 2015

THAT’S RIGHT. YOU DRINK THAT COFFEE, YOU MAGNIFICENT MAN. MAYBE TREAT YOURSELF TO A SLICE OF PIE TOO.

Jury selection began yesterday in the trial of the accused Boston Marathon bomber Dzhokhar Tsarnaev. Reporting from the courtroom, Seth Stevenson touches on why it is significant that he is being tried in the same city where the bombings took place:

Judge [George A.] O’Toole has refused to move the trial to another location. It’s worth remembering that the most comparable act of domestic terrorism, Timothy McVeigh’s bombing of a federal building in Oklahoma City, was not tried within walking distance of the site of the crime. It was shifted to Colorado in search of a less biased jury pool. Some of the circumstances in that case were different, but there’s no doubt there are parallels in how these two attacks cut at the heart of the regions they damaged.

Whatever the final makeup of this jury, the hardest question they face will have little to do with simple guilt or innocence. It’s safe to assume Tsarnaev will have no hope of disproving his involvement in the bombing. There are videotapes. A rumored confession. A revealing, anti-American screed written in the boat cockpit where he lay bleeding.

The gut-wrenching decision for this jury will come later, during the penalty phase, when Tsarnaev faces execution. This is a state where a firm majority opposes the death penalty on principle. But Tsarnaev’s jurors, to be chosen, will need to state that they are willing to impose a death sentence if they determine one is justified.

Noah Feldman can’t see him getting a fair trial in Beantown:

The Boston Marathon bombing poses a new challenge. It’s not just that many and maybe most Bostonians know one or more of the thousands of people who ran in the marathon and were targets of the attack. (I certainly do.) The search for the bombers actually shut down the city and several suburbs after they killed a police officer for the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and exchanged fire with Watertown police. Having been in lockdown, with the sound of Black Hawk helicopters overhead and the children barred even from the backyard, was an experience not easily forgotten. And it affected hundreds of thousands of people who might be in the jury pool.

Deepening the problem of a fair trial is the collective response to the bombings. The “Boston Strong” campaign, which featured everyone from then-Mayor Thomas Menino to the redoubtable Red Sox slugger David Ortiz (the latter mere popular even than the former) united greater Boston like no other public outpouring in my lifetime.

Masha Gessen agrees:

[T]he eighteen jurors who are eventually seated will face the difficult, if not impossible, task of separating their duty of representing the community as jurors from the outrage they may feel as members of a community that was attacked, by proxy, when the bombs went off at the Boston Marathon. The prosecution and, likely, its witnesses will repeatedly stress this sense of collective injury. Tsarnaev is accused of attacking America, and he may believe he did. The government will, in effect, ask the jury over and over again, “Are you with us or against us?”

Chini comes clean:

Canada. My first guess was Canada. That’s how bad my gut is at this. It’s as if my subconscious took one look at the image and said, “Well, let’s see. Lots of snow. Looks real cold too. Probably north of here. Yup, definitely Canada.” Having disregarded that brilliant bit of instinctual wisdom, I got down to the business at hand. And what a fascinating set of clues to work with …

Another reader’s brain explodes

Too many conflicting clues, and no clever detail I can seize – I am pretty sure it’s in the USA, in an area that doesn’t get snow all that often, but is not in a hot zone either; mountains look like Western arid ones; houses with brick chimneys and hip roofs whisper “east”; evidence of abandoned building sites; I can’t quite settle on exactly what the sports complex is (the lighting with those two towers on one side only??); strange combination of urban density and urban sprawl (along with the odd-shaped lorries in the parking lot) almost give hints it’s not even North American.

My wild guess, with a pretty broad stroke – somewhere in the Logan-Salt-Lake-Provo corridor of Utah. Or Tennessee. Or West Virginia. Or Kentucky. Or . . . Portugal.

Or Idaho?

A hunch that might just be a wild hair, I believe this is a photo of a section of Boise.

Or maybe it’s in Mongolia:

Ulaanbaatar is my best guess, though even if I’m right, I’ve not been able to narrow it down any more than this and have now stayed up *way* past my bedtime trying.

Another ended up closer to target, guessing Sofia, Bulgaria “because of the mountain skyline and VIP Massage sign.” Another adds that “it doesn’t take long before that search turns NSFW”. Regardless, the parlor did end up leading many readers to the right city:

The soccer stadium, weather, English, and mountains pointed to somewhere in Europe, but there seemed to be little to indicate precisely where. The best clue was something that forced me to do my research from my smartphone rather than my office computer, a small sign that appeared to say “VIP Massage.” It took some time to realize that the sign was in fact a reflection of the roadside billboard rather than a sign on the building, meaning searches for an establishment named “VIP Massage” were unlikely to bear fruit. Eventually I came across a Relax Center VIP Massage located in Pristina, Kosovo (I don’t remember exactly what search provided this and was searching incognito) which seemed legit enough to have a billboard, so I took a look at the city.

Another notes a trend:

Minarets. Again. I could not believe my eyes. Antalya. Then Dakar. Now this. However, as luck would have it, this time there was no need to review one hundred mosques, nor to look for stadiums in Islamic countries, thanks to the Relax Center VIP Massage and to its easily readable shop sign.

And a correct guess of the building:

So … we’ve got mountainous terrain, snow, and lots of minarets. Where do you have Muslims in cold mountains? Latin letters instead of Cyrillic rules out the former Soviet Union, so I spent a long time looking at soccer stadiums in forlorn inland regions of Turkey. That got me precisely nowhere.

Then I tried something else. A billboard in lower left looked like it read “VIP massage.” Googling that got me to Pristina, Kosovo, and I felt VERY good about my chances. That would explain the vaguely Austrian / Alpine look of much of the architecture. The Wikimedia picture from inside the Pristina soccer stadium, taken on a much nicer day, overlapped with lots of the buildings in the picture and I was home and dry:

We’re about a kilometer west-south-west of the Pristina stadium, looking at the back of the main stands at the stadium. The funky curved roof building to the right is the Palace of Youth and Sport. We’re across Ahmet Krasniqi street from a couple of hotels (the Denis and Adria) and the US Embassy. Now, what the building actually is proved a little tougher. No Google Street View, Google Maps doesn’t tell us much, no obvious hits from tourist sites. I can see the building from above:

And in a city panorama:

But can’t say what it is, aside from that it’s on Ahmet Krasniqi.

A few readers passed along photos of the exterior of the Palace of Youth and Sport, which though obscured in the view, was another key clue:

Another adds:

Constructed in the late 1970s, it now features a large portrait of Kosovo Liberation Army commander Adem Jashari. Quite the beard on that one:

This reader used the roads to help zero in:

A traffic warning sign not found in the western hemisphere, where our warning signs are diamond shaped. And NOT an English speaking country either, because the cars are being driven on the right:

And a former winner takes us on a trivia tour:

This week we are in Pristina, Kosovo just south of NATO Kosovo Force’s (KFOR) headquarters and about a 25-minute walk to the Statute of Bill Clinton on Bill Clinton Boulevard. Given the hills, snow, and mosques, I looked at every football stadium with a 10,000 to 30,000 seating capacity in Turkey, Bosnia, and Albania. Then I checked the ones in Kosovo. The stadium in the center of the picture is the Pristina City Stadium, home to FC Prishtina. The weird roof encroaching on the view from the right is the communist era Palace of Youth and Sport.

As for the window’s location, I couldn’t find a street address. The best I have is Street Ahmet Krasniqi in Prishtinë’s Arbëri neighborhood (or coordinates 42.660684, 21.150451). (The street is named in memory of Colonel Ahmet Krasniqi who defected from the Milosevic’s Yugoslavian army and organized a militia group fighting for Kosovo’s independence before internal purges led to his 1998 murder in Tirana, Albania (see NYTimes article here)). The window is on the northeast side of the northeastern most building within the City Front Apartments development, a series of five mostly residential buildings. Alternatively, this zoning map of unknown provenance shows the City Front development as Arbëri 3, Prishtinë, Block C1. That means the construction in the contest picture’s foreground is the Redoni Apartments.

After giving up on finding the building’s street address, I searched for pictures taken nearby. The presence of Five Star Fitness in the next-door City Front building caused one particular search engines to display an avalanche of beefcake selfies (like this guy; and, yes Sully, he has a beard). But I did find a picture of the City Front buildings taken on Street Ahmet Krasniqi facing away from the Pristina City Stadium. It shows that the development’s balconies have the same railings as those shown in the contest picture. Looking for apartments for rent in the City Front buildings returned this Airbnb rental. Although airbnb’s map places the apartment a couple of blocks away, I think this is the apartment with the contest window. I’m guessing that Airbnb blurred the exact location.

A bunch of readers thought it was that Airbnb, or one of the nearby hotels, but in fact, this week’s contest was over a rare residential view. Another reader landed in the right region because he noticed the “relatively recent construction & the good condition of virtually all the buildings in the view, suggesting rebuilding after a catastrophe or war.” Of course, readers have stories along those lines:

This week’s photo took me back to 1988, when I took some time off from my job at the U.S. Embassy in Rome and drove through Greece and what was then Yugoslavia. It would be another year before civil war broke out and Yugoslavia fell apart, but there had already been demonstrations and violence and the country was tense.

Two memories of Pristina, Kosovo stand out in my mind: getting stopped by the cops, who seemed curious about what an American diplomat was doing driving around in Kosovo, and the bizarre and massive Palace of Youth and Sports, part of which is visible in the right-hand corner of the contest photo, which seemed both out of place and out of scale. Between my faux Russian and the cops’ faux English, I thought I satisfied them that I was just a tourist and not on some mission for the CIA. As I drove on through Kosovo and into Bosnia, though, I couldn’t shake the feeling I was being followed. Later that night, in my hotel in Mostar, five uniformed officers of some sort materialized between the time I checked in and retrieved the luggage from my car, followed me up the stairs and planted themselves in the room next to mine. I couldn’t decide if they were spying on me or just needed a place to goof off and play cards. I didn’t sleep a wink that night.

This reader was in country around the end of the war:

I haven’t had the time to really look for one of these in a while. Work has been a lot more busy and with two kids under 3, I haven’t had much time on Sundays to search. But today, my wife was looking at The Dish on my phone and left the VFYW contest open. In about half a minute I recognized Pristina – the Youth and Sports Center roof was the give away.

I spent 12 of the hardest months of my life between Belgrade, Pristina, Pejë (Peć), and the Kukes border in Albania. I moved to Pristina in the ’90s, when things were heating up but it was still part of Serbia. Then we evacuated because NATO was about to bomb. Lots of memories. Two that stick with me: standing on the border on the Albanian side drinking a cola while watching NATO plans fly overhead and drop bombs. Surreal. And standing at the same border late one night and realizing the refugees were from Pejë when out of the crowd a refugee came up and called me by name. It made it a much more personal conflict.

I suppose those aren’t even Pristina memories. Ha. What do I remember about Pristina? Bone jarring cold in winter, excellent Turkish coffee. Cigarettes that smelled like 100% tar. Damn fine homemade raki – rice vodka if I remember correctly. I’ve been back a couple of times and my best friend still works there with the EU. I’m glad I worked there when I did, it taught me a lot about myself. But I’m still unsettled by it all, and still surprised I supported the bombing before it started.

Another reader can’t wait to visit, because trains:

I have not yet been to Kosovo but it is definitely on my list. I work for German Railways and my European travels are almost exclusively by train, but since Kosovo’s declaration of independence in 2008 it is only accessible by rail via Macedonia — which suits me just fine, as those are the two countries I have yet to visit in the former Yugoslavia. Kosovo is much beloved by many in the railfan community, as it is the last country in Europe to operate so-called “NoHAB” locomotives – a 1950s American streamliner diesel locomotive design licensed and built in Europe:

Nobody got the exact right window this week, but our winner, from the vaunted difficult-view-guesser-without-a-win list, only missed it by one floor:

Snow cover. Distinctly eastern European buses in the parking lot and socialist architecture in the angle-roofed building on the right. And then the key detail: a minaret (I missed one in the Turkey competition a few weeks ago). It looked like but didn’t quite match my recollection of Sarajevo (the Olympic stadium is different) and maps confirmed it wasn’t. Medium-sized city in former Yugoslavia with a large Muslim population? Next guess, Pristina. First picture showed the theater with the angled roof. From then on it was easy-ish. Found the right building. No streetview so had to use Google Panorama but found something close enough below. No addresses so I resorted to the Facebook Group “Why We Study Eastern Europe.” Success! Thanks to the members there for letting me post occasionally. The prize, if I get it, goes to the founder of the group and my new acquaintance in Pristina.

As for the window? Triangulation says the middle balcony of this bloc of flats. The floor depends on whether they added another floor since this picture was taken. I’m going to guess no but I may be wrong.

The best part in exploring this was the accidental architectural typography. There are whole projects devoted to buildings that look from above like letters, but I can’t imagine that the world holds a better “F”. According to the Fontfinder at Whatthefont.com, the building was built in Luzaine Ultra:

An A for this one. The correct window?

This view should be among the easier VFYWs given the neighbourhood it’s taken from. The shot is from my apartment balcony in Pristina where I’ve been the last few years. It happens to be a stone’s throw away from a few embassies, including the American one, so anyone who has passed through should quickly recognize the view of the city. On the right side is a glimpse of an otherwise unmistakable Pristina landmark – the Palace of Youth. In any case, the location is across the street from Krasniqi Street peering out eastwardly, window on the corner, 4th floor:

Thanks so much to all our players this week. And yes, Chini ended up guessing correctly, though he missed the window by one floor:

It's a simple one, and it's just saucy enough that people feel a little excited over having been included, but not so saucy that you risk offending someone (your mileage may vary depending on your peer group, results not guaranteed). It requires just enough participation and interaction that people perk up and start talking to each other, but not so much that anyone has to get up or anything. If the conversation was flagging before, odds are that it'll get a little more personal and a little more genuine afterwards.

It could also fail. I don't know. I don't go to very many parties. Give it a try anyhow.

The question is this: How would you give a handjob if you had no wrists?

Read more The One Question I Always Ask At Parties at The Toast.

You have until noon on Tuesday to guess it. City and/or state first, then country. Please put the location in the subject heading, along with any description within the email. If no one guesses the exact location, proximity counts. Be sure to email entries to contest@andrewsullivan.com. Winner gets a free The View From Your Window book, a new Dish mug, or two free gift subscriptions to the Dish. Have at it.

Last week’s contest results are here. Browse a gallery of all our previous contests here.

Cari Romm flags a study where small group of test subjects “had their non-dominant arms placed in elbow-to-finger casts for four weeks.” Half “were asked to perform mental-imagery exercises five days a week, imagining themselves alternately flexing and resting their immobilized wrists for five-second intervals”:

When the casts came off at the end of the four weeks, both groups had lost strength in their arms—but the group that had imagined themselves doing the arm exercises lost significantly less, measuring an average of 25 percent weaker than at the start of the study, compared to 45 percent for the group that hadn’t taken part in the mental-imagery activities. “There’s a fair amount of evidence that you’ll activate the same parts of the brain doing imagery as you do if you’re actually doing the task itself,” explained Brian Clark, a physiology professor at Ohio University and the study’s lead author. “The basic thought is that the imagery is allowing the brain to maintain those connections.”

Amy Westervelt talked to professor Frederic Luskin, who has spent ten years leading forgiveness classes at Stanford, about the importance of pardoning everyday transgressions:

‘Even the stuff that forgiveness was supposed to be good for – stuff like murders … it’s so rare,’ he told me. ‘More important is can you forgive your brother-in-law for being annoying? Can you forgive traffic? Those things happen every day. Big things? They happen once in a lifetime, maybe twice. It’s a waste of forgiveness. That’s my perspective. But forgiveness is really important for smoothing over the normal, interpersonal things that rub everyone the wrong way.’

Part of what makes the word – and practice – tough for people, in Luskin’s view, is that it requires a degree of selflessness. ‘For me to say, “Even though you were a shithead, it’s not my problem; it’s your problem, and I’m not going to stay mad at you, because that’s you, not me,” that’s a huge renunciation of self,’ he said. ‘And I don’t know whether it’s our [Western] culture or a human thing, but it’s hard.’

Plus it requires acknowledgement of our fundamental human vulnerability, without getting angry or bitter about it. ‘A lot of times people start with this idea that “I shouldn’t have been harmed”,’ Luskin said. ‘Why not? We live on a planet where harm happens all the time, where children are murdered and horrible things happen; to think that you should escape that is a mammoth overstatement of your own importance and a lack of sensitivity to everyone else on the planet.’

“In moments of crisis one is never fighting against an external enemy but always against one’s own body.”
—George Orwell, 1984

making of frozen

Holy crap this guy’s good:

— Big savvy internet publishers will spend a lot of money posting things directly to social networks that they do not own or control. This will be a success by every immediately important measure: these posts will reach and delight many people; they will assume new forms, most of which will have fresh potential as vessels for advertising. Some of these forms will closely resemble common website posts, which will suddenly feel clumsy and unnecessary. Other types of website posts will not find a comfortable home on social networks. From the networks’ perspectives, this will be fine—these posts never did that well anyway. The publication of non-viral, non-native-social content will begin to be viewed by a new breed of triumphalists as either pathetic or vain. Home pages—now less curated selections of stories than uncomfortably revealing glimpses into the social sausage factory—will be considered by large sites to be something of a liability.

— BuzzFeed (disclosure: where I worked for a couple years) is out front on the native stuff, with a team dedicated to “distributed” content, not to mention an enormous video unit that already publishes solely to YouTube and Facebook (First Look is trying a newsy version of the concept, and Fusion is doing entire shows on Instagram). BuzzFeed is a large and diverse company applying capable people to a new project that may or may not be the future of its business—it has room to experiment. However, with any public evidence of success, it will be emulated by less-savvy and more vulnerable companies, large and small, looking for any escape from a set of converging and downward trending lines. In 2015, notable (choose your definition) publications will declare their intentions to go fully distributed—or some other term that means the same thing—effectively abandoning their websites and becoming content channels within Facebook or Twitter or Pinterest or Vine or Instagram.

Websites that expect to be able keep doing what they’ve always been doing will undertake this endeavor and fail. Websites that don’t mind changing their goals and identities completely—newer ones without much institutional momentum or history—will undertake this endeavor and succeed. It will resemble the multi-decade struggle to bring magazines to the internet—which, if we’re really honest about it, has been a failure—in that there will be large familiar categories of writing that will not be easily transferable to the new medium. Related: 2015 will be the year that a large magazine company folds a major lifestyle brand into a Pinterest page.

— The personality-driven professional use of Twitter will reveal itself, like all other phases of Twitter, to be a weird and regrettable aberration. For the media, Twitter will settle into its ultimate role on an increasingly television-like internet as its grim and noisy and constant 24-hour news channel. The Twitter gaffe cycle will be compressed and amplified; this year, however, nobody’s heart will be in it.

— Proud spammers and uncanny cynics and weird internet plagiarists and liars will be given a lot of money. Some of them will remain openly terrible; others will back uncomfortably into legitimacy, turning their content operations into “news organizations” and pretending it was the plan all along. They will be welcomed warmly by those few who remain to welcome them.

— It will be declared problematic to call things or people “stupid.” This one’s been coming for a while, and it’s finally time. Unlike empathetic identity-based problematicals, this one will serve only the powerful. Its enforcers will disingenuously adopt the language of social justice.

— GamerGate will return under different names in multiple venues. Its agents will not be GamerGaters or even necessarily know what GamerGate is, but they will behave almost indistinguishably. Publications that defy the wrong internet communities will be held to insincere political standards in full view of their inherently cowardly advertisers and “brand partners,” who, with plenty of easier ways to spend marketing money, will cave. (Related: This will be a great year for the neoreactionary movement!)

— Facebook will release those publishing tools everyone is so worked up about. They won’t seem like much at first. But Facebook video is instructive: It was a feature that nobody used, then it was ice buckets everywhere, and now my page is totally rotten with native Facebook video reshared from accounts I’ve never heard of. These contextless videos of Animals Acting Like People and Easily Stereotyped People Confounding Expectations are so much more viral than anything else in my News Feed. It’s not even close. Links are doomed. Teens hate links!

— The future-of-media types either go quiet or insane as they realize that they spend most of their time defending… ads.

— Old media layoffs will accelerate; coverage of old media layoffs will all but disappear. Magazines—national magazines at large companies!—will vanish in silence.

— The acquisitions are going to be weiiird. Will Yahoo buy CNN? Sure, why the hell not. Would Facebook buy BuzzFeed? Again: WHY NOT? It would solve more problems than it would create. What’s left for a vanity purchase? Wired? Maybe some tweetstorming VC can buy it and destroy it and remake it as this generation’s Industry Standard.

— Some of these acquisitions, especially the small strange ones, will serve as a humbling and traumatic experiences for hundreds of young Content producers, who will first cheer and feel pride before gradually realizing that it was never about them at all; that their companies were always just… companies.

— Imagine the new JOBS. So many new varieties of feed-stockers: Maybe Twitter will hire a bunch of “anchors” to retweet celebrities and politicians and terrorists? Vine news production units? Hundreds of people will be hired to create videos for Facebook that work just as well without sound as with sound. Apple Watch breaking news notification writers! In general, though, barring big macro BAD THING, this means more jobs, which is good (especially if you’re very young). The least interesting and most important internet media prediction for 2015 is that it will be a lot like 2014, but just more.

— There will be a backlash not against podcasts but against the podcasting voice, which is really an extension of Ira Glass voice [30 seconds of post-rock] which is a mutation of NPR voice.

Prediction for 2015: URL-shorteners will fall out of fashion and long, luxurious URLs will become symbols of status and prestige.

— Mark Slutsky (@totallyslutsky) January 5, 2015

— No human, for the entirety of 2015, will be convinced of anything but his own rightness by any “explainer” site. They will become extremely popular, fully stocked with “Perfect Response” and “Reasons Why” posts that are first and foremost affirming to the reader, and secondarily intended to demonstrate the rightness and virtue of the sharer. One high-growth post-type in 2015: “You’re Right, But For Even Better Reasons Than You Think.”

The result of this glut will be a social media discourse nightmare—more engagement than ever, but carried out at a distance, through articles written in slightly more composed and assertive versions of your voice, by people who sound like they know what they’re talking about but might, in fact—sorry, I mean ACTUALLY—not. Mainstream neoliberalism might monopolize explainerism right now, but don’t worry: it’s compatible with any loose and selfish ideology! (Related: An earnest discussion about ideological platform biases, possibly? We spent a lot of time last year worrying about the forms of Content privileged by the new internet, but what about the consequences of the forms? The new internet loves markets. The new internet thinks in markets!)

— The SERIAL EFFECT: So much True Crime.

— A splashy recent hire will leave Fusion (maybe soon!).

— Lmao Vice IPO, jesus. Awl IPO??

— Uhhhhhhhhhh

— sdg;bjasdfkj84asfjfl’

—

BBC:

Gunmen have shot dead 12 people at the Paris office of French satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo in an apparent militant Islamist attack. Four of the magazine's well-known cartoonists, including its editor, were among those killed, as well as two police officers. A major police operation is under way to find three gunmen who fled by car. President Francois Hollande said there was no doubt it had been a terrorist attack "of exceptional barbarity". The masked attackers opened fire with assault rifles in the office and exchanged shots with police in the street outside before escaping by car. They later abandoned the car in Rue de Meaux, northern Paris. Witnesses said they heard the gunmen shouting "we have avenged the Prophet Muhammad".

Gawker has a rundown of controversial Charlie Hebdo cartoons, covers, and headlines. Christopher Hitchens defended mocking Islam—he defended mocking all religions—in this piece for Slate in 2006. Today's attack is certain to fuel the rising tide of anti-Muslim, anti-immigrant xenophobia in Europe. The Guardian has the best ongoing coverage.

The best tribute to murdered cartoonists is a cartoon. From @davpope #CharlieHebdo pic.twitter.com/gDQqqp4b6b
— Francis Wheen (@FrancisWheen) January 7, 2015

"A drawing has never killed anyone." —Stéphane “Charb” Charbonnier, editor in chief of Charlie Hebdo, who was murdered today in the attack.

Twitter users are expressing solidarity with #CharlieHebdo by using the hashtag #JeSuisCharlie http://t.co/ntUIIhJvl6 pic.twitter.com/kNVlKi7hNe
— Guardian news (@guardiannews) January 7, 2015

Salman Rushdie:

Religion, a mediaeval form of unreason, when combined with modern weaponry becomes a real threat to our freedoms. This religious totalitarianism has caused a deadly mutation in the heart of Islam and we see the tragic consequences in Paris today. I stand with Charlie Hebdo, as we all must, to defend the art of satire, which has always been a force for liberty and against tyranny, dishonesty and stupidity. ‘Respect for religion’ has become a code phrase meaning ‘fear of religion.’ Religions, like all other ideas, deserve criticism, satire, and, yes, our fearless disrespect.

Deze cartoon is het beste van alles wat ik vandaag gezien heb. Hier klopt (triest genoeg) alles. #CharlieHebdo pic.twitter.com/QUnU7bJaGM
— Marco Lagerwerf (@MarcoLagerwerf) January 7, 2015

UPDATE 4:13 PM: NBC says one suspect has been killed and two have been arrested:

One of the suspects in the Paris attack on Charlie Hebdo magazine has been killed and the two others are in custody, two senior U.S. counterterrorism officials told NBC News.

Authorities earlier had identified the three men as Said Kouachi and Cherif Kouachi, both French and in their early 30s, and 18-year-old Hamyd Mourad, whose nationality wasn't immediately clear.

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I can't understand a word he's saying, but there's something terribly moving about listening to our secretary of state address the French people in their own language today:

I'm old enough to remember when Republicans turned Kerry's fluency in French into a political liability—it was back when Kerry was running for president against a man who could barely speak English.

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Early Sunday morning, a Boston police officer used an everyday occurrence, an Uber ride home in the wee hours, to help his department advance its community relations with a groundbreaking new strategy: meet with members of racial minorities, then insult and beat them.

Allegedly.

According to a police report obtained by DigBoston of events that began at 2:45am, two responding officers answered a radio call “that a taxi driver had been beaten by a passenger at E 1st @ Farragut Rd.” in South Boston.

It all started when the driver “picked up a white male … who was with [another] unknown white male at 200 Hanover St.” in the North End.

He then “drove the unknown white male to Charlestown and was then asked to take [the second white male] to E 2nd in South Boston.”

But when they arrived at that address, the “suspect stated they were in the wrong location.”

The “suspect then stated ‘[You] think I’m stupid you fucking spic’ and told the victim to continue driving.”

Sounds like the kind of misunderstanding that could happen to anyone! We might speculate that perhaps this off-duty officer, having imbibed some spirited beverages, was a little hazy when he initially gave his address, then got just a touch assertive in telling the driver how to complete the journey.

With the car stopped at E 2nd and M Street, the report says “the suspect began hitting the victim.” The Uber driver said he then removed his seatbelt and exited the vehicle, only for the suspect to begin “chasing the victim around the motor vehicle.”

With the victim “attempting to stop passing traffic to assist him,” an “unknown black male” lent a hand. “When the victim went toward the male that stopped to assist him, the suspect entered the [victim’s]” car and drove off.

Isn’t that the can-do spirit we’re looking for in our public servants? See a problem, fix it hands-on. If you’re close to home and there’s a car sitting there, running, why not make use of it? It’s just common sense. Apparently the driver’s titular “owner” did not see it that way.

The victim then entered the vehicle of the assisting black male “and they followed the suspect,” who was driving the Uber toward Farragut Road, “where the suspect stopped.”

Once outside the stolen taxi, the suspect “approached both the victim and the male assisting and stated to the black male ‘[What] do you want you fucking nigger’ and began swinging at both parties.”

In the process the “suspect knocked the victim to the ground and began hitting him and the assisting male attempted to pull him off. They all struggled until the suspect observed blue police lights coming in their direction.”

Oh, good! These community-building exercises are more effective when you get more people involved.

The suspect then “stopped fighting and began to walk away.” At which point two MassPort police officers “arrived on the scene and the suspect walked away.” The Uber driver pointed at the suspect, but according to the police report he made an “escape” up P Street.

With the officer too modest to take credit for his acts of street diplomacy, his fellow cops were left to track him down using his Uber account. Officer Michael Doherty has only been with the Boston Police for 16 years, so he might not be privy to these deep investigative techniques.

At Doherty’s arraignment, he had stitches framing a black eye and a sling cradling his arm, and his attorney claimed his injuries showed that Doherty was in fact “the victim and not the perpetrator.”

 

Yes, certainly no one injured in a fight could have instigated it! This officer was merely trying to unite the city’s disparate constituencies into a harmonious tapestry when things went a little awry, and even though he felt victimized he did not contact the police. Those charges — assault and battery and operating a motor vehicle without permission — must be the product of an overzealous prosecutor. We assume that’s how the judge saw it, since Doherty was released on $500 bail with the only restriction that he stay away from the alleged victim. Oh, and he’s grounded from using Uber. Be on the lookout for this Friend of All People, Boston Lyft drivers!

Just in case you nervous nellies don’t like the idea of Doherty tooling around the streets of Boston with a badge and a gun: he’s on administrative leave while this all gets sorted out. They would’ve punished him by putting on desk duty, but he was already there following another assault that took place back in June and which is, evidently, still being investigated.

Doherty’s bumpy foray into community relations included this bit of synchronicity: When he emerged from jail for his arraignment, he found his until-recently girlfriend in the very same courtroom to attend to “a different incident between the two of them involving an assault.” And for that, we tip our hat to either the forces of cosmic coincidence or a South Boston District Court clerk with a sense of humor. Well done.

[WBZ-TV / DigBoston / BPDnews]

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