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I.

A sample of Thursday’s talk at Yale:

These are four headlines describing the same study, Milkie, Nomaguchi and Denny (2015). The study found that of twenty or so outcomes, only three of them – all measuring delinquent behavior among teenagers – show significant effect from time spent with parents (and this result remains after Bonferroni correction). So Vox has a great argument for their headline. The National Post has an okay argument for their headline even though it’s kind of cherry-picked. The Washington Post just sort of reads between the lines and figures that if it’s not quantity of time that helps kids, it must be quality. And FOX also reads between the lines and figures that if moms spending time with their kids has no effect, the argument from opportunity costs suggests mothers are spending too much time with their kids.

None of them are completely outright lying. And indeed, most of the articles eventually explain what I just said, halfway down the article, in one or two short sentences that most readers will skim over. But the rest of the article uses the study to support whatever the news source involved wants it to support, and so people will come up with four diametrically opposed conclusions from this one study depending on which source they read.

II.

Here’s a study that I wasn’t able to include in the presentation because it just came out recently. As per the Rice University press release: Overweight Men Just As Likely As Overweight Women To Face Discrimination.

The paper included two studies. In the first, men went into stores either with or without fat suits and try to do some things – ask if there were job openings, ask for a job application, ask an employee for help, try to buy some things, et cetera. Then they measured the men’s success across both conditions to see if they had more trouble when they appeared overweight.

In the second, subjects were asked to rate videos of an employee giving a marketing spiel for a new product; once again, the employee was either wearing or not wearing a fat suit. They measured the subjects’ ratings across conditions to see if they ranked the overweight employees lower.

The first study only included men, and so could not possibly have determined whether men were more or less likely than overweight women to face discrimination. The second study actually did have both male and female employees involved, and although it really wasn’t their main interest, the researchers did a post hoc evaluation to find the effect in each sex. In all three of the outcomes where discrimination was found, women faced more discrimination than men. They didn’t significance-test the comparison, but just from eyeballing it, it was probably significant.

So a paper in which one study does not compare men to women, and the other study finds women facing more discrimination than men, the press release somehow gets phrased as “Overweight men just as likely as overweight women to face discrimination in retail settings”. Huh.

You might wonder, “Does it really matter what a press release says? Does anyone read the exact wording?” Yes. Many other news sources copied the phrasing, for example Medical Daily’s Fat Discrimination Is The Same Regardless Of Gender. One such copycat, PsyPost.com copied the press release nearly word for word, including the title. Then it got posted on Reddit and now has 5189 upvotes and 1572 comments. So there’s that.

III.

“But at least it correctly raised awareness of how weight discrimination is a big problem in the retail setting, right?”

The paper measured a ton of different outcomes. Let’s focus on Study 1. The actor in the fat suit was supposed to ask if there were job openings (there were) and see if the company told him. Then he was supposed to ask for an application form and see if they gave it to him. Then he was supposed to walk in as a customer and see if employees greeted him. Then he was supposed to ask the employees to recommend him an item and see if they did. Then he was supposed to ask them to recommend him a second item and see if they did.

No difference was found between overweight and normal-weight actors in any of those five experiments. Two of them had ceiling effects that probably made the attempt futile, but the other three didn’t, and there wasn’t even a trend toward discriminating against the overweight guy.

So what did they find discrimination on? They say that detected “interpersonal discrimination”, ie discrimination based not on any quantifiable outcome but based on how friendly/warm the person interacting with the actor seemed toward him. They determined this by self-rating and other-rating; that is, the actor wrote down how friendly he thought the store clerks were toward him, and a spy surreptitious observer who had placed herself near the interaction also rated this for corroboration. Their rating scales included twelve items including “how many times did the clerk nod”, “how friendly did the clerk seem?”, “how much eye contact was the clerk making?” and “how much comfort level did the clerk seem to have?”. The experiment found a statistically significant difference between the fat-suit-wearing and non-fat-suit-wearing trials and concluded that there was interpersonal discrimination.

But hold on a second! The study says nothing about anyone being blinded. In fact, it’s really hard to blind an actor to the fact that he is going into some stores while wearing a fat suit and other stores while not wearing a fat suit. As far as I can tell, everybody involved was in on the study from the beginning. If your boss tells you “I want you to rate how much comfort level clerks have with you for this study on fat discrimination”, it seems really possible to me that there might be a slight tendency to overrate the clerks who interacted with thin-you, and to underrate the clerks who interacted with fat-you.

How slight a tendency? Clerks dealing with fat people got an average rating of 2.3 (seven point scale, lower is better), and those dealing with thin people of 2.0.

So after finding no discrimination on five objectively measurable outcomes, they find very subtle discrimination on an unblinded subjective outcome practically designed to produce placebo effects.

We move on to the second study, where participants (as usual, psychology students) are rating video presentations given by fat vs. thin people. This is supposedly tying into the “retail industry” theme of the paper, but honestly it seems kind of forced to me.

Anyway, the participants are asked to rate their presenters on seven measures: overall quality of presentation, overall attitude toward product being presented, overall attitude toward the store that would employ a person such as this, intention to support the store, employee’s appearance, employee’s carelessness, and employee’s professionalism. The results:

There was no difference between how participants rated overweight vs. normal-weight presentations overall.

There was no difference between how participants rated products presented by overweight vs. normal-weight people.

There was no difference between how participants rated stores staffed by overweight vs. normal-weight people.

There was no difference between how likely participants were to support stores staffed by overweight vs. normal-weight people.

There was a difference in how participants ranked the appearance, carelessness, and professionalism of overweight vs. normal-weight people.

The first four results are encouraging. What about the last three?

Well, I feel like if you ask people to rank someone based on “their appearance”, and your subjects answer based on how they look, you kind of walked into that one. Oh no, people rank conventionally attractive people as having better appearances than less conventionally attractive people! Someone call John Ioannidis to double-check this astonishing result!

“Carelessness” and “professionalism” are perhaps less excusable, but c’mon, you had them watch a two-minute video. When you give someone zero information on a thing, and you force them to make a judgment on the thing, then yes, stereotypes are their best source of information. If you showed me a picture of an average-looking man and an average-looking woman and say “Quick! Which of these people is more likely to like baking cupcakes?!” I’ll pick the woman, not because I think all women are obsessed with cupcakes or because I go around looking at every woman I see as a cupcake factory, but because you asked me a stupid question and ensured stereotypes were the only thing I had to go on.

Then the authors find that this was mediated by explicitly-expressed stereotypes against fat people, which is kind of interesting, but doesn’t make the nonsignificant things any more significant.

So to sum up: there was no discrimination against the overweight on any objective measure of the actual retail experience, including positions advertised, applications given, greetings offered, or customers served. There was also no discrimination against the overweight on presentation evaluations in terms of overall evaluation, evaluation of employee, evaluation of product, or evaluation of company.

There was a tiny amount of discrimination on a subjective measure rated by unblinded observers aware of the purpose of the study. There was also some evidence on three subtler ratings of the presentation that seemed designed to ask participants impossible questions in order to force them to stereotype. However, these meaningless scales did not effect the raters’ overall impressions as measured any of four different ways.

IV.

Here is the reporting from the news outlets that passed their first test and didn’t frame it as men and women facing equal amounts of weight discrimination.

Business Insider: Researchers Had Men Pretend To Be Obese – And The Results Are Disturbing, which says that “this research highlights the importance of including men in discussions about weight stigmatization,” and “the authors also advocate organizational efforts to combat negativity against heavy customers and potential employees…the first step may be for individuals to become aware of how strong weight biases are.”

AskMen: Young Men Who Appear Overweight Suffer Interpersonal Discrimination. “Researchers disguised six thin young men as obese customers or job applications and found that they were victims of microaggressions. Basically people were a little bit more jerky towards them.”

Oximity: Overweight Men Often Snubbed At The Mall. “Shopping malls can be hostile places for overweight men, regardless of whether they’re customers or simply looking for a job.”

The Health Site: Men, Here’s One More Reason For You To Lose Weight. “Ruggs said that these findings were another reminder that there was still more work to be done in terms of creating equitable workplaces for all employees, potential employees and consumers. She concluded that this was something organisations could take an active role in, and said that companies could do better job training on customer relations as part of the employees’ new-hire process. ”

Now I’m almost missing the kind of random scattershot media bias we found on the time-spent-with-children study. Here every media outlet reports the results the same way that the study’s author and the press release reports the results.

This is not a totally wrong interpretation, any more than “six hours a week will tame your teen” is a totally wrong interpretation of the childhood study. But if I myself were writing an article on this study, it would be SURPRISINGLY LITTLE DISCRIMINATION FOUND AGAINST OVERWEIGHT MEN, and mention somewhere in the middle that some discrimination was found on a few sketchy variables. Instead, we get DAILY DISCRIMINATION AGAINST OVERWEIGHT MEN and WE NEED TO INSTITUTE SENSITIVITY TRAINING PROGRAMS IN RETAIL ENVIRONMENT, and they mention somewhere in the middle that a lot of important variables came out negative.

A lot of studies work like this. You test ten or twenty complicated variables, you get positive results on some, negative results on others, some of those results seem plausible, other results seem like maybe you made a mistake somewhere or didn’t have enough power or whatever, and then you make an interpretation based on your personal bias. Then it goes from the researcher’s personal bias to the abstract to the press release to the headlines to the mind of the average reader, dropping subtlety at each step, until “No discrimination against overweight men, except where the study was practically designed to ensure false positives” becomes “Rampant discrimination against overweight men everywhere” becomes “Overweight men are discriminated against just as much as overweight women.”

Don’t get me wrong. I expect there probably is lots of discrimination against overweight men. And I think this study’s project of trying to find it and convince people of its existence was worthwhile. But I don’t think you should get to convince everyone that science has proven X, unless science has actually proven X. The process that produced these headlines is strong enough to produce any headline you want, with the part where you actually do the study becoming more and more of a ritual or a formality. There are just too many degrees of freedom between the study and the reporting.

Stalin once said that “those who vote decide nothing; those who count the votes decide everything.” It’s starting to look like those who do the studies decide nothing and those who report the studies decide everything. The only solution is to actually read the study and not just the headlines. Sometimes we might even have to – God help us – read beyond the abstract.

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Naeem Mohaiemen reviews Vivek Bald’s Bengali Harlem and the Lost Histories of South Asian America, which chronicles for the first time an early history of Black-Bengali racial solidarity.

 

 

Taraknath Das floated as a pale ghost at the edge of my mind during my first reading of Vivek Bald’s first book, Bengali Harlem and the Lost Histories of South Asian America (Harvard University Press, 2013). Das was an anti-colonial organizer in British India, eventually fleeing arrest by British authorities by immigrating to America. After landing in New York in 1907, Das carried on the Indian Independence movement in exile and also married a white socialist named Mary Keatinge Morse, a co-founder of the NAACP. Morse’s marriage to Das had an unusual consequence: it revoked her citizenship. A law passed in 1922 voided citizenship for American women who married foreign men. As for Das himself, federal law had stated that only “white persons” and persons of African ancestry could be granted citizenship. Previously, attornies for Indian immigrants like Das had argued that Indians were of “Aryan descent” and therefore “whites” eligible for citizenship. But a 1923 Supreme Court decision (United States vs. Bhagat Singh Thind) voided all citizenships granted to Indian migrants by declaring them non-white. It was not until 1946 that US immigration law finally allowed Indian-born migrants to become citizens without having to resort to redefinitions of race.

This means that prior to the 1923 ruling, Das had stayed in the United States by virtue of a presumed “white” identity (how actively he framed himself as such, if at all, is not clear). Given his particular history as an anti-Imperialist activist, why did Taraknath Das not protest an unjust citizenship law that had granted him temporary refuge as a “white” person? Was it something Das accepted for the expediency of having a safe organizing base against British colonialism? Was it only a banal clerical error? The answer is not clear, but for historians tracking early forms of migrant self-identification, these cases present a complicated problem.

Published last month, Vivek Bald’s book attempts a new teleology of South Asian migration to America, placing Bengalis, from today’s Bangladesh and India’s West Bengal, at the center of the narrative. While Bald’s book does not feature Das, the movements of early South Asian migrants that he documents indicate a particular decision point. Did these early migrants accept misidentification for the sake of naturalization (like Das), or did they live a life that challenged and confounded color barriers? The book’s key intervention is in how it expands ideas of race, especially the relationship between Asian migrants and “blackness.” These migrants “horizontally assimilated,” in a process that Vijay Prashad described in Everybody was Kung Fu Fighting as new alliances of “recognition, solidarity, and safety by embracing others also oppressed…”. By conducting archival mapping of these early lives, Bald shows how early Bengali migrants shape-shifted into blackness. They lived with, and became part of, African American communities. They married Creole of Color, Puerto Rican, and African American women. They raised children who themselves straddled a line between communities of color.

An MIT professor and former musician and DJ, Vivek Bald has journeyed through the archives of American migration and yielded an alternate history of South Asian Americans’ relation to race. Bald demonstrates that some of the earliest South Asian migrants to America were Bengali Muslims who settled in the American South, Northeast, and industrial Midwest. Instead of a broken migration history that restarted after the United States opened immigration in 1965, South Asian migrants–naturalized and undocumented, in the shadows and in public–form a deeper, more continuous migration history since the nineteenth century. Bald uncovers not just a hidden chapter of American history, he also models a new way to imagine what it means to be Asian American in the United States.

 

Lost in the shadow archives

The subject of Bengali Harlem is the early Bengali migrants who made lives in America, living within the country’s Black communities on the other side of the Jim Crow line. Bengali Harlem begins with a discussion of the dual track pursued in two immigration appeals, that of J.J. Singh and Mubarek Ali Khan. Both men emphasized the accomplishments of “leading” Indian Americans, while skirting around the significant proportion of Indian American farm and factory workers. Bald contrasts their cases with the more assertive approach taken by a Bengali migrant from New York, Ibrahim Choudry. In a 1946 immigration hearing, Choudry submitted a letter that read: “I talk for those of our men who, in factory and field, in all sections of American industry, work side by side with their fellow American workers… We have married here; our children have been born here.” Singh and Khan presented Asian migrants as a quietly striving community that would not cause friction—they advocated a proto-model minority vision. Choudry, by contrast, insisted that migration was not a gift but a right, earned by past contributions and possible future roles. It is Choudry’s argument—the idea that these migrants built America—that the book also explores through the life stories.

Bald subtitles his book “lost histories,” and his research notes give us clues as to why these stories remained obscured for so long. Many of these early migrants were illiterate, and for the most part they left few written records in America. For example, a letter is reproduced in the book from the U.S. National Archives, but it is from a migrant’s wife back in British India, asking him to return from America. Missing are his letters replying to her, which would help piece together his life in America.The book’s signal achievement is overcoming this paucity of archives to trace these missing stories. Bald employed a mode akin to an archeological dig, tracking down a Bengali name from an immigrant arrival document (or in some cases, an immigration detention log), and then finding that same name a few years later in a census record of a Southern or Eastern Seaboard city. Sometimes, the names appear again in logs for marriages, usually to Black and Creole women. The search is made more complex by the crazy-quilt of Anglicized spellings of Muslim names—names belonging to men who, before leaving their country, might not have needed to spell anything in English. “Ali” is one of the common names and is spelled “Ally,” “Alley,” and “Alli.” “Miah” becomes “Meah” in a Life magazine feature. “Mollah” becomes “Molar” in a New Orleans marriage certificate. Other unusual spellings include “Goffer” (Gaffar or Gofur), “Solomon” (Suleiman), “Seconder” (Sikander), “Caramath” (Keramat), “Abdeen” (Abedin), “Rub” (Rob or Rab), and “Rohfman” (Rahman).

Many of these men eventually integrated into historically black neighborhoods in Baltimore, New Orleans, Detroit, and the Harlem of the book’s title. Although many of the migrants were Muslim, most from East Bengal, their affiliations extended beyond their linguistic, regional and religious bonds and they married women who were Puerto Rican, African American and West Indian. They were not legible as South Asian migrants in the classic “ethnic enclave” manner, in which the immigrant community becomes its own niche community—a “Chinatown” or a “Little Bangladesh.” And when their biracial children married into local communities of color, the Asian migrant trail was further obscured. These migrants’ identity as Asian immigrants grew mixed with other, second generation stories. Bald, for example, includes the name “Frank Carey Osborn” on one of the lists of marriages in the book. I found myself puzzled by this incusion until I realized that Osborn had married Nofossu Ella Abdeen in 1914. Abdeen was herself the biracial child of a Bengali father (Jainal Abdeen) and a Creole mother (Florence Perez), who married in 1893. Bengali Harlem maintains a delicate balancing act, combining marriage certificates, rare newspaper reports (with headlines such as “Slogans of Islam to mingle with Christmas Carolings”), oral recollections from surviving children and grandchildren, reconstruction and detective work.

 

Between “Hindoo” and “Negro”

Because legal migration was difficult, the early migrants arrived via many circuitous processes. These migration chains offer insights into the relationship between the dying British Empire and the newly surging United States. Changes to the Indian economy under the British caused mass dislocations. These displaced men moved first to the colonial hubs of Calcutta, Bombay and Madras, and then finally abroad. Meanwhile, British ships needed ever more low-wage Indian seamen or lascars, as they transitioned to steam power in the late nineteenth century. As British ships fanned out all over the world, many Indian seamen jumped ship to leave their indenture-like conditions. These men engaged in what Bald calls a “complex calculus” of ship-jumping. They left the ship in places where there were both strong networks of other ship-jumpers and receptive local economies. Many of the seamen left their ships at Eastern ports, such as New York, Baltimore, and Philadelphia, and made their way to factories in Detroit, Bethlehem, and Lackawanna. This cycle has been repeated many times, for example, during Bangladesh’s 1971 independence war, Bengali ship-jumpers were one channel through which information came about arms being shipped from Baltimore to Pakistan.

Whether jumping ship or coming as small traders, many Bengali migrants adopted a profession that added to a particular racial identification. Many became merchants who capitalized on fin de siècle America’s obsession with the “exotic East,” which was itself an emulation of Europe’s “sophisticated” classes’ Orientalist obsessions. Here, Bald tracks a merchant network through the U.S. South called the chikondar network, linked to a delicate handicraft work known as chikon. The book teases out several ironies at play here. Many Bengali small traders had to leave British India when England began to import cheap fabrics, collapsing the domestic textile and hand weaving industries. Yet now similar products could be sold in America to feed an increasing hunger for the “sophistication” associated with “eastern” goods, whether in the home (“shawls and table cloths”) or the brothel (“afghan spreads, [and] oriental, deep-pile rugs”). Forced to play into orientalist expectations, these Bengali Muslim men acted out a particular archetype of the exotic “Hindoo” (an archaic way of referring to people from the subcontinent). The migrants may have possessed an element of knowing self-satire as well. Bald quotes one irritable reporter musing that the Indian peddlers must be “laughing in their sleeves… as they are loading us up with their ridiculous rugs.”

And yet these Asian immigrants inhabited a nether zone and confused the forces of segregation, which did not know how to classify “in-between” people. Bengali migrant’s skin tones were classified by every shade: “Mulatto” and “White” in a 1900 census; “dark,” “copper,” and “ruddy” in a 1910 passport application processing; “Black,” “Oriental,” “Turkish” or “Malaysian” during the draft registration of the first World War. This shape-shifting sometimes went both ways. Some African Americans began to pretend to be “Hindoo” and cross the lines of segregation. Thus, a black man named Joseph Downing played a spiritualist named “Joveddah de Rajah” in the 1900s. Another African American man, the Reverend Jesse Routte, traveled in the deep south without being accosted, because he had taken to wearing a velveteen robe and a turban. Activist Mary Church Terrell tells a similar story, in her book A Colored Woman in a White World, of an African American who travels with an exposition through Charleston as a “Hindu Fakir.”

We can consider these moments accomplishing a double-masquerade. Muslim Asian men played the “Hindoo” peddler, and were then impersonated in turn by African Americans. The story of a man named Bahadour Ali offers an interesting reversal of these stories. The son of a Bengali father and an African-American mother, Bahadour embraced blackness as his primary identity, taking on the name Bardu Ali and performing in the 1920s black vaudeville circuit. Bald’s central research throughout the book is concerned with how Bengali migrants interacted with blackness and the largely black communities that became their home and family, as well as white America. Regarding the latter space, for a limited time, being oriental “exotics” allowed these Asian peddlers to travel more freely within lynching-era America. Consider by contrast that wistful moment when Dubois considers his old hometown, “Thus sadly musing, I rode to Nashville in the Jim Crow Car.”

Shape shifting did not always work of course. Bald tells the story of a man named Abdul Fara, beaten by a World War I veteran for daring to sit in the “white” section of a segregated streetcar. In New Orleans, Anglo-Americans mounted a counterattack against newly empowered people of color.. They segregated the city by force, flattening the heterogeneous population into a binary of black and white zones. In this volatile racial order, Asian men were categorized as “so dark as to be taken easily for Negroes” in a 1900 newspaper story about Asians in New York sailors’ quarters. The same newspaper described them as “peacable and orderly up to a certain point and then they lose all self-control and generally resort to the knife.” These Asian migrants were now considered both “inscrutable” Asians and “criminal” African Americans.

Unlike Bhagat Singh Thind, the man who argued to the Supreme Court that he was white, these Asian immigrants did not automatically identify with “whiteness.” Instead, as racial lines hardened, Asian migrants married into and lived alongside African-American families and effectively became “black.” Some of these migrants became radicalized after experiencing anti-black racism and witnessing black anti-racist organizing, as Bald shows through the biography of activist Dada Amir Haider Khan. Many also became racialized through the new black nationalism of Islam. One thinks, for example, of the Ahmadiyya Muslim mission, the missionary group from India that converted many African Americans to Islam—long before the rise of the NOI. The black press reciprocated these bonds of warmth and sympathetically presented the struggles of Asian seamen and migrants. In contrast to the xenophobic New Orleans paper mentioned above, the Baltimore Afro-American wrote in 1925: “East Indian Sailors Strike for Grub.” Finally, Bengali men developed a reputation for being “good husbands” among some African American and Latina women. These women of color formed the crucial stabilizing element in Bald’s narrative, providing homes, boarding houses, support, and partnership to men building new lives in uncertain times and a hostile environment.

In contemporary migrant narratives, we have lost these overlapping stories between immigrants and slave descendants, in favor of the flattening narratives of “Asians in America.” Bengali Harlem destabilizes the assimilationist model minority myth, and Bald’s work is the first of many necessary steps toward constructing a new history.

 

A coda and a memory

Vivek Bald ends his book with a thoughtful coda focused on the playwright Alaudin Ullah, whose father Habib  was a beginning point for Bald’s research. Alaudin has explored his family’s stories for his one-man show Dishwasher Dreams and the play Halal Brothers. For many years, he has been searching for a dimly remembered family photograph. It is a photograph of Ibrahim Choudry, the same Bengali man we discussed at the start of this essay, standing with Malcolm X, surrounded by African American and South Asian Muslims. By now, the photograph has acquired a mythical status, one possible missing link that establishes Bengali migrants standing at a crucial juncture of Black American history. Alaudin is still hoping to find that photograph one day.

The story reminds me of a photograph and a memory I have of Vivek Bald himself. It is a photograph I took of Bald, about to go onstage to perform as an opening act for the drum and bass artist Roni Size at Central Park. That mega-concert in 2000 marked a high point for Mutiny, an Asian underground music event that Bald had cofounded with DJ Rekha in 1990s New York. When Mutiny first began, South Asian events happened mainly at the energized margins of the city. Mutiny helped move all that to the center. By bringing British Asian bands to New York—including groups with Bangladeshi members such as Asian Dub Foundation, State of Bengal, and Joi—Mutiny shook up the model minority ethos through deeply politicized musical events. In this way we encountered a generation of British Asians, influenced by thinkers such as Paul Gilroy and Stuart Hall, who identified as “Black British” in solidarity with Britain’s other communities of color. In a New York where South Asians were starting to enter anti-racist coalitions, such as the Amadou Diallo campaign, the concept of Black Asians created an important space for solidarity work.

In the last two decades, the city’s South Asian community has changed significantly. Bolstered by a new wave of immigration, South Asian migrants gained the scale of numbers to encourage organizations to form along national South Asian lines (say, “Indian” or “Pakistani”), rather than cross-racial ones. Bangladeshis were the fastest growing migrant group in New York for the ten years after 2001 and these numbers have allowed the Bangladeshi community to become a nationalist one. Bangladeshi-Americans now have a low level of interracial marriage— an ironic contrast with their predecessors, who married into and lived with other communities of color. There are structural reasons for this, which includes the fact that processing of immigration for spouses is slightly more streamlined than before. Therefore, there is an incentive to get married before arriving in America. Further, with large Bangladeshi ethnic enclaves now in existence, it is possible to live surrounded by people of the same country, reducing the possibility of meeting and marrying others. Of course these trends can also shift and vary with time and processes. As Bangladeshi children grow up here and, especially for those in public schools, they become friends with other students of color. Cultural spaces are also where new hybrids are arriving, for example in the form of hip-hop musician K-Prime (Anik Khan– his website announces that he moved “from Dhaka to the borough of Queens”) with his cult African-American following.  In addition, an increasing Indo-centrism, twinned with the triumphalist “India Shining” bug, crowds out recognition of South Asians who are not Indian—like Sri Lankan, Nepalese, Burmese, and other migrant groups. Without cross-racial solidarity, Asian migrants may cut themselves off from the possibility of generative, progressive alliances with other racial justice movements.

Nowadays, you can sense a palpable desire to highlight white-collar South Asian success, sidelining the working class population that was the bulk of post-‘80s migration. Vijay Prashad warned about exactly these tendencies, when he responded to Dubois’s famous question “How does it feel to be a problem?” by asking South Asian Americans: “How does it feel to be a solution?” Prashad argued, in The Karma of Brown Folk (the title was a play on Dubois’ The Souls of Black Folk), that by embracing the model minority myth in their own self-presentation, Asian Americans allowed themselves to be pitted against African Americans. In this narrative, Asians could be the exceptional minority, the one that purportedly disproved racism in America simply by “working hard.” Of course, the position of South Asians in America has gone through new realignments and reversals as a racially profiled population after 9/11, but triumphalist celebrations of “South Asian” identity can still unmoor us from longer span, shared histories.

Bald quotes poet Edouard Glissant at the beginning of the book. I finished the book thinking of another set of Glissant’s words: “We are not prompted solely by the defining of our identities but by their relation to everything possible as well– the mutual mutations generated in this interplay of relations.” Following Glissant, we can imagine that many possible futures lie ahead. That day in Central Park in 2000, I stood in the audience watching Vivek Bald perform, spinning new records on the turntables. It was an exciting day, but I also wondered if mainstream visibility would end up diluting a progressive, pan-race political moment. As we have seen in the past, the seduction of mainstream “acceptance” always subtly demands that we leave something, or someone, behind. Bengali Harlem helps to imagine possibile other paths out of the cul de sac of narrowly defined race lines and lives. The stories of South Asian migrants who integrated into historically black neighborhoods of Treme, Black Bottom, West Baltimore, and Harlem speaks to other possibilities of Afro-Asian solidarity that still wait to be shaped.

 

 

This review is expanded from a version published in Margins (Asian American Writers Workshop).

 

 The title references a poem by Sekou Sundiata, an East Harlem resident who frequented a restaurant managed by Syed Ali, a character in Bald’s book.

 

 

Reading List

Vijay Prashad, Everybody was Kung Fu Fighting: Afro-Asian Solidarity and the myth of Cultural Purity (Beacon Press), 200.

Vivek Bald, Bengali Harlem and the lost histories of South Asian America, Harvard, 2013.

Richard K. Taylor, Blockade! A guide to non-violent intervention, Orbis Books, 1977.

W.E.B. Dubois, “On the meaning of progress,” The Souls of Black Folk, Dover, (reprint) 1994.

Richard Brent Turner, Islam in the African-American Experience (Second Edition), Indiana University Press, 2003.

Vijay Prashad, The Karma of Brown Folk, University of Minnesota Press, 2000.

Edouard Glissant, Poetics of Relation, University of Michigan Press, 1997.

Vivek Bald also made a documentary about the British-Asian music scene, Mutiny: Asians storm British music (2003). The film was preceded by an earlier documentary, Taxi-vala/Auto-biography (1994).

 

Naeem Mohaiemen is a writer, visual artist (www.shobak.org), and a Ph.D. student in Anthropology at Columbia University. His essays include “Fear of a Muslim Planet: Islamic roots of hip-hop” (Sound Unbound, Paul D. Miller ed., MIT Press).

 

Turtles Forever (full length movie YouTube) was a feature length, 3 episode story from Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles (2003 edition) released in 2009 as an end cap to that particular turtle continuity. Noteworthy for having the somewhat edgier, somewhat darker, definitely more angular circa 2003 turtles meet up with the recklessly wacky 1987 turtles via an interdimensional travel device. Inevitably they all end up traveling to Turtle Prime, the black and white world of the original comics and are scared out of their minds by the alpha turtles of that dimension.

I could talk about my life - but whatever, livejournal, there are more perplexing things going on right now.

Last night around midnight Edbury and I were gchatting about an interview I have coming up. Even though we're roommates we probably talk more often over gchat than in person - but also I'm not home. I'm house- and dog-sitting for a friend in Sausalito, across the bay from San Francisco.

I've gone through my texts and gchats with Edbury and put the events together in the following narrative:

It's midnight and I'm talking to Edbury about, I don't know, TV or the internet or something. While we're chatting, Edbury receives a weird text. It was from 972 676 9168, but according to the metadata appended to the SMS that's a proxy for 931 338 XXXX. The message reads:

half hour, union square

Now, we live just a few blocks from Union Square. Eddie and I were intrigued of course. Mysteries! I was kinda nervous about him being all alone, and thought he shouldn't bring his wallet or phone, and wished I was there to safety-wingman him for ... whatever it was. But: Sausalito. Mostly I was thinking it was some weird OKCupid person. While I don't think he's all Eyes Wide Shut in his personal life, he has had what I would consider to be very mildly unusual assignations through OKC, so maybe it was just a weird hookup thing. Weird, but just you know, lower case w.

We debate whether he should go at all, and he decides he will. And at the required time, Edbury leaves the house and starts walking over there. He responds to the text with

I'm ready.

and receives the response

Donations?



Weird. Five minutes later Edbury messages me

There are like. Cops everywhere in the park and a guy on the corner clearly waiting with a briefcase.

The cop part isn't too weird. The Nike Women's Marathon is on Sunday, and the park is mostly taken up with the marathon's pavilion and registration tent, and is well covered by the fuzz for civic safety purposes, presumably.

But that guy. Just standing there. Briefcase. Edbury's description:

brown blazer and slacks
chin length hair, but clean cut
glasses

Edbury starts kind of circling around him, walking past and trying to surreptitiously take a picture. He definitely doesn't know the guy and definitely has never seen him before.



But also like, that could just be a guy who's standing near the park. At 12.30 at night. In empty San Francisco. Coincidence, right? Then the guy takes out his phone and dials a number and EDBURY'S PHONE RINGS.

The guy is calling me. It's def him.

Edbury is standing too close to him to answer the phone without the guy realizing Edbury is standing kind of near him (though Edbury has walked within a few feet of him several times at this point, and there's no one on the street). Edbury doesn't answer.

Also: the phone call? FROM A DIFFERENT NUMBER THAN THE TEXTS. The caller ID on the phone call reads 415 399 1613.

Yeah no idea who this guy is.
Okay what if I text him "just leave the case." ?
I'm kind of just waiting and watching from behind.



Edbury and I spend a few minutes gchatting and trying to figure out what to do next. Edbury is finally like, fuck it, and texts him

Just leave the case

The guy checks his phone, sees the text, looks at it for a second, then starts SPRINTING.

HES RUNNING
What do I do he's running down post and I'm like semi chasing

Then

Nm I stopped wtf I can't chase some stranger

And that was the end of the night. Edbury watches the dude recede into the distance. It was like 1.30am at that point. Edbury went home and I got set up in the guest room here and we both went to bed. Sorta. Both of us sat up all night thinking about that shit.

This weirdness was the first thing on my mind when I woke up today. I was still inside this weird dream. And I immediately messaged Edbury and started trying to research the numbers on the internet. There are a bunch of boards where people talk about the robonumbers they get calls from. Mostly it's just like "Candidate for U.S. House of Representatives, left message in Spanish", but for the first number Edbury got the text from - 972 676 9168 - there are these two notes on 800notes.com, left on Mar 3, 2011:

I keep getting a text from this number with a +17864437089. The text goes on about us being friends and I need to let him know what's up. He adds little smiley faces and says his name is Guille...

and

Just got a text from this number followed by the word "Diamond"

The other, second number is registered to a Jeffrey Cox, age 59, 895 Chamberlain Ct Mill Valley, CA 94941.

A bunch of us who are fascinated by this started calling. The first number, 972 676 9168, just yields the message "Could not complete your call, please try again".

Will called the second one, 931 338 XXXX, the "Jeffrey Cox" number.

well I got through to the second number
and I said
diamond.
and a male answered
sounded mid 20s/30s
and he was like
what? hello?
and then was like
you have the wrong number
and hung up

I called the 931 338 XXXX number myself an hour later and talked to the guy for a (very) little while. He seemed slightly older to me definitely more 50s/60s than 20s/30s. But he spoke with a distinct Hindi accent. Will thought it was Spanish-sounding, but I think he's wrong. The guy admitted he lived in California but refused to answer any of my other questions, and legitimately didn't seem to know wtf I was talking about. He said he didn't know anything about Union Square. A little while later he called me back wanting to know who I was. I didn't tell him anything.

James/Jim called the third number, 415 399 1613, the one Edbury supposedly received the phone call from. It's weird computer noise and James hangs up, frightened. I call it and record the sound:



Now I'm trying to find a program that can turn audio data streams into something more useful. Though Jim is probably right that it's just some handshake protocol, not actual data.

I try calling the 786 443 7089 number from the "Guille" comment, in case that's not a red herring or coincidence. Not in service.

Then: Edbury deduces the Indian guy is "uninvolved."

she* is like 90% sure the second number is spoofed
his number is just text content sent from google voice
but whoever owns that number could just set that
*[Edbury's computer-engineer co-worker, who is also investigating]

Edbury's Jim's theories:

some weird misguided silk road FBI thing
a viral marketing scam
and actual awkward and maybe shady wrong number

My theory in the comments. Right now I've been at this for like twelve hours straight and no matter how fascinated I am, I haven't had anything to eat or drink, and I need to put this computer down and go to the bathroom. And maybe try to get some work done today. But damn. It'll be hard to pull my brain out of this.

UPDATE 1.56pm PST The "Jeffrey Cox" number, 931 338 XXXX, at the end of which I spoke to a Hindi-sounding man, texts me asking what is going on, and saying "My phone was not with me". I reply asking if he is saying his phone has been out of his possession in the last 24 hours. Awaiting reply.

UPDATE 3.36pm PST Jeffrey Cox number redacted because it is in fact the number of a real person.

UPDATE 3.42pm PST Jeffrey Cox number texts me to say his phone was out of his possession yesterday at "orientation", and his friends - who wanted to play with his 41 megapixel camera - sent out texts as a joke, asking random numbers to meet them at Union Square. This would have been early in the day though, not at midnight. He apologizes profusely. But if that is true ... who was Briefcase Guy? Jeffrey Cox number doesn't seem to be able to check his phone to ascertain whether those texts were or were not sent from his phone. I wonder if he isn't just assembling fiction from the fact that I asked him about Union Square when we spoke earlier, and questioned him about whether texts had been sent from his phone. He says "if you say it was from my number its impossible to say or prove that it was not me".

Comments

Oops. Facebook had another little PR snafu this week when it was discovered that an ad being promoted on the site by an online dating concern featured the image of a dead girl. The girl, Rehtaeh Parsons, made headlines earlier this year when she killed herself in her home of Halifax, Nova Scotia after being bullied and raped. The ad, unfortunately, said, "Find love in Canada!" [ more › ]

Quora, the question-and-answer site that convinced investors to part with a whopping $61 million, is notoriously unwilling to release any concrete data about its growth—preferring, instead to dole out vague vanity metrics. Maybe that's because its traffic is coming from outside the U.S.

Read more...

Set to turn your smile upside down, Trulia just unleashed a new interactive map that shows their median rental price info collected over the last year. And what a map it is. San Francisco is basically one 7x7 red danger zone of doom. In other words, most rentals in the City run over $2,000 per bedroom, at least according to Trulia. [ more › ]

Playing at the World is a blog about the early days of tabletop RPGs. Select articles include "How Gaming Got Its Dice" (and the followup "The Origins of Dice Notation,") "The Early Works of Gary Gygax, " "A Playtesting Edition of Dungeons & Dragons (1973)" (and the followup "The Dalluhn Manuscript: In Detail and On Display") and "Character Sheets in 1975."

by Alex Balk

"Why Aren't There More People Of Color In Craft Brewing?"

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The post Is This The NPR-est Headline Ever? appeared first on The Awl.

Brooklyn rental prices continue to climb, as the median rental price shot up 4.6 percent to $2,850 in August, compared to the same period last year, according to a report from Douglas Elliman. Manhattan prices rose as well, but at a much slower rate, leading to a price difference of just $300 in August — the second smallest price gap on record. Rentals in Manhattan increased 1.8 percent to $3,150 in August vs. the same period last year, while Brooklyn rents reached a five-year high. The number of new rentals surged in Brooklyn as well, with 554 new rentals in August alone, 166.3 percent higher than August of 2012. We’ve inlcuded Elliman’s graph of Brooklyn rental prices after the jump. As Brooklyn Rents Soar, Price Gap With Manhattan Has Narrowed to a Near-Record Low [Daily News] Summer of Queens: Renters Flee Manhattan and Brooklyn for Gentler Borough [TRD]… Read More

This morning in Richmond, California the city council of the small Bay Area city voted 4-3 to follow through with an unprecedented plan that will rescue local homeowners from a plague of underwater mortgages and effectively push out the big Wall Street banks. [ more › ]

We suppose this was inevitable, really: a private shuttle bus collided with an historic F-Market Street car Thursday evening. [ more › ]

Unless the candidate who's deeply concerned about "POT HEADS" wins, New York City won't have a billionaire as its next mayor. This worries those who have benefitted most from Mayor Bloomberg's tenure as mayor: rich people. With the current leader of the pack of Democratic candidates proposing a tax increase on the wealthy to pay for universal preschool, the defenseless rich people have but one recourse to stop the begrimed hands of tyranny from picking their pockets: whine to the media. [ more › ]

Late 1960s drug culture apparently had readers of The New York Times perplexed.

How else to explain this article, dated April 16, 1967, that translates slang words and phrases spoken by East Village drug users?

The reporter hung out with young adults who were part of the “scene,” in other words, “people over 25 years old who hold sporadic jobs when they need money and can be understood only by other members of the “acid bag.”

It reads like a quick anthropological study of a primitive culture or tribe.

“The lingo of the ‘head,’ or drug user, is as diverse and incomprehensible to an outsider as the laboratory jargon of a nuclear physicist,” states the article.

“‘Head’ also has two meanings—what a person thinks and what drug he uses. . . .”

“A ‘shrink’ is a psychiatrist. Acid is LSD; grass is marijuana; a joint is a marijuana cigarette and a high is the feeling after using a drug.”

“In the East Village, people don’t carry things in a bag.  They carry things in a sack,” the article goes on. “A ‘bag’ is what they like and ‘what’s happening.’”

My favorite: “When a person’s mind is blown, he hears a phrase, word, poem, story, or sound that is ‘too much.’”

A cabbie who allegedly continually sexually harassed a customer has had his license revoked by the Taxi and Limousine Commission. According to the News, Tashfeen Awan was accused of harassing the female customer during a ride on Nov. 14, 2012. “Am I making you uncomfortable, honey, or am I making you horny?” the married father of three asked the woman repeatedly. But maybe he was just a really big Mike Meyers fan, amirite? There are still a few of those out there campaigning for a fourth Austin Powers film, right?? [ more › ]

by Choire Sicha

Largely today's New Yorker profile of Mike Bloomberg makes me remember there are lots of things we're going to miss about the lil' Bostonian billionaire that could! In particular, the attitude, and also the humongous amount of money he's dumped into various institutions and projects in the city. We're also going to miss him when we forget in a couple years that he's largely to blame for the forthcoming budget crisis. But.

“No one has done more to help the poor than we have.” The city, he insisted, “created three hundred and fifty thousand jobs in tourism. These are entry-level jobs.” In his twelve years as mayor, it built “one hundred and sixty-five thousand units of affordable housing.” And by improving education the city addressed “one of the keys to getting out of poverty.” Yet a report issued by one of his own agencies, the Center for Economic Opportunity, revealed that by the end of 2011 more than a fifth of New Yorkers were living below the poverty line and another quarter just above it. These figures will rise, the report added, especially if federal spending declines, as expected.

This spring, the Fiscal Policy Institute, a progressive nonprofit research organization, issued an even grimmer report, concluding that there has been “no meaningful reduction in poverty” in the city in thirty years.

So here in the New Yorker is a thing, I am sorry to say, that is absolutely untrue. It's this part—"In his twelve years as mayor, it built 'one hundred and sixty-five thousand units of affordable housing.'" No. He/it did not. Do you want to learn about housing in New York City, and why that's not true? Let's roll! Don't be alarmed, we're going to do this very slowly, even the math-afraid can follow along.

It's true that Bloomberg's New Housing Marketplace Plan (PDF) calls for the creation and preservation of 165,000 units of affordable housing by 2014. Here's how the administration put it:

At the end of my first year in office, we announced the New Housing Marketplace Plan, the City’s largest affordable housing program since the Koch Administration. The plan pledged to create or preserve 65,000 units of affordable housing by 2008. In April of 2005 we increased that commitment to 68,000 units…. [W]e are now expanding the original five-year New Housing Marketplace Plan to a 10-year plan to create and preserve 165,000 units of affordable housing.

That's where the 165,000 number comes from.

You will notice that the word "built" doesn't appear. Whenever they drag out these numbers, create is always coupled by "preserve." People get fuzzy about this, and development is complicated, and then, something totally untrue gets passed around.

Let's pull back!

You know what an apartment is, right? Kidding: not that far back.

Almost 70% of New York City dwelling units now are rentals. That's about double the national average. All told, there are about 3.3 million buildings in which people live in New York City.

So, right. Math tells us there are about 2.1 million rental units. Around 40% of those now are unregulated, free market—that's around 900,000. About 45% are rent stabilized. (Fewer than 2% are rent controlled, so you can pretty much just ignore it when people prattle on about rent control and what it means.)

There was, as you might recall, a recession! Here's one amazing thing that happened in the recession.

There were 34,000 permits issued for new residential construction in 2008. In 2009? The number of permits dropped to about 6000. And it didn't really recover. 2010 and 2011 barely grew. In 2011, fewer than 997 buildings received permits, for a total of 8,936 units.

In 2012, still, the numbers had barely rebounded to 1998 levels—just about 10,000 permits. Basically, if you were tortured by pile-driving and construction-banging in the mid-00s, you likely no longer are. According to the city, "the number of buildings demolished between 2005 and 2007 alone was almost triple the number demolished" in all of the 90s. Then it dropped; only 1,129 buildings were demolished in 2011, which was essentially stable through 2012.

One thing that's very hard to do is to create new affordable housing when there is barely any housing being created at all.

Now, Koch, for instance, actually created around 200,000 units of affordable housing. But one thing about affordable housing is that it expires. "421a"—created in 1971—is the name for the program that used to give tax exemptions for somewhere usually between 10 and 25 years. But after that, the affordable housing rolled into market. (Here's an interesting story about that.)

There were recent improvements made in the affordable housing credit scheme. For one thing, they closed down the "off-siting" of affordable housing. It used to be that you could build a fancy apartment in Manhattan and affordable housing in another borough, and you'd still get the tax credit. Also they extended the period that you had to keep the housing affordable to 30 years.

But what these "affordable housing" incentives mean is that affordable housing is constantly rolling off the books.

As well, we need to ask: what is affordable housing anyway? In fact, just over half of created affordable housing is for poor people—households under $50,000 a year. Actually 37% of this created affordable housing is for households who are 120% or more of Area Median Income ($75,360 for a family of four).

(We won't get into the whole thing about how NYC has dealt with homelessness.)

(But, a sidebar: there was also the J-51 plan. That's when you would get a tax abatement or exemption for renovating. That program ended in 2011. That's good! In fiscal year 2013 alone, J-51 will cost the city $251.3 million in lost taxes on just 1,181 buildings. The trade-off was that any apartment renovated under the plan had to enter rent regulation while the building was receiving the benefits.)

Since 2003, actually, the city has only "funded" 100,000 units of affordable housing—except most of this is retention. Overall, fully 66% of the units of affordable housing expected to be created by the time Bloomberg leaves office are actually "retention," not creation. (By the end of the fiscal year of 2011, 65% of the affordable housing "gain" was just retention.) Absolutely it costs a ton of money to retain affordable housing. But it's far, far harder to build it. And that hasn't happened.

As of March 2013, HPD and HDC have financed almost 145,000 units of housing under the New Housing Marketplace Plan, almost 88% of the total planned. The City has also shifted from its priority on new construction, and now anticipates that 68% of units by 2014 will be preservations, up from the 44% anticipated in the initial plan.

So right. (PDF) The Bloomberg administration said it would create new affordable housing. It realized it couldn't, and focused its efforts on retention. That's understandable! This is all incredibly complex and expensive and difficult to manage, and honestly the people who work with housing in New York City are pretty much heroes and must want to tear out their hair everyday.

That big jump in the last two years? That's people hustling trying to make a quota.

And also… there'll be 9 million New Yorkers by 2030; there are about 8.3 million now. Between 2005 and 2008, New York City only had a net gain of 65,000 housing units. Those numbers don't match up well.

Photo of New York City by Doug Kerr.

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The post Mayor Mike's Legacy: What *Really* Happened To Affordable Housing In New York City appeared first on The Awl.

In 2009, a New Yorker profile described Mayor Bloomberg as "more a Medici than a mayor." The billionaire presided over a well-oiled "meritocratic machine" that produced results: "Crime is low, test scores are climbing, and racial tension hardly registers." One of those things still rings true, but now we're entering Very Important Legacy Sculpting Season, in which we mash all of the facts of Bloomberg's tenure with all our feelings over the past 12 years into one, reflexive yelp that we hope will help us better understand our condition under this mayor. Ken Auletta's piece in this week's New Yorker echoes what other Important Voices have already proffered: The Rich People Won. [ more › ]

Our Science Fiction Movies Hate Science Fiction. An intelligent discourse from The Awl about the state of modern science fiction movies.

Written about this weekend's opening of Elysium, the article goes into detail about how most modern SF movies essentially boil down to the same core themes:

1. Science is Bad.
2. Robots are Eeeeevil.
3. Dystopia is Our Future.

If you read nothing else, read the ending paragraph: For all the great special effects and enormous, booming noises our films are bringing us now, the majority of science fiction films have forgotten the one thing science fiction is supposed to do: make us think about the future. Thinking, we have forgotten, is not the same as worrying.

by Choire Sicha

Hey, how have Bloomberg's homeless and housing policies been working out? Let's see!

"Desperate for shelter space, New York City has been paying landlords in low income communities much more for their apartments than they could get in the private market. The result? Landlords are pushing out paying tenants to make room for the homeless….

For the last year, the number of people in New York City’s shelter system has hovered around a record 50,000 overall. Nearly half are children. The numbers of people in shelters have shot up since 2011, when state- and city-funded programs designed to help people move into permanent housing were eliminated….

In fiscal year 2013, it cost more than $1 billion to run the homeless services system, up from $944 million in 2010. But at that time, the city was paying not just for shelter but for permanent housing assistance as well."

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by Alex Balk

"There's something deeply classist about Web coverage of the gathering of Insane Clown Posse fans," argues Salon. This is particularly striking when you consider the strenuous efforts most organizations take to ensure total awareness of the extent to which socio-economic issues affect the underlying assumptions they bring to their coverage of everything that is not Juggalo-related.

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The post Web Classist appeared first on The Awl.

Well, this news came as a total and complete shock. According to The L Magazine, legendary Park Slope dive bar, Jackie's 5th Amendment, will be closing its doors sometime in mid-September. You may recall that last November one of the bartenders there started a petition to secede from Park Slope. As she said then:

Due to the changing nature of the neighborhood and the fact that we are beginning to take offense when potential customers come into the bar, look around them with disdain, and leave, immediately, we the people of Jackie's 5th Amendment at 404 5th Avenue request the permission of the United States Government to peacefully secede from Park Slope and become our own neighborhood, to be tentatively known as "Brooklyn".

But, apparently, it's not the Jackie's regulars' disdain for neighborhood newcomers that has them calling it quits. According to the same grouchy bartender, the owner is just ready to retire. The pharmacy next door bought the space -- presumably so they can expand -- so at least it's not turning into another burger joint or frozen yogurt place. 

RIP, Jackie's. You were depressing as fuck, but those you served, you served well. Share your eulogies in the comments.

 

Read 7 remaining paragraphs | Comments

After secure email provider Lavabit—famously used by NSA leaker Edward Snowden—shut its services down in an attempt to avoid what its CEO Ladar Levison called "crimes against the American people," Silent Circle said it would terminate its own email service, Silent Mail.

Unlike Lavabit, which suggested it had received a court order to turn over information about its users, Silent Circle hadn't received a warrant or other notice from the government. Instead, in a statement to TechCrunch, Silent Circle CEO Michael Janke said he anticipated the government would come after them given the nature of the clientele who use Silent Mail. Silent Circle offers other, more inherently secure services, but it saw email as the weak link that would give the government leverage in handing information over.

Here's the statement Janke gave TechCrunch:

There are some very high profile people on Silent Circle—and I mean very targeted people—as well as heads of state, human rights groups, reporters, special operations units from many countries. We wanted to be proactive because we knew [the US government] would come after us due to the sheer amount of people who use us- let alone the “highly targeted high profile people." They are completely secure and clean on Silent Phone, Silent Text and Silent Eyes, but email is broken because govt can force us to turn over what we have. So to protect everyone and to drive them to use the other three peer-to-peer products—we made the decision to do this before men [in] suits show up. Now—they are completely shut down—nothing they can get from us or try and force from us—we literally have nothing anywhere.

The Guardian, one of the publications to first reveal Snowden's claims about widespread government surveillance, points out that other secure email services may soon come under similar pressure.

In related news, the Obama administration is meeting with representatives from technology companies to allay their concerns about government surveillance programs, Politico reports. 

The NSA's Maryland headquarters/Wikimedia

This week, two encrypted email providers shut down their services, and that’s very bad news if you’d rather the government didn’t read your private communications.

The first company, Lavabit, closed after founder Ladar Levison announced that after a decade of running his secure email service (which is supposedly the one Edward Snowden used to deliver his NSA leaks to the Guardian), he was being forced to shut it down or “become complicit in crimes against the American people.”

Ladar’s official statement is vague, but you can hear him clench his teeth as he writes, “I wish that I could legally share with you the events that led to my decision. I cannot.” It certainly sounds like he was asked to hand over data or open his servers in a secret court; since he refused he had to walk away from his business. Chillingly, Ladar finished his statement with a stern warning about American-based communications services: “I would _strongly_ recommend against anyone trusting their private data to a company with physical ties to the United States.” So basically, he’s saying you’re fucked if you store confidential information on Facebook, Gmail, Skype, Twitter, or any cloud service owned by Microsoft or Apple.

Just hours after the announcement from Lavabit went up, Silent Circle—an encrypted communications company that had just become profitable in May and was forecasting 2 to 3 million subscribers by the end of 2013—shut down its own email service. While they say the US government hadn’t made any move to compromise Silent Circle’s secure email service, Jon Callas, one of Silent Circle’s founders, wrote that the company can “see the writing the wall” and concluded it was “best for us to shut down Silent Mail now.” (The company plans to continue to provide encrypted phone and text services.)

This message is in sharp contrast to the more optimistic tone Jon took in an interview with VICE last month. “In Silent Circle’s view, every person in this world, regardless of their station in life or religion, should expect a level of basic human privacy,” he said back then. “And many of the people on the internet have no understanding on what level they are giving that up.”

With the shutdown of these two services, it’s clear that the US government is worried about private encryption technology—in other words, the good news is that these companies’ security techniques are working, the bad news is that the government won’t allow them to exist. Clearly, the right to buy and sell on the free market and the right to privacy only apply to people who don’t piss off US intelligence agencies. Entrepreneurs are being forced to chose between immoral cooperation with the surveillance tactics their products are meant to combat and losing their businesses entirely—which is all the more absurd since they don’t seem to have violated any law and haven’t been charged with any crime.

As Edward Snowden told the Guardian, “Ladar Levison and his team suspended the operations of their ten-year-old business rather than violate the Constitutional rights of their roughly 400,000 users… America cannot succeed as a country where individuals like Mr. Levison have to relocate their businesses abroad to be successful. Employees and leaders at Google, Facebook, Microsoft, Yahoo, Apple, and the rest of our internet titans must ask themselves why they aren't fighting for our interests the same way small businesses are.”

The situation resembles what happened in the aftermath of the raid on popular file-sharing site Megaupload last year. Back then, two similar services—Uploaded.to and Filesonic—shut down on their own, while other sites were quick to distance themselves from evil piracy in an attempt to prevent their own businesses from being crushed by the government. Evidently, taking out one tech company in a vicious and authoritative fashion is an effective way to shut down their competitors, too.

Like much of what the intelligence community does, the crackdown on encrypted emails was largely secret—we still don’t know what exactly Lavabit did that the powers that be had an issue with, or who made the decision to target that company. It’s the polar opposite of transparency in government, and it echoes something Julian Assange told VICE’s Royce Akers in an interview we aired last week: “The desire to be seen as a vicious authority that can terrorize people is higher than the desire to be seen as an authority that commands respect, as a result of its integrity."

The government’s presumed rationale for shutting down Lavabit is that terrorists and other unnamed bad guys could use encryption for evil. Yet the idea that because a few people are committing crimes using a product it means that no one can use it is deeply paranoid and strange, especially in a country that is supposed to value free speech and the free market.

Yesterday, it came out that the NSA is monitoring the content, not just the metadata (which is valuable enough on its own), of text messages and emails of Americans who are talking with, or even about, foreigners. With every new story revealing that the government monitors more and more of our supposedly private information, the idea that the authorities will essentially ban encryption is extremely disturbing. This is, quite clearly, not a positive direction for an allegedly free society to be taking.

Follow Patrick on Twitter: @patrickmcguire

Wanna get spied on? Bait the NSA with this phrase generator.

This post originally appeared at VICE.

The first time audiences saw Hedy Lamarr, she was running naked through a field. The second time they saw her, she was in the throes of a very animated orgasm. The next time she appeared on screen—more than five years later—she’d have a new name, a new language, and a new image, but the effect was the same: just the sight of her was enough to stop Hollywood, and audiences across America, in their tracks.

But a new name wasn’t enough to distance Hedy Lamarr from her past as the “Ecstasy Girl,” the star of the so-called “art film” that scandalized all of Europe, and received special denunciation by the Pope. When one exhibitor tried to import it to the states, it was declared “dangerously indecent” and uniformly banned. The real scandal wasn’t the nudity, but the pleasure: a young girl abandons her husband, runs naked, finds a new hot guy, and then has a really intense orgasm for all to see. Who knew what young women the world over would do with that knowledge?

With the help of her new studio, Lamarr was able to denounce her part in Ecstasy, but the stigma of the desiring female would stay with her. Over her Hollywood career, she would be cast as one “high class whore” after another—women whose beauty, and sexuality, make them natural victims of the world around them.
Read the rest at The Hairpin.

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The Pirate Bay, arguably the most resilient file sharing website, was first founded on August 9, 2003, although it didn’t launch until September 15, 2003. Nevertheless, the group considers the former date to be its start, so today The Pirate Bay is 10 years old.

When it first arrived on the scene (pun not intended), The Pirate Bay was powered by just four Linux servers. Since then, it has fought back against multiple raids, legal problems, service issues, DDoS attacks, ISP blocks, domain seizures, and has thus moved its servers all over the world.

In January 2008, Swedish prosecutors filed charges against the four founders for facilitating illegal downloading of copyrighted material. In February 2009, they were put on trial and in April 2009, Peter Sunde, Fredrik Neij, Gottfrid Svartholm, and Carl Lundströmwere were found guilty by the court, which sentenced them to a year in prison with a fine of 30 million SEK (approximately $3.5 million that year).

All four appealed the verdict, and in November 2010 the court shortened the prison sentences, but increased damages. In February 2012, the Supreme Court of Sweden refused to hear an appeal in the case.

As a result of the court case, ISPs have been ordered by governments around the world to block access to The Pirate Bay. Unsurprisingly, proxies have been to provide access to the site regardless.

Here’s the group’s triumphant blog post, typos and all:

Oh look, we made it.

A decade of agression, repression and lulz.

We really didn’t think we’d make it this far. Not because of cops, mafiaa or corrupt politicians. But because we thought that we’d eventually be to old for this shit. But hey, running this ship makes us feel young.

And we’re gonna stay young til we die.

Thank you for everything. We would not be anything without you.

Tomorrow, The Pirate Bay plans to throw a party in Stockholm to celebrate its decade-long existence.

See also – You can now download the whole of The Pirate Bay in one 90MB file and Canadian government accidentally sponsors The Pirate Bay, blames Yahoo for the mistake

Top Image Credit: RAWKU5

A moment of outstanding absurdity from the Manning trial: prosecutors inquiring in tones of menace whether a witness is familiar with "wget" -- a standard Unix command for fetching a file from the Web ("wget" = "Web get") that many of us use routinely.

The prosecutors are in their early 30s — nominally “digital natives” — and should know better. “Do you know what Wget is?” they interrogate a witness, as if it is malicious spyware and not an everyday command line program. The government is capitalizing on asymmetric tech literacy and the failure of language when old laws are applied to the internet. Bradley Manning on Trial

Gary Bolton has been found guilty of selling fake bomb detectors to countries including Iraq. In May James McCormick was sentenced for 10 years for committing a similar fraud (previously, previously, previously). The original fraud is now 20 years old.