‘Touchable Memories’ by pirate3D, turns photographs into 3D-printed objects for people without vision. This hits home, as I have a close family member that has been slowly losing his eye sight over the past year.
A group of scientists have been trying to study penguins without disturbing them, and they may have found the cutest way possible of doing it: rovers disguised as baby penguins. These penguin-bots are able to get close to the penguins without raising the alarm or stressing out the penguins, which will allow scientists to collect data about them in their most natural state.
Louisville-based Meteorologist Jude "Bones" Redfield cleverly incorporated the green screen into his costume Friday morning, delivering the weather forecast as a skeleton.
And in other news, it's going to rain in Louisville tonight.
The Internet, like most world-changing inventions, came to life in a series of fits and starts. The thing that allows you to read these words, on this screen, right at this moment, is the result of multiple innovations and experiments on the part of multiple collaborations of multiple nerds. But one of the first collaborations—the one that is generally regarded as the collaboration that created the Internet as we know it—took place 45 years ago, on October 29, 1969.
At 9:00 in the evening, Kline began typing the communication that would allow, for the first time, computers to talk to each other. He got as far as the L and the O ... and then, as he was trying to enter the G, the system crashed. Which meant that a kind of accidental epicness had been achieved by way of a finicky computer: The first word typed on the Internet was "lo."
Kline waited for the system to reboot—a process that took, back then, an hour—and then, at 10:30, he began again. With L. And then with the O and the G and the I and the N. This second transmission attempt was successful. Kline had, from UCLA, logged in to the host computer at Stanford. The ARPANET—the infrastructural foundation of the Internet—was born. With, if not a bang or a whimper, a crash and a reboot. And with, appropriately, an LOL.
Pajama Jeans may have paved the way for articles of clothing that blur the line between fashion and comfort, but now there's Suitsy, the "Business-Suit Onesie."
The Suitsy is a jacket connected to a shirt connected to pants — like the lovechild of a business suit and a onesie! False shirt-cuff material extends from the end of the jacket sleeves to give the impression of a complete dress shirt worn underneath. A zipper is hidden behind the shirt-button placket (with false buttons).
The project is just a little over halfway to their goal with 16 days left, and the Suitsy is selling at a discounted price of $302.40. Act fast, or you'll be stuck wearing fancy, tailored suits the rest of your life, and won't look anywhere near as relaxed as this guy!
On Saturday, Iran hanged a woman convicted of murdering a former intelligence officer she claimed had attempted to rape her—a defense the court and the man's family ultimately rejected.
IRNA, Iran's official news agency,says 27-year-old Reyhaneh Jabbari was hanged at dawn Saturday for the 2007 murder. The court ruling dismissed Jabbari's claim of attempted rape, saying all evidence proved she had planned to kill Morteza Abdolali Sarbandi, a former intelligence agent, after having purchased a knife two days earlier. However, the United Nations called on Iran for a retrial, saying the incident never received a full investigation and that she was denied a fair trial.
A robust campaign led by human-rights groups and prominent Iranians, which was amplified through social media, appeared to be gaining traction and it seemed for a short time that the sentence would be commuted. However, the execution was carried out after Sarbandi's family refused to pardon Jabbari or accept blood money—a possible provision under Sharia law.
"The shocking news that Reyhaneh Jabbari has been executed is deeply disappointing in the extreme," said Hassiba Hadj Sahraoui, Amnesty International’s Deputy Director for the Middle East and North Africa Program, in a statement. "This is another bloody stain on Iran’s human rights record."
"Once again Iran has insisted on applying the death penalty despite serious concerns over the fairness of the trial," said Sahraoui.
In the U.S., the State Department took to Twitter to condemn the execution.
We condemn execution of Reyhaneh Jabbari, Iranian woman convicted of killing man she said she stabbed in self-defense during sexual assault.
Tiambrya Jenkins was just 14 years old when she got into a fistfight that would change the course of her educational trajectory. Following an after-school scuffle between Jenkins and a white classmate, the two girls—both freshmen at Rome High School in Georgia—were transferred to an alternative school as punishment. Her white classmate was allowed to return to their original school after 90 days. But Jenkins spent the rest of the year at the transitional academy, a place she describes as more like prison than school. "It was really, really boring. You just sat there all day until the bell rang," she says. "They didn't teach us anything."
At the academy, minor missteps such as talking out of turn or violating the dress code were used as reasons to delay a student's return to high school, Jenkins says. Simple organizational mistakes like showing up late or forgetting class materials were seen as acts of defiance and could turn the clock back to zero on a student's 90 days at the transitional academy. After forgetting her notebook one day and suffering the consequences, Jenkins began stashing spares in an abandoned house across the street from the school, "just in case."
Two years later, Jenkins is back at her old high school, but she still feels hopelessly behind. Once a top math student, she'll be lucky to achieve a passing mark in advanced algebra this year. "I don't even know what we're learning," Jenkins says. "The teacher, she'll be teaching something, and I don't even know what it is. I just see a bunch of numbers on the board."
Share of Disciplined Female Students, by Race
National Journal
Jenkins is not alone in her experience. A recent report finds African-American girls were suspended at six times the rate of white girls, and more than any other group of girls (and several groups of boys). This is despite evidence that African-American students do not misbehave more frequently than their peers. The study, released in September by the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund and the National Women's Law Center, outlines the barriers to African-American girls staying in school and shows how poor educational outcomes can limit their opportunities, from lower graduation rates to setbacks in expected lifetime earnings.
Education levels have an extraordinary impact on future wages, with academic attainment standing in as a rough proxy for future wealth. A female African-American college graduate typically sees an increase of about $657,000 over the course of her lifetime as compared to a female African-American high school graduate, according to the report. Should she fail to graduate from high school, her financial outlook worsens considerably. In 2013, 43 percent of African American women without a high school diploma were living in poverty, compared to 29 percent with a high school diploma and just 9 percent with a bachelor's degree, U.S. Census data show. Helping African-American girls successfully complete high school, then, could stave off a lifetime of poverty for them and their families.
"There's this widespread misperception that girls—all girls—are successful in schools. Full stop," says Fatima Goss Graves, vice president for education and employment at the National Women's Law Center. "Much of this is fueled by not having data broken down by race and gender. Girls of color end up being invisible too often in these conversations." A close look at the data reveals that in 2010, one-third (34 percent) of African-American girls didn't graduate from high school on time. Only 18 percent of white female students and 22 percent of all female students could say the same. And African-American girls are more than twice as likely as whites to be held back a grade.
The reasons for such setbacks have less to do with student behavior, the report's authors argue, than with disproportionate and overly punitive disciplinary practices that remove African-Americans from classes for minor and subjective infractions (examples include violations of dress code or even wearing natural hairstyles). "Traditional" middle-class notions of femininity, which value passivity in girls, can clash with stereotypical images of African-American females as loud, assertive, and provocative, and generate differing punishments for similar conduct, the authors note. Subjective offenses like "disobedience" or "disruptive behavior" may signify little more than a student's failure to conform to dominant gender norms or fit a teacher's view of what constitutes appropriate "feminine" behavior.
Rosalind Wiseman, a best-selling author and educator, certainly sees the discipline gap in those terms. "Adults of every background need to challenge the ways in which we exercise our authority over students—all students—but especially minority students who have a legacy of domination," she says. To illustrate the point, Wiseman recalled a time she saw a white male vice principal reprimanding a young black teenager for acting out in the classroom. When the boy questioned him, the administrator construed the inquiry as disrespectful and and the informal talking-to quickly morphed into a formal detention, enraging the young man. "What you're really saying in cases like this," Wiseman says, "is, 'Get back in your place, which is below me.' "
In her work training educators in social and racial awareness, Wiseman—best known as the author of the book that inspired the movie Mean Girls—encourages teachers to start at the ground floor. Teachers of all races need to understand and be aware of their own racial assumptions and biases, she explains, then have the maturity to face it and be able to manage their behavior as a result. It also helps to view punishments such as detention and suspension as a last resort.
Some principals, like Pete Cahall at Wilson Senior High School in Washington, D.C, are already doing that. Three years ago, Wilson had 332 suspensions; two years ago the number dropped to 224; and last year, there were just 209 suspensions. "I'm not pleased with 209 suspensions," Cahall says, noting that while African-Americans make up half the student body, they account for 80 percent of those suspended. "I'd like to cut that by another 20 percent this year because I don't think suspension really solves the problem." Usually, he adds, kids act out because they're frustrated or embarrassed that they can't do the work. "If you take them out of school for 10 days, they're just further behind."
What's worse, Cahall found quite often it was adults who were causing, or at least escalating, the problems. "A kid would do something minor," Cahall says, "and teacher would get in their face and and yell." In recent years, he's started doing teacher trainings in how to better manage student behavior. He also handpicks his staff and instructs teachers to think about every kid in context. "You don't know what's going on in the life of a child," Cahall says. "You don't know if their parents are beating them at home or what, so you've got to be compassionate and drill down to get to the root of the problem."
For Jenkins, however, such compassionate resolutions look increasingly out of reach.
"My whole life has been affected by a fight that I was in when I was 14," she says. "It's not something that you can take back and not something that was premeditated, and I still have to deal with the consequences every day."
Aaron surprised me with a bottle of glow-in-the-dark nail polish! Perfect for Halloween! When I saw that it goes on clear I was skeptical that it would work, but it does! I put on two coats and sure enough the tips of my fingers lit up in the dark.
For the article about famous women's college experiences.
If your Sundays find you ogling the travel section of the newspaper like ours do, we’ve got some great inspiration to kick off your weekend. Twin sisters Elizabeth and Kathryn Fortunato have often used their far-and-wide travels as inspiration for their beautiful line of accessories, Lizzie Fortunato. This week, they are launching their first line of lifestyle and home goods called Fortune Finds, a collection of objects curated from their travels and favorite makers. With pieces from places as far ranging as Mexico and Japan, this lovely assortment is sure to satiate the travel bug in you. Check out more photos from the line after the jump! Have a lovely weekend! —Max
Happy 20th anniversary to one of our favorite magazines, Martha Stewart Weddings! The all-things-Martha blog Martha Moments shares some of its best moments.
Laboratory assistants have to do all sorts of terrible, embarrassing things, but surely this is among the silliest: Enter a bar in Grenoble, France. Identify people who look moderately drunk. Walk up to them, tap them on the shoulder, and say something along the lines of, "Uh, hey, this is awkward, but, would you be interested in answering some questions about philosophy?"
Such was the fate of some poor, unnamed graduate student who did "most of the recruitment" for a recent study about the relationship between alcohol consumption and ethical decision-making. In two separate experiments, researchers presented bar-goers with a questionnaire about philosophy and their state of mind; a total of 102 men and women took part. ("One participant was excluded from the study because he did not follow the instructions properly," the researchers note—a remarkably low number, considering that all their subjects were drunk.) After the participants filled out the survey, they took a Blood Alcohol Content test so that researchers could measure how intoxicated they were.
The researchers asked participants to give their opinion on two of philosophers' favorite quandaries: the so-called trolley problem and its cousin, the footbridge problem. In the first, people must choose whether they would flip a switch to divert a runaway trolley, killing one person but sparing five others; the second asks about pushing someone off a bridge for the same purpose. "A drawing accompanied the text of each vignette in order to facilitate understanding of the story," perhaps in case the subjects were too drunk to read.
"The idea was to look more at the more moral and ethical implications of how alcohol might affect decision-making," said Aaron Duke, one of the researchers.* His team found a correlation between each subject's level of intoxication and his or her willingness to flip the switch or push the person—the drunker the subject, the more willing he or she was to kill one hypothetical person for the sake of the hypothetical many. This choice follows the logic of utilitarianism: More good is done by saving five people than harm is done by killing one.
This "really undermines the notion that utilitarian preferences are merely the result of more deliberation," said Duke, who also co-authored a paper on the study, charmingly titled, "The drunk utilitarian: Blood alcohol concentration predicts utilitarian responses in moral dilemmas."
There's a fabulous irony in the idea that drunk people are emotionally steeled rationalists who are willing to do whatever it takes to save lives. But Duke and his research partner, Laurent Bègue, aren't necessarily arguing that drunk people are ace philosophers and logicians; it's more that their findings challenge common assumptions about how people make decisions.
"There's this argument that utilitarian ethics are correct; they're associated with people who are less emotional. Our finding was that this may not necessarily be the case," Duke said.
One explanation he offered is that drunk people might be less sensitive to what happens to the guy who's on the wrong side of the hypothetical tracks or bridge—"it seems like a reasonable explanation that the effects of alcohol would decrease emotional sensitivity toward someone else's pain." In general, he said, the study reinforces the complexity of figuring out why people make the choices they do. "Ethical decision-making is influenced by things like substances—it shifts the ethical frame by which we view the world."
Duke also recognized that the implications of the study are limited, especially because the sample size is so small. Plus, the questions themselves have flaws.
"To be honest, with the trolley problem in general, there is going to be a range of seriousness with which people view it, because it's kind of a ridiculous premise," said Duke. "I don't know that inebriated people would take it any less seriously. But alcohol can make it almost more simplistic—they may be less likely to question some of the assumptions upon which the task is based."
In other words, drunk people are more willing to "just go with it" when a random graduate student asks them to participate in a thought experiment about killing people. Utilitarian or no, the inebriated may be the philosophy researcher's dream.
* This post originally stated that the researcher's name is Aaron Blake. We regret the error.
Famed fashion photographer Bruce Weber has turned his lens on the dogs he’s loved and been inspired by throughout his life with a series of beautifully designed and photographed travel journals and postcards for Shinola.
Check out Shinola’s complete pet collection right here.
May the light of your soul bless the work you do with the secret love and warmth of your heart. May you see in what you do the beauty of your own soul. May the sacredness of your work bring healing, light and renewal to those who work with you and to those who see and receive your work. May your work never weary you. May it release within you wellsprings of refreshment, inspiration and excitement. May you be present in what you do. May you never become lost in the bland absences. May the day never burden. May dawn find you awake and alert, approaching your new day with dreams, possibilities and promises. May evening find you gracious and fulfilled. May you go into the night blessed, sheltered and protected. May your soul calm, console and renew you.
~John O'Donohue
This poem was sent to me by a friend, a beautiful woman named Oceanna, whom I have yet to meet but who seems to know me.
The Economic Policy Institute has just released a report by Richard Rothstein that gives some sense of how the world of Michael Brown came to be. It turns out that that world was born from the exact same forces that forged cities and suburbs across the country—racist housing policy at the local, state, and national levels. Rothstein's report eschews talk of mindless white flight, and black-hearted individual racists, and puts the onus exactly where it belongs:
That governmental actions, not mere private prejudice, was responsible for segregating greater St. Louis was once conventional informed opinion. In 1974, a three-judge panel of the federal Eighth Circuit Court of Appeals concluded that “segregated housing in the St. Louis metropolitan area was … in large measure the result of deliberate racial discrimination in the housing market by the real estate industry and by agencies of the federal, state, and local governments.”
Similar observations accurately describe every other large metropolitan area; in St. Louis, the Department of Justice stipulated to this truth but took no action in response. In 1980, a federal court order included an instruction for the state, county, and city governments to devise plans to integrate schools by integrating housing. Public officials ignored this aspect of the order, devising only a voluntary busing plan to integrate schools, but no programs to combat housing segregation.
A lot of what's here—redlining, housing covenants, blockbusting, etc.—will be well-known to those with a good handle on 20th-century American history. I focused on this particular era in my case for reparations. But it bears constant repeating: The geography of America would be unrecognizable today without the racist social engineering of the mid-20th century. The policy included—but was not limited to—mortgage loans backed by the Federal Housing Authority and the Veteran's Administration:
At its peak in 1943 when civilian construction was limited, the FHA financed 80 percent of all private home construction nationwide. During the postwar period, it dropped to one-third. But even when subdivisions were not built with advance FHA commitments, individual homebuyers needed access to FHA or VA insured mortgages, so similar standards for new construction pertained. Subdivisions throughout St. Louis County were developed in this way, with FHA advance commitments for the builders and a resulting whites-only sale policy.
The FHA’s suburban whites-only policy continued through the postwar housing boom that lasted through the mid-1960s. In 1947, the FHA sanitized its manual, removing literal race references but still demanding “compatibility among neighborhood occupants” for mortgage guarantees. “Neighborhoods constituted of families that are congenial,” the FHA manual explained, “… generally exhibit strong appeal and stability.” This very slightly sanitized language suggested no change in policy, and the FHA continued to finance builders with open policies of racial exclusion for another 15 years.
In 1959, the United States Commission on Civil Rights concluded that only two percent of all FHA-backed loans had gone to blacks. "Most of this housing," concluded the report, "has been in all-Negro developments in the South."
As it relates to black America, segregation must always be understood, as a system of plunder. Once the big game has been fenced off, then comes the hunt:
According to a study by the St. Louis nonprofit Better Together, Ferguson receives nearly one-quarter of its revenue from court fees; for some surrounding towns it approaches 50 percent. Municipal reliance on revenue generated from traffic stops adds pressure to make more of them. One town, Sycamore Hills, has stationed a radar-gun-wielding police officer on its 250-foot northbound stretch of Interstate.
With primarily white police forces that rely disproportionately on traffic citation revenue, blacks are pulled over, cited and arrested in numbers far exceeding their population share, according to a recent report from Missouri’s attorney general. In Ferguson last year, 86 percent of stops, 92 percent of searches and 93 percent of arrests were of black people—despite the fact that police officers were far less likely to find contraband on black drivers (22 percent versus 34 percent of whites). This worsens inequality, as struggling blacks do more to fund local government than relatively affluent whites.
And this is but one aspect. I strongly suspect that if I talked to some housing attorneys in the region they could tell me a story.
Reynolds American, the company that makes Camel cigarettes, announced yesterday that its employees are no longer allowed to smoke in its offices—down to its conference rooms, hallways, and elevators. “We’re just better aligning our tobacco-use policies with the realities of what you’re seeing in society today,” company spokesperson David Howard told the Associated Press. It’s the type of hazy explanation that seems like it was read from cue cards at gunpoint.
Even in an industry criticized for its lack of integrity, the hypocrisy stands out: It’d be like if The Atlantic banned its employees from reading (if reading caused cancer, that is). According to the AP, the smoking rate at Reynolds’ offices is roughly 18 percent (coincidentally, that’s the literacy rate among Atlantic editors), which, with 5,200 employees, means that this policy will nudge about 1,000 people away from smoking at work—which, in the end, isn’t a bad thing.
But that doesn't change the announcement's subtext. “In every state R.J. Reynolds lawyers work diligently to oppose public-health laws which would discourage smoking,” Dr. Robert K. Jackler, a professor at the Stanford School of Medicine, told me. “Now these same lawyers recognize the potential liabilities from worker lawsuits due to illness from secondhand smoke.” Jackler pointed out that before yesterday, Reynolds was one of the few American companies that hadn’t done anything about protecting its employees from secondhand smoke.
“There does seem to be some high hypocrisy here, but by connecting some dots, I see it as being found not with ‘management’ (which just wants to hold onto and recruit talented people), but with the employees,” James F. Pankow, a professor of chemistry and engineering at Portland State University, wrote to me in an email. Pankow suggests there’s a special kind of self-deception required to prefer not to be around a product you sell and promote.
With a plot featuring accidental dismemberment, death by leeches, serial arsonists, and rampant child abuse, A Series of Unfortunate Events seemed to descend from the Grimm's Fairy Tales tradition of juvenile fiction. The tragicomic 13-book series, which debuted 15 years ago, chronicled the plight of the three Baudelaire orphans, whose lives become a hamster wheel of misery after their parents die in a mysterious fire. The books sold more than 60 million copies internationally, spawning a video game, fan sites, companion books, and a 2004 film adaptation starring Jim Carrey.
A year after the series began, I received a copy of the first, alliteratively titled novel The Bad Beginning as a Christmas gift. I fell in love—partly because of the absurdist storyline and the likable but unlucky young trio: Violet the inventor, Klaus the reader, and Sunny the baby with sharp teeth.
And yet it was the books’ style, not content, I found most compelling of all. Each installment in the series would begin with some iteration of tortured narrator Lemony Snicket (who I didn’t know was actually author Daniel Handler) urging the reader to put the book down and find some happier way to spend his or her time. Snicket would refer to himself extensively, implying that he existed in the same universe as the Baudelaire children. He would repeatedly interrupt the narrative to rant, tell a story, or relay advice, creating a splintered reading experience. Not only would Snicket use ponderous terms like in loco parentis, but he’d also often spend several sentences defining them. And the endings were, as promised, irredeemably depressing.
I remained a devoted follower until the final book, The End,was released in 2006, but it wasn’t until several years later that I realized how the series transcended its popular children’s book context: Unfortunate Events was my first introduction to postmodern literature.
The loosely defined postmodern literature “movement” (for lack of a better word) started after World War II and adopted many elements from its modernist forbears: a heightened focus on formal experimentation, non-linear narratives, irony, stream-of-consciousness, and a sense of alienation and fractured identity. Postmodernism takes these elements a step further, but incorporates more humor, references to pop culture, and even greater self-consciousness about writing. Some writers of importance: John Barth, Thomas Pynchon, Jorge Luis Borges, William Gaddis, Haruki Murakami, Zadie Smith, and David Foster Wallace.
In college, I encountered postmodern novels including Italo Calvino’s If on a winter’s night a traveler…, Don Delillo’s White Noise, and Thomas Pynchon’s The Crying of Lot 49. My professors presented them as works that were radical, at least in their day. But to me the tone and techniques they deployed felt familiar and somehow comforting.
For an example of postmodern hallmarks—such as metafiction, the unreliable narrator, irony, black humor, self-reference, maximalism, and paranoia—look no further than this excerpt from the seventh Unfortunate Events book, The Ersatz Elevator.
The word 'bubble' is in the dictionary, as is the word 'peacock,' the word 'vacation,' and the words 'the,' 'author's,' 'execution,' 'has,' 'been,' 'cancelled,' which make up a sentence that is always pleasant to hear. So, if you were to read the dictionary, rather than this book, you could skip the parts about 'nervous' and 'anxious' and read about things that wouldn't keep you up all night, weeping and tearing your hair out. But this book is not a dictionary, and if you were to skip the parts about 'nervous' and 'anxious' you would be skipping the most pleasant parts of the entire story. Nowhere in this book will you find the words 'bubble,' 'peacock,' 'vacation,' or, unfortunately for me, anything about an execution being cancelled.
The series also relies heavily on intertextuality, or the way the meaning of a text is shaped by other texts. A brief catalog of texts referenced in the books includes T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land, Dante Alighieri’s Divine Comedy, J.D. Salinger’s “For Esme, With Love and Squalor,” and Herman Melville’s Moby Dick.
Handler also constructed an elaborate, if purposely obscure, universe around the series, involving a secret organization known by the initials V.F.D. and a cast of shadowy members somehow involved in the death of the Baudelaire parents. With playful pedantry, Handler teased this invented world through allusions in the novels and fictional apocrypha such as the so-called Snicket file. The companion work Lemony Snicket: The Unauthorized Autobiography (it was authorized and not an autobiography) fleshed out the backstory with a bizarre collection of photographs, letters, transcripts, and other mysterious documents.
Postmodernism’s influence can be found widely throughout children’s literature, particularly in picture books such asThe Monster At the End of This Book or the 1991 Caldecott Medal-winning Black and White. Unfortunate Events merely exaggerated and broadened that trend to lengthier chapter books.
Why might postmodern literary techniques resonate with young readers? One explanation: By complicating the relationship between author and reader, narrator and character, these methods muddy the boundary between text and reality. Young readers might feel the distinction between fact and fiction slipping away, lost in the series’ story-within-a-story-within-a-story. Early in the series’ run, I found myself believing the Baudelaire children or V.F.D. might actually be real (a little more seriously than I believed I’d receive an admission letter from Hogwarts on my 11th birthday). Such was the intoxicating effect of this imaginary world and story that seemed to bleed from beyond the pages.
Of all the series’ postmodern gimmicks, the most endearing was perhaps how Unfortunate Events, in true metafictional fashion, championed the act of reading books as an inalienable good. For all the morally black and gray villains the Baudelaires and readers are forced to endure, the books regularly equated literacy with virtue (“Well-read people are less likely to be evil,” Snicket notes). Though the series’ earliest readers have now mostly grown up, the books will continue to offer a wellspring of sound advice: “When trouble strikes, head to the library. You will either be able to solve the problem, or simply have something to read as the world crashes down around you.”
24-year old Riley Swearingen thought nothing about his drunken joke on a police officer.
According to the criminal complaint, Mankato Department of Public Safety Police Sergeant Adam Gray was talking with a driver of a "drunk bus" in the city's entertainment district when he "felt two fingertips that were obvious to him as wet with saliva being pushed into his right and left ear canals, which caused pressure and discomfort in his ear canals."
The officer turned and saw a man later identified as Swearingen tell his friends, "I just gave the cop a wet Willie."
"Sergeant Gray immediately proceeded after the male who assaulted him," the complaint continues.
Once he was apprehended, Swearingen told Gray he was just joking around and was sorry, but Gray arrested him anyway.
Philadelphia based PYT burger is famous for their outrageous burgers and this time they created as an homage to Homer Simpson. The burger features "a warm glazed donut filled with delicious bacon cheeseburger and topped with bacon sprinkles." My heart hurts by my stomach is growling.
Somewhere in the infrastructure of Apple’s mobile ecosystem, something has broken.
Last year, iPhone and iPad users upgraded in droves to the company’s new operating system, iOS 7. Just a week after its release, more than half had moved to the new system. A month after, more than 75 percent had made the jump.
This year, the release of Apple’s newest mobile operating system, iOS 8, isn’t quite going like that. That system came out more than a month ago, but, according to the analytics firm Mixpanel, yesterday was the first day more than half of users were registered as using it. It overtook iOS 7 only last week. Before that, it had lingered in the 45-percent area for weeks.
Thanks to this exclusive chart from Mixpanel, we can now see what those two upgrade cycles look like next to each other.
Comparing iOS 7 and iOS 8 Adoption Rates
Mixpanel
There’s been a big, sticky gap between iOS 7 and iOS 8 upgrade rates.
This is more than a hiccup for Apple. The company promises that its hardware and software “just work,” but that tight integration requires consumers to upgrade every year. Perhaps this indicates more and more people sticking with older hardware rather than buying the newest phones—and avoiding the software upgrade due to worries it won't work on their older device. The chart also includes phones so old they can’t upgrade at all. The premier Apple blogger John Gruber called the lagging upgrades “very worrisome,” adding that they were “a canary-in-the-coal-mine indicator that casual users no longer trust Apple with major iOS updates.”
Is that true? It’s not as though iPhone users have always been thrilled to install a new Apple concoction. In the fall of 2012, many balked at the new version of iOS—the sixth—after it removed Google Maps and replaced it with a mistake-ridden Apple-made clone. But even that year, iOS 6 upgrade rates had still overtaken the 60-percent mark a month after release—a milestone iOS 8 has yet to reach. Despite all the Maps hoopla, consumers still installed it.
So we know something of what a software-associated rejection of a new iOS looks like. It looks better than this year’s pattern.
Gruber eventually came around to another view, though—one that I’m inclined to agree with. It’s not the software itself, he says, but the storage space that it requires. Upgrading an iPhone “over the air” (that is, not connecting it to iTunes) requires some five gigabytes of space on the phone. Who has five gigabytes of space on their phone?
Note this is only “over the air,” though. If you connect your phone to iTunes, it will upgrade it remotely, without requiring much extra space on the device. But many users long ago stopped thinking of their phone as tethered to a computer. Unless Apple reduces the size of that over-the-air upgrade, I wonder if an overwhelming upgrade to iOS 8 will ever happen.
So taste isn’t holding the new iOS back—only terabytes. And while it’s not the “canary-in-the-coal-mine” situation proclaimed at first by Gruber, with consumers distrusting Apple en masse, I do think the lagging iPhone upgrades this time around reflect an infrastructural crisis for Apple. Most iPhones still ship with a default 16 gigs. That’s just not very much. The new iPhone 5Cs ship with only eight default gigabytes.
If most users have switched to upgrading their phone over the air—and most, this chart hints, have—and if Apple continues to make phones with so little storage by default, then it will see its previously pristine upgrade rates plunge, and the nature of its products change.
One final note: These kinds of rates do vary wildly from ecosystem to ecosystem. It’s apples-to-oranges, or at least free-mobile-to-paid-desktop, but Windows 8 hasn’t even reached 14 percent of the market yet. It was released in 2012. And Windows XP, a 13-year-old piece of software, is still installed on almost 24 percent of PCs.
Yesterday, I shared the thoughts of a recent college grad who gave his reasons for abandoning affirmative consent. As he told it, women were more often frustrated by his deference than appreciative. He was most confounded by a woman who stopped his advances—he quickly listened—only to complain later that he wasn't more persistent. She was offering "token resistance," he thought, because while she wanted to hook up, she didn't want to be thought of as a slut. And while he didn't feel comfortable ignoring "token resistance," his perception of it helped sour him on affirmative consent. "One of my fondest sexual experiences started with making eye contact across a room, moved to a dance floor, and then to an empty bathroom," he offered by way of comparison. "Not a single word was ever spoken, because none had to be. We both knew and understood. I was a man and she was a woman, and we found ourselves drawn together in that beautiful way that men and women have been since a time immemorial, a time long before language was ever spoken."
That perspective is shared by an unknowable number of young men—enough, I think, that it represents an obstacle to spreading affirmative-consent culture. It also elicited some thought-provoking responses from other Atlantic readers.
One offered the young man insights gleaned from kink parties, arguing that what some regard as "natural" aspects of sexual culture are, upon reflection, not natural at all. Rather, they depend largely on the set of basic rules laid down:
I frequently attend kink parties whose rules prescribe affirmative consent for any physical contact. And the one thing I've never seen there is someone putting up token resistance and expecting it to be ignored. Everybody knows the rules, so somebody who says "hey, slow down" when they don't mean it—whether it's because of a reflex, or meant as flirtation (because yes, some people may do that), or any other reason—at least accepts that if they say no, they're responsible for having said it! This is not because everyone there is awesome or even well-intentioned; it's because saying "no" while meaning "yes" just won't work.
Your letter writer seems to fall into the trap of thinking that sexual norms are "natural," and that laws have to fit existing norms. But there's also a "traffic laws" element to sexual norms; declaring how people should interpret certain actions sets the meaning of those actions, even if they didn't have that meaning before.
"Token resistance" is a pretty dumb social norm for all kinds of reasons. You mention (as a possible response to the letter) that one might say some of the people who like it are rapists who appreciate the cover it gives them; while I think that's true, I also think there are plenty of women who expect to face social punishment if they don't follow this norm. My point is, those people are not going to necessarily go without sex if they live under affirmative-consent laws. They're going to say, "Hey, I guess if I say this, I'm not getting laid," and make their choice accordingly. (I think affirmative consent is a very good social norm but probably a terrible law. I hope I'm wrong about the second part.)
A female Stanford student posited that "token resistance" isn't a reason for men to abandon affirmative consent—it is a call to women to do their part to make it work:
This, to me, is exactly why women and men need California's new affirmative-consent law! It changes not just what we expect of men, but what we expect of women.
We are in the middle of a transition ... to a world in which sex is collaborative and wanted. But we haven't yet had the kind of cultural change that causes all individuals to rethink the new burdens that this standard places on them. For men, I think it lifts burdens. Judging by the stories you've shared, it hasn't lifted them yet. And this is where new expectations for women come in. I'm not suggesting that women no longer think sexual leadership is attractive, but that women assert their desires .... Playing a game where saying "no" or "wait" is a ploy to realign one's self-perception as a slut versus a prude merely reinforces the notion that women are two-dimensional Madonnas or Whores, or that women always want it. It's up to women to stop playing this game—to see asking as attractive, or if not, to ask for the more assertive behaviors they want, to see deference as respect, to reject the idea that the only option available to our gender is to wait passively for the act and when unwanted, say no.
I urge others, especially those sympathetic to your experiences, to see this change as a positive one simply because it relieves men's pressure to read minds. It relieves their grasp of all the power in a sexual encounter ... there's a big difference between assertiveness and assault, and it's not up to you alone to tread those waters.
The next correspondent is a somewhat unlikely supporter of California's law:
I am 27 and a recent law-school graduate.
I remember my first semester at law school in criminal law learning about an older study of college coeds at University of Texas. Around 75 percent had reported saying "no" to sex when they intended or wanted to have sex. In college, I rarely made the first move, and hearing this caused me to rethink my strategy. Assertiveness is clearly a desirable quality. Thereafter I began to be more bold but also conscious of body language and other signals. If a partner refuses initially, I pay close attention to whether she said, "I probably shouldn't," or unequivocally, "no." I sometimes test the "no," but will never cross the line to aggressive or pushy.
When I heard about California's new law, I thought back to our discussion of elements of rape and the previously mentioned study. My reaction was that this law is completely removed from the reality of modern dating and sets a potentially ridiculous standard for students to meet. However, I think ultimately it is positive.
Being assertive and recognizing body language are things that took me years to learn. This new standard will encourage partners to be more conscious of those small signals since consent may be nonverbal cues (like leaning in slightly when face to face versus cheating away [a stage term]).
It will encourage women to be more open and assertive in their sex lives. (It is okay and does not make you a slut to say "yes," and saying "no" when meaning "yes" is confusing.)
While the reality is that there will not always be explicit consent in adult relationships, college is different. The peer-pressured, alcohol-fueled hook-up culture (I went to Arizona State for undergrad, so not a total exaggeration) warrants greater emphasis on consent, even if that means missing potential hook-ups.
Remember, this is a standard to be implemented in disciplinary hearings, not a criminal statute, and holding college students and administrators to higher standards is understandable given their terrible track record. Students should remember that being assertive and confident does not preclude being respectful.
A male opponent of California's law writes:
If women want to be treated as equals—as they should be and as I do treat them—then it isn't too much to expect them to say "no" or "stop" if they don't like whatever a sexual partner is doing. If they say that one word, even once, it should be totally respected. If a man doesn't listen, that's rape, and he should be thrown in jail for years. But if those are the stakes, years behind bars probably getting raped, or in the current law getting expelled from college and branded a rapist, asking for a simple "no" or "stop" is not too much to ask.
The alternative is that some men will go to jail for misunderstandings or women who changed their minds after the fact. Of course men should ideally avoid even those situations, but how can I take women seriously as strong, independent equals if they infantilize themselves so much that they won't even take responsibility for saying no? If a man is threatening violence if she says no, even nonverbally, that's different. I'd vote for rape in those cases, but the standard should be, were any actions taken that would make a rational actor fear saying no? If not, then it shouldn't be rape even if there wasn't affirmative consent.
A woman explained why she opposes California's law, in part by sharing a harrowing experience:
My junior year of high school, a male "friend" stood between me and the door of an empty classroom. He asked for sex repeatedly, and I had repeatedly said no. When I attempted to leave, he stopped to "hug" me, tightly, and asked again. That time, I felt I could not get out of the room without fighting a fight I would likely not win, or giving up. I said yes—and although the experience left me with what my college psychologist would later call "symptoms of PTSD," under California's law, this would be considered consent ...
Her takeaway:
Requiring women say "yes" to demonstrate consent does nothing to help women for whom that "yes" was coerced or threatened. And women who gave "affirmative consent" under duress would have no legal recourse—their "yes" would be evidence against them.
She objected to "any law that uses a plaintiff's actions (or lack thereof) to determine the defendant's guilt" because it "necessarily places responsibility on the plaintiff to avoid being the victim of a crime—the jury tries the victim's responsibility, rather than the defendant's potential crime." What would she prefer?
The ideal policy would be sort of like a rational basis test for free will ... could the accuser rationally believe the defendant may legitimately harm them if consent is not given? In cases in which consent was not given and the accuser was harmed, the verdict should be obvious. In cases in which consent was given under psychologically questionable circumstances, this test would put pressure on the courts, or other evaluating bodies, to analyze the defendant's actions and the messages said actions could communicate. If these actions could reasonably communicate an intent to harm, then consent was not given freely.
Another woman looks back on college and explains why she didn't like giving affirmative consent:
Women don't want to be labeled sluts. Token resistance lets us dodge that question. I think what has bothered me about being asked for consent is I'm never really sure if I'm into it. So thinking about it makes me confused. I haven't been taught that it is okay to be into a guy, how to recognize if I'm attracted—all those things, I'm only thinking about now. So yeah, asking me if I want to can be difficult for me.
I replied, "If you're not really sure when asked for affirmative consent, do you think that means the standard is a good thing, and that those hookups ought to be stopped, or that it's a bad thing, because despite your uncertainty you want those experiences?"
She answered:
Basically, I think women need to separate sex from morality so that consent is positive and sexy for us, too. Some women can do it now, but those who can't are the ones fueling the idea of "token resistance." Hookups can be a very good thing, but they need to positively and spontaneously affirmed by both parties. Despite my uncertainty, I wanted those experiences, and the guy I was with took the time to verify that. It has been an exploration into how well I know my body, and it has been positive. The yes-means-yes law pushes everyone into that knowledge, because it is essentially the difference in the two ways of presenting the question "Do you want to receive further emails from the company?" when you buy something. Those emails mean more to the people who have to actually check yes, but they reach more people when they're automatically checked. They're just unwanted spam to most of them.
Does that make sense? I'm figuring out my ideas as I type.
A woman supportive of the law writes:
My partner and I don't just look for affirmative consent when interacting sexually, we actually still get verbal consent for a surprising amount of it. Four and a half years together, and we still don't have P-V sex without verbally checking in. The same is usually true for any kind of oral (if I'm leading into it slowly then sometimes I don't ask him, but I'm pretty sure he almost always asks). This isn't because we're scared of prosecution or anything, it's just what we do. It's normal for us. And no, it doesn't interrupt things. Talking about what you want to do to each other isn't what I'd call a turn-off!
To be fair, not everyone is the same as my partner and me, nor should they be. I've seen commentators who argue that the law is trying to dictate how we communicate, and I see why that would be a concern if it were true. I think it would be more true to say that the law is dictating that we communicate, in some way, which doesn't have to be verbal. That seems pretty defensible to me.
I'm receptive to the idea that we need cultural change as much as or more than we need a legal change. The moral principle is easy to articulate, right? Every sexually active person has a moral responsibility to not have sex with anyone who does not want to be having sex with them. Back when I was hooking up with different guys, rather than being in a relationship, I can't say that seemed like an excessively difficult principle. I'm okay with the principle that, in order to keep their college enrollment, students have to make a good faith effort not to have sex with people who don't actively want to be having sex with them.
A professor at a prestigious institution of higher learning in the Northeast writes:
To live or work in academia and openly express that young man’s perspective is to take a risk, especially if you’re a straight male. If you do, you’re practically begging to be made into a negative example. You just have to hope that women who understand the truth that guy is expressing will say it for you. When the sexual-safety-training session takes place—and this goes for male students and instructors alike—it’s best to say whatever the session’s leaders want to hear.
If you push back on their often one-sided and politically driven views of human sexual response, you can easily be branded a conservative, a sexist, a misogynist, or even a potential rapist who needs to be monitored. (Although I hate to confirm a Fox News talking point, “conservative” is indeed a damaging slur at far too many universities.) Those of us who hope to discuss this subject honestly are caught between the psychopaths who tweet misogynist and violent garbage and the Judith Butler wannabes who use all manner of bullying and demagoguery in an attempt to—this is not an overstatement—silence male voices in the academy.
In all of my sexual experiences, I have never been asked for permission nor have I had to ask someone for permission. It has been clear and obvious that we were both interested. I have been in experiences that were not consensual. I know what enthusiastic consent looks like because I have not given it before. I don't think that excludes men from knowing what it looks like—they have given enthusiastic consent before. And they have also not given it.
Anonymous seems perplexed … as if by discovering that some women don't like to be asked for permission every step of the way, that means the only alternative is … what? Not clearly defining consent? Not getting laid? Eschewing his feminist upbringing because one woman suggested that she would like to be ravaged? I have never been that confused during sex .... I have never been unsure about what comes next or when it needs to continue or stop. And I don't think that means I am lucky or extra insightful. It means that I am capable of thinking one level deeper than Anonymous appears to be about humans.
Can't I like confident men in the same way that men like confident women? I feel like this sort of this defines the non-problem that Anonymous is bringing up. Confident doesn't mean rapey. Not asking for permission doesn't mean rapey. It is possible to be all of those things—passionate, spontaneous, aggressive, raw–without raping someone, or assaulting someone. I wish I could say I sympathize with Anonymous' confusion on this topic, but I just don't. Perhaps if you can't figure it out, then you just shouldn't be having sex.
More correspondence on this subject is welcome (conor@theatlantic.com), but let's move past directly responding to the letter that inspired this string of responses.
This ring, created by the great Art Nouveau designer René Lalique, was obviously commissioned by a sorcerer who would wear it while poring over alchemical manuscripts from the library of Dr. Dee. It's exquisite, of course, but also stupendously creepy. (Note: the Wartski site does not link to pieces directly, so click on “Jewellery” and scroll down.)
Featuring a central carved ivory face set in yellow gold and crowned with a cabochon emerald, the ring showcases the quality of workmanship so typical of Lalique jewels. Long, flowing hair of deeply engraved gold forms the shoulders of the ring, contrasting with the more formal engraved leaf patterns that run along the tops of the shoulders. Small accents of black enamel provide further contrast.
I often find relics haunting, and I like the fragile, almost hazy look of this late 1800s French relic pendant. A tiny relief of Mary has been carved out of meerschaum—a soft white mineral used for centuries to create carved pipes and, later, cigarette holders—and placed under convex glass. The glass heightens the three-dimensional appearance of the carving. The piece is set in brass.
This 15k gold memento mori stickpin features a skull with a hinged jaw, allowing it to be opened or closed. The three-dimensional effect of a slightly raised nasal bone and individually etched teeth (not to mention the gaping eye sockets) should combine to make him creepy, but instead he's kind of cute.
Circa 1900, this Art Nouveau "Bat Maiden" ring, by the French designer Charles Boutet de Monvel (1855-1913), features a glowing center opal flanked by two crowned and bat-winged female figures in gold with diamond accents.
Toadstone is a fairly unattractive brownish-gray stone that was traditionally believed to come from the head of a living toad, but it's actually a fossilized fish tooth. It was highly sought after for centuries for its so-called magical powers, which could apparently detect the presence of poison, cure snake bites, and treat kidney disease, epilepsy and various other ailments. Christopher J. Duffin, in a great article for Jewellery History Today (the magazine of the Society of Jewellery Historians), also quotes Albertus Magnus, a 13th-century Dominican friar from Cologne, and his recommendation that unmounted toadstones be swallowed—“to cleanse the bowels of filth and excrements”—and then later, uh, retrieved.
Toadstones were also believed to protect mothers from fairies, preventing them from stealing their children and replacing them with changelings.
How does one get a toadstone, you may ask? It's easy: According to Edward Topsell's The History of Four-Footed Beasts and Serpents from 1658, all you need to do is place a live toad on a red cloth, wait until it belches the stone out, and then quickly grab it before the toad snarfles it back up again. Piece of cake.
Toadstones were usually cut in smooth cabochon form and set into rings. This ring is circa 1700, and features a high karat gold setting. A very similar ring resides in the Victoria & Albert Museum, and 14 toadstones were also found in the Cheapside Hoard.
Circa 1200 B.C., this bronze ring originated in Luxor, Egypt. Depicting a sacred asp, it was excavated in the 19th century, and was formerly part of the Baron Amherst Collection (click through to the Doe & Hope site for more on the provenance and Amherst himself).
Snakes were both revered and feared in ancient Egypt, and they appear throughout their mythology and ornamentation. 1200 B.C. places the ring in the Twentieth Dynasty of Egypt, a period that featured general unrest and decline, as well as around 4000 pharaohs called Ramesses (well, just Ramesses III through XI). Actually, since we're in a Halloween frame of mind, I should probably note that Ramesses III's mummy, which was discovered in 1884, was the inspiration for Hollywood’s infamous film mummies.
This creepy-crawly spider brooch, circa 1890, features a colored pearl body, cushion-cut diamond thorax, and cabochon ruby eyes. Rose-cut diamonds line the legs, and the piece is set in silver and gold.
I've featured a posy ring in the past, but this one has an unusual and fierce motto. Circa 1620, it states: Accvrsed be that wicked wicht that seeke to robb me of my right (Accursed be that wicked witch that seeks to rob me of my right).
Posy rings were usually presented to loved ones with secret messages of love and devotion engraved inside, but in this case the hidden motto was protective. It was essentially a good luck charm, acting as a talisman against witchcraft and reassuring the wearer of protection against anyone who would seek to harm their union. It's a fascinating and potent symbol of the widespread fear of witchcraft that existed in the 17th century.
Snakes, as shown above, have been featured in jewelry for centuries—sometimes loaded with symbolism, and other times simply decorative. Whether you like them in real life or not, their sinuous form often results in some exceptionally beautiful designs. This bangle bracelet is one of them. From a Philadelphia estate and up for sale in Freeman's November 3rd Jewelry & Watches auction, it coils around the wrist in 18k gold with green, white and red enamel.
Circa the 1940s, a sterling silver winged bat pendant with endearingly huge ears.
So, I don't know, maybe this is like a version of The Ghost and Mrs. Muir, except instead of an attractive dead sea captain, we have a ghostly floating package? Circa 1900, this Art Nouveau "erotica" pendant features a woman embracing exactly what you think she's embracing. The pendant (in gold with natural pearls and a small cabochon ruby) is also a locket, and may have been used to hold snuff.
This mourning ring doesn't mince words. In 18k gold with black and white enameling, it features a central panel that swivels, revealing a lock of braided gray hair under glass on one side, and the words "Prepare to Follow” on the other. The inscription engraved in the band states "Nath Hayward 0B 3rd Feb 1814 AET 73."
Depicting Medusa's head on bat's wings, this gilded silver Art Nouveau belt buckle was created by German designer Albert Holbein, and dates to circa 1900. According to the dealer, it's a variation on another design that was shown at the Paris Exposition Universelle of 1900.
Another form of talisman, Bavarian "charivari" amulets were believed to protect and bring success to hunters. Wearing a charivari—traditionally hung from a chain attached to the hunter's belt—was seen as a way to magically gain the attributes of the animal, making it easier to catch or kill. Gruesome, I know, but I can see how carrying a protective charm might be an appealing option when facing the forest alone.
Bits of antler, teeth, claws, the jawbones of small predators, and even the pincers of stag beetles were used in charivari pendants, and they're still worn today as an accessory to traditional lederhosen. You can see some more examples here.
This charivari dates to around 1901-1909, and features the jaws of what was probably a weasel or a stoat. It's set in German silver (which is not actually silver, but an alloy of copper, zinc and nickel), with an acorn and leaf detail on the top.
Another relic! This pendant is Portuguese, circa 1780. It's made of carved boxwood and gold, and features a tiny figure of St. Anthony. The Catholic Church has always used symbols to identify saints, so this little guy can be identified as Anthony by his robes (he was a Franciscan friar) and the child in his arm, because he’s usually depicted as holding the baby Jesus. The coffin-shaped box is a nice little touch.
This 19th century memento mori ring showcases a tiny skull hovering beneath rock crystal—a constant reminder to the wearer of his or her mortality.
Circa 1900, a beautiful little 14k gold Art Nouveau owl pin, with opal eyes and outstretched wings.
This piece is sold, but I'm including it because it's beautiful and OMG THE TINY OWL. Circa 1910, it's a Jugendstil—a.k.a. German Art Nouveau—silver and gold bat pendant, created in the style of designer Georg Kleemann (1863-1932). It is set with opal, moonstone, pearl, amethyst, lapis, turquoise, ruby and diamond, with touches of enamel. That owl!!!
I saved the best for last! This is a contemporary brooch by Spanish designer Andrea Coderch Valor. Made of silver, copper, steel and a plastic doll, the piece is part of her aptly named "Hieronymous Bosch" collection. It will haunt your dreams. Enjoy!
Monica McLaughlin tweets about ridiculous old jewelry and other random nonsense at @rococopacetic. She also wants to mention: If you're in the New York area, don't miss the new "Death Becomes Her: A Century of Mourning Attire" exhibit at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. The exhibit examines the development of mourning fashions and rituals through the 19th and 20th centuries, including clothing, jewelry and other accessories. Good stuff! The exhibit opened on October 21, and will run until February 1.
In pregnancy, women are shape-shifters, their bellies waxing like the moon. After delivery, they hold another kind of magic: microchimerism, a condition in which women harbor cells that originated in their children even decades after birth.
The name, born from Greek myth, refers to the chimera, a fire-breathing lioness with the head of a goat rising up from her body and the tail of a serpent. In ancient mythology, the chimera was an omen of storms and natural disasters. Just what microchimerism foretells still isn’t clear, but a recent study in the International Journal of Epidemiology suggests that these cells may substantially improve the health of the women who house them.
In research published earlier this year, epidemiologists analyzed the data from a previous longitudinal study of 272 elderly Danish women. Out of that group, 70 percent had Y sex chromosomes in their blood, a sign of the presence of male cells.
Although cardiovascular disease was slightly elevated among women with male microchimerism, their overall mortality rate was a whopping 60 percent lower, primarily because of a lower incidence of cancer. Eight-five percent of these women made it to age 80, compared to 67 percent of women without the presence of these cells.
Scientists don’t know for certain what biological mechanisms cause these findings, but past research suggests microchimerism may boost immune surveillance—that is, the body’s ability to recognize and destroy pathogens and cells that might become cancerous—and also play a role in the repair of damaged tissue, helping form new blood vessels to heal wounds. Microchimerism is also associated with a lower risk of Alzheimer’s disease and breast cancer.
These fetal cells migrate all over a mother’s body, becoming part of the heart, the brain, and blood—and fascinating scientist and artists alike. Writer Sarah Gerkensmeyer, mother of two sons, says she likes to think that they never completely left her, and that microchimerism from her younger son Charlie, born in 2011, helped give rise to her short story collection.
“When I was pregnant with him, those weird stories were in me, washing around and fusing together right alongside my developing son,” she wrote last year. “It’s a nice, strange thought, isn’t it? That he gave me those stories to tell.”
Some journalists have asked if the presence of male cells can cause women to think differently, said Mads Kamper-Jørgensen, an associate professor of public health at the University of Copenhagen and the lead author of the International Journal of Epidemiology study.
The answer: No. He also noted that the health benefits of microchimerism are the same whether the cells are male or female. “Sons aren’t any better than daughters.”
The reason why much of the research has focused on microchimerism stemming from males, he explained, is because of the ease in measurement. In blood samples, male Y chromosomes stand out among a woman’s XX. By comparison, finding a daughter’s genetically distinct cells in a mother is expensive and difficult because the chromosomes are all XX. Detecting microchimerism in men is also a challenge, because the female X chromosomes are hard to differentiate from the male XY. (Microchimerism is probably more frequent in women, because pregnancy is a natural avenue for transferring cells, but individuals may also pick up genetically distinct DNA after an organ transplant or transfusions, or in utero if they had a twin.)
A 2004 study found the presence of male genes in 21 percent of women overall—even among those who had only given birth to daughters, had a miscarriage, underwent an abortion, or had never been pregnant. Researchers speculate the unknown DNA could have come from a miscarriage these women never recognized, or from an older brother who transferred cells to their mother, who in turn passed the genes onto subsequent children. Or—here’s where the science starts to feel like sci-fi—women could have picked it up through sexual intercourse, traces of past lovers never lost.
Though the idea is intriguing, it’s also “sort of impossible” to study, Kamper-Jørgensen said, because of the intimate details participants would have to agree to share, and the testing that would have to begin even before women have sexual intercourse and after each new partner.
Kamper-Jørgensen’s current research focuses on preeclampsia, a condition involving elevated blood pressure in pregnancy that causes a higher exchange of cells between fetus and mother, and its association with breast cancer. He’s also investigating the association between microchimersim and allergies in women; those with more children tend to have fewer allergies compared to those who don’t. In another study, he plans to examine microchimerism and its association with rates of brain, cervical, and lung cancer.
“There’s so much [epidemiological] observation out there,” Kamper-Jørgensen said. “Having kids protects you from breast cancer, but we don’t really know why. If you have kids, you live longer, but we don’t really know why. Women live longer than men, but we don’t know why. This phenomenon, this may be it.”
All around the country, parents are sitting down to have the talk with their children. Not about sex or mortality or college. They're having the talk about Gamergate. From our own comments:
I have a 17 year old son and trying to point out the actual facts in this story is like trying to convince a rabid 70 year old FOX viewer that Obama is not a terrorist, born on Mars, here to take your guns.
"It's about ethics, mom. Don't you care about ETHICS?"
He's not down with the death threats though, so I guess Yay?
Imagine! You hear your child talking animatedly about something. He steps closer and you hear him say "bias" and "Sarkeesian." The words drip with spite. Later, you hear him through the bedroom door, talking to his webcam: "No, it's about corruption in games journalism!" What do you do?
My son is 19, with mild ASD. Sometime in the last 2 years he discovered 4chan. At first he was just reading /co, but now he is almost addicted to /pol and /v. Before he went back to college he was constantly online, getting all worked up about Zoe Quinn and gamergate.
I raised him to be a feminist, a liberal and a kind person. It hurts me that he is involved with such sexist, racist, anti-Semitic people. I don't even have the words to express how sad this makes me.
Because he is 19, he of course knows more than me. I'm just his ignorant mom. So I don't even know how to approach this conversation. What do I say that won't just make him dig his heels in more?
Here's what it looks like from the other side. From Reddit:
My dad and I got into an argument about #GamerGate today. He said I need to try and see the other side's point of view. But that's the problem. They haven't, they've just sat back and called us White Cis Heterosexual Male Misogynists. (BTW, if you do have a legitimate argument about #GamerGate that won't simply devolve into cries of sexism for "cries of sexism"'s sake I [and several others, I'm sure] would love to hear them)
But the problem with arguing about #GamerGate with someone that isn't a gamer, is they don't truly understand what this experience puts the whole gaming community through.
We started #GamerGate with a simple request. Give us some f-ing integrity with your reporting. Don't suck up to developers, over-hyping video games that couldn't live up to the impossibly high standards you set them to (See Watch_Dogs and Destiny) Were they bad games? Not really, but they didn't deserve as much of the hype that they received.
But my dad will insist that I need to show some respect for the other side's opinion. So I simply ask to those who oppose #GamerGate, "Besides feeding the trolls of the internet attempting to sabotage a movement with good intentions, why would you oppose a call for ethics in gaming journalism?"
And:
I actually talked to my dad about this, and he looked at me funny. Not because he thought I was wrong, or that we were in the wrong, but I don't think me explaining the opposition made absolutely any sense to him.
Some parents are attempting to engage in earnest:
He likes to think that the GGrs are benign heroes who are "misunderstood". Um, I think not. I've sent him two new links. BOOM. Take that!
I'm a gamer, I'm not ashamed of calling myself that and I take offense at the notion that I should. I've been playing video games for more than 30 years, been a game developer for more than 10. I'm enjoying playing video game with my son and I'm looking forward to be playing them with my soon to be born daughter. I refuse to be held accountable for the actions of others.
I'm a left leaning liberal and I fully support GamerGate.
My son is following it and is outraged enough for our whole family. It's probably justified too as people may well have based spending decisions on biased information.
There are parents cautiously expressing concern:
@jamesmelay@Boogie2988 My son is a 15 y/o gamer (and fan of Boogie's) and I am hoping that this doesn't effect his identity negatively.
So we took a recent scouting trip to a Big Box Toy Store — the POINT of which was to figure out exactly which Transformer he was talking about, which I completely blanked on while scrolling through Amazon because THEY ALL LOOK ALIKE and there are fourteen million variations of the same robot and now I'm utterly amazed at my parents' ability to always get me the exact pose of Strawberry Shortcake I had my heart set on.
"The Strawberry Shortcake with the watering can! The GREEN watering can. And not the BENDING DOWN one. The STANDING UP one."
While we were there, I figured Ezra might want to have a say in Bloon's party dress selection as well, so after some disoriented wandering around in search of the doll aisle, I asked an employee where we might find doll clothes.
"Like for [DOLL BRAND I'VE NEVER HEARD OF]?" he asked.
"Um, I dunno," I answered. "It's for his bear. I don't know what brand will fit, so is there just an aisle we could look at?"
"All we really have is [DOLL BRAND I'VE NEVER HEARD OF], but it's, you know. For girls."
"Well," I bristled, hoping that Ezra didn't hear that, because NOPE. "His bear is a girl."
"Oh, okay," he laughed and started walking away. We trailed after him, until I realized he was just walking towards the employees-only area of the store.
I asked again where we might find those doll clothes, please. He looked surprised, then gave us the aisle number and general direction.
It turned out that the clothing for [DOLL BRAND I'VE NEVER HEARD OF] was perfectly Bloon sized. Ezra very seriously considered each option, pointedly turning down anything blue or gender neutral.
"That's not beautiful enough," he explained.
He chose this.
Isn't she beautiful?
Just like Ezra, my beautiful, amazing boy. He's Transformers and Plastic Battle Droidpod Whatevers and Dirt and Defiance and Stubbornness and the most loving, gentle, and nurturing little person I have every had the honor to meet.
I started his birthday video the usual way, set to some song that he loves or was just the right blend of sappy/peppy, before realizing that...no. He doesn't need a soundtrack anymore. The one he provides — his singing, dancing, talking — is a better representation of life with Ezra this year than any old rapid-fire clip montage ever could.
While jogging near his home in San Mateo County, California, Gary Hesterberg, a 50-year-old electrician, felt sharp metal barbs strike him in the back. He fell forward, his face hitting broken asphalt, as thousands of volts of electricity surged through him. The current caused his nervous system to fail and his muscles to seize. He lay on the ground, momentarily paralyzed, in pain he later described as the most intense he'd felt, worse than breaking his collar bone or having his hips replaced. Due to a heart condition, he feared he would die as he writhed on the ground.
The person who propelled steel-tipped barbs into his back at 160-feet-per-second, sending 5 seconds of electric current through his body, was not a deranged serial killer, or a robber, or a romantic partner's jealous ex. It was Sarah Cavallaro, a Park Ranger patrolling the Golden Gate National Recreation Area. She deployed her taser in the jogger's back to stop him from leaving a crime scene:
He'd been jogging with his rat-terrier off leash.
Tasers have been purchased for law enforcement agencies all over the United States by policymakers who imagined that they'd facilitate protecting the public with less force. Their rise has instead led to an epidemic of cases–a sample are on YouTube*–where officers deploy the debilitating weapon in instances they regard as justified, but that strike many citizen observers as unjustified, draconian and immoral. Officers in these cases appear to believe that they're justified in brutally electrocuting anyone who disobeys them, even if the person poses no danger to the public.
In Gary Hesterberg vs. United States of America, a civil rights lawsuit filed by the electrician, who sought damages for his treatment at the hands of the National Park Service, and litigated by Haddad & Sherwin, Oakland-based civil rights trial lawyers, the federal government explicitly defended the notion that it is permissible to Tase an unarmed citizen in the back while enforcing something as trivial as an off-leash violation (in a wilderness area where off-leash dogs were tolerated for years). During testimony, Hunter Bailey, the Deputy Chief of Law Enforcement for the National Park Service, maintained that a Park Ranger would be legally justified in Tasing even "a 9-year-old girl" or "a pregnant woman" if they were caught walking a dog off-leash and tried to leave the scene against a ranger's orders. This institutional mindset leads directly to violent civil rights violations, as a federal court ultimately ruled in this important litigation. The National Park Service now owes the jogger that they victimized $50,000 in damages. And law enforcement is on notice that the Constitution forbids tasing so needlessly.
* * *
Prior to 2012, the Rancho Corral de Tierra, a 4,000 acre recreation area on the Northern California coast, was managed by San Mateo County. On paper, that jurisdiction forbids walking dogs off leash, but in practice, dog owners were permitted to do so on the relatively quiet, remote trails near Gary Hesterberg's house. In recognition of that fact, the National Park Service decided that after taking control of the acreage, it would assign rangers to go out on the trails and issue informational warnings to offending dog owners rather than issuing them citations. Park Ranger Sarah Cavallaro was deployed to carry out these orders on the very first day that federal authorities were patrolling the land they'd recently acquired.
It was January 29, 2012.
Late that afternoon, Hesterberg was jogging in the Rancho Corral de Tierra with his pet beagle, leashed because it didn't always obey his voice commands, and his unleashed rat terrier, JoJo, an obedient dog that always stayed within 15 feet of him. They set off down a lightly used single-lane road paved with broken asphalt. A mile-and-a-half into his jog, Hesterberg saw a woman in a green uniform in the distance. He instinctively leashed his dog even before she approached.
Cavallaro wore a jacket with a National Park Service patch and a duty belt outfitted with a gun, a taser, a baton, and a radio. She told Hesterberg that she wouldn't be issuing him a citation for failing to leash one of his dogs during their jog. Rather, she'd give a warning as "this is going to be an educational experience for the local residents." One might expect that having delivered this information she'd regard herself as having discharged her duties and permit man and leashed dogs to be on their way. Instead, she insisted that Hesterberg provide her with his identification.
Hesterberg was annoyed and a bit confused. He accepted that it was unlawful to jog with his dog off leash. But he says he was uncertain about the identity of the woman in the green uniform and whether she had the authority to question and detain him. He testified that he initially regarded her as the equivalent of a state park ranger, someone who could perhaps give him a ticket, but wasn't like a police officer who could interrogate or detain him. In any case, he didn't have an ID on him. Pressed for identifying information, he gave his real birth date and address, as well as his real first name, but made a split-second decision to give a false last name because he didn't want to end up on some government list or something. If mere educational warnings were being offered why did she need his name anyway?
Cavallaro's reasoning will be known to those familiar with the law enforcement mindset, wherein any infraction, no matter how minor, is used as a pretext to detain someone while checking whether there are any warrants out for their arrest, even when there is no reason or probable cause to imagine that might be the case. At trial, Cavallaro testified that she sought to establish Hesterberg's identity for several reasons: 1) to check for outstanding warrants; 2) to put the offender's name on a government list of leash-law violators in order to identify repeat offenders; 3) to collect information pertaining to ongoing litigation about leash laws; 4) to increase officer safety by establishing the identity of an on-duty contact.
As Cavallaro radioed the name, address, birthdate, and fake last name to law enforcement colleagues, a young married couple happened upon the scene. The husband, James Babcock, approached to ask why a park ranger was there, as "it was such an unusual circumstance.” He too expressed uncertainty, asking, "What is your authority here?" At no point did Cavallaro say, "I am a Park Ranger, a sworn federal officer of the National Park Service. As of this month, we're the agency that lawfully patrols here. I have every bit as much authority as a police officer has." In court, she offered this description of her mindset upon the couple's arrival:
I was on a law-enforcement contact with what I believed was Mr. Jones. So, that is my primary focus. I have to have a general awareness of the overall scene. Folks often try to interject themselves into law-enforcement contact. Particularly on a trail setting like that. And, so, it’s—it goes back to my divided attention and everything that I need to be focusing on which is, you know, sort of the universe, so to speak, in kind of a broad term, just the— you know, the time of day, who else is on the trail, where my backup is, the radio, Mr. Hesterberg, his body language, the Babcocks, their question, Mr. Babcock, Mr. Hesterberg’s questions, all of that was stuff that I was now having to focus on.
Babcock's skeptical questions reinforced Hesterberg in his own skepticism, and he persisted in pressing Cavallaro for information about her role and authority in the park. Unsatisfied with her answers, he announced that he was going to continue his jog. She replied "‘What?" ("As if in disbelief," she later explained, "not that I didn’t hear him.”) In subsequent testimony, she counterintuitively explained that her confused incredulity was a result of Hesterberg's straight-forwardness:
...we talk about people are going to telegraph what they’re going do. You’re watching for their body language. You know, if someone kind of keeps looking in a particular direction, that’s typically an indicator that something in that direction is of interest to them, or they might be heading in that direction. If someone drops their shoulder it might mean they’re cocking back to maybe swing at you. So, you’re—so, you’re looking for different things. So when we talk about telegraphing, it’s usually minor things, the nuances of people. You’re not expecting that telegraph to actually be an announcement that someone is leaving.
Cavallaro responded that he was not free to go, causing Hesterberg to resume his questions about her authority to detain him. She did not respond to those questions, and meanwhile ordered the Babcocks to vacate the scene. They watched from a few dozen feet away. Around the same time, dispatch radioed back that they didn't have any record of a Gary Jones in the city Hesterberg provided.
Cavallaro responded by asking for backup, knowing that "the closest ranger to her was north in San Francisco, which is about a 25-minute drive away. Dispatch summoned San Mateo County Sheriffs, who were much closer, along with two rangers from San Francisco and one ranger from Marin County, who was even farther away from Cavallaro." At that point, the dog leash violation commenced to occupy at least some of the attention of law enforcement in three different counties!
At trial, Cavallaro explained why she called backup for an encounter with an unarmed, middle-aged man in jogging shorts with two docile dogs in tow:
...it was the managing of the three people instead of two, the barrage of questioning that was, you know, challenging of my authority. And, the fact that I’m now getting further information with the 10-74 not on file, which means negative, there are no wants or warrants for a Mr. Gary L. Jones with that date of birth. But, that there’s no Gary L. Jones on file in the entire California, the CLETS system. So, there’s no wants or warrants for that person, but this person doesn’t exist... with that date of birth... So, those are some red flags starting to go off.
At some point, Hesterberg again announced that he was leaving and started to jog away. Cavallaro grabbed his arm to stop him. "Hesterberg stopped, pulled his arm away from Cavallaro, asked if he was under arrest, and expressed incredulity that Cavallaro would not let him go," the court found. "Cavallaro did not answer Hesterberg’s question." Shortly after, Cavallaro told dispatch, "this guy’s tried to run on me twice." Hesterberg again announced his intention to be on his way.
Says the court of the climactic moment:
In response, Cavallaro drew her taser, pointed it at the center of Hesterberg’s chest, and ordered him to put his hands behind his back. Hesterberg did not put his hands behind his back and instead asked her sarcastically and in disbelief, “What, you’re going to tase me now?” Hesterberg also told Cavallaro something close to, “Don’t tase me, I have a heart condition.” Cavallaro responded, “Well, then turn around and put your hands behind your back.”
Hesterberg again did not put his hands behind his back. Mr. Babcock, who was with his wife 20 to 30 feet away, commented something along the lines of, “Don’t you think this is a little excessive? Hesterberg remained at taser point for approximately the next four minutes. Cavallaro and Hesterberg were facing each other on opposite sides of the trail—Cavallaro facing west and Hesterberg facing east—and approximately 12 feet apart. During this time, Cavallaro was on her radio giving directions to her location. Hesterberg was also repeating his questions to Cavallaro regarding her authority to detain him. Cavallaro eventually answered that her authority was “the Constitution.”
Hesterberg responded: “that is no kind of answer. Come on, dogs, we’re leaving.” Hesterberg turned to his right and began a slow jog south on the trail and got two to three strides into his jog when Cavallaro fired her taser in dart mode, striking Hesterberg in the back and buttock. Cavallaro did not give any verbal warning just before tasing Hesterberg, though she did order him to stop.
Cavallaro was prepared to Tase him again if he tried to leave, having judged it better to electrocute a rogue dogwalker than to let him leave the scene. But he didn't flee again:
Besides eliciting a cry of agony, the taser incapacitated Hesterberg, causing him to fall face first on the trail’s degraded asphalt. Hesterberg testified that on a scale of one to ten, the pain from the taser was a ten. Hesterberg hoped that he would not die.
After the taser’s five second cycle, Hesterberg was on his back, eyes closed. Cavallaro checked for signs of extreme distress, including whether Hesterberg was breathing (he was). Cavallaro then ordered Hesterberg to roll onto his stomach so she could handcuff him, but Hesterberg was unable to immediately comply. Cavallaro, however, believed Hesterberg was intentionally refusing to comply and stated over the radio, less than a minute after she fired her taser, that Hesterberg was “refusing commands to turn around and get on his stomach.” Cavallaro testified that she believed Hesterberg’s inaction was willful because he eventually did get up and because “after the five-second burst of the Taser, there would be no further neuromuscular interruption.”
She'd shot steel barbs into his back and sent through his body an excruciating electric current that overrode his muscles and temporarily paralyzed him, butthat had ended several seconds before. What excuse could there be for not promptly rolling over? By then, another passerby had stopped to witness the scene. He assessed it differently. "I’ve never seen anything like it,” local resident John Bartlett would later tell the press. “I’m 77 years old, never had such an emotional reaction to something. I didn’t know if the guy was dying—for a leash on a dog.”
When police arrived, Hesterberg informed them of his real last name, saying that he'd have given it from the beginning had he understood that Cavallaro was a duly empowered law enforcement officer who was legally entitled to ask for ID. He was handcuffed and taken to jail. The witnesses agreed to take his dogs home and notify his wife. "Cavallaro cited Hesterberg with three violations, all under state law," the court notes, "1) failure to obey a lawful order; 2) providing false information; and 3) walking dog off-leash. The first two violations are misdemeanors, while the off-leash violation is merely an infraction. The San Mateo County District Attorney declined to pursue any charges against Hesterberg." The National Park Service was pilloried in the local press, but its Office of Professional Responsibility declined to take disciplinary action against Cavallaro.
Hesterberg sued, alleging battery and negligence (along with other allegations like false imprisonment that were summarily dismissed). As the court would explain in its ruling, "the test for whether force was excessive in violation of the Fourth Amendment is 'objective reasonableness.'" Did Cavallaro act reasonably when she tased Hesterberg? It isn't exactly right to say that the National Park Service was enthusiastic about its employee's behavior. They couldn't help but see how counterproductive it was to raise the ire of a community's residents just as they were beginning to patrol in their area, and a supervisor told Cavallero that it would be better to let someone leave if similar circumstances ever recurred. At the same time, they zealously defended Cavallaro's behavior in federal court, using legal arguments that would arguably set problematic precedents.
"While Plaintiff would soon have been free to continue with his jog if he had answered Ranger Cavallaro’s request for information truthfully, Plaintiff instead single-handedly and unnecessarily manufactured a confrontation by lying about his identity," the government argued. "By lying about his identity, Plaintiff transformed a routine law enforcement contact into a cause for serious concern by law enforcement, which is reflected in the fact that Ranger Cavallaro immediately radioed for backup after receiving her dispatcher’s no-match. Having gotten trapped in his lie, and thereby put himself at risk that Ranger Cavallaro would realize his second and more significant crime of lying to a law enforcement officer, Plaintiff sought to avoid detection, alternatively by trying to leave the scene or by badgering Ranger Cavallaro about the basis for her lawful authority to detain him."
The state's trial brief, signed by United States Attorney Melinda Haag, continues (emphasis added):
Through his defiant and increasingly belligerent behavior during the encounter, Plaintiff gradually exhausted all of Ranger Cavallaro’s less forceful efforts to detain him... Now faced with a suspect who had lied about his identity, disobeyed repeated verbal orders, and physically resisted her attempts to detain him with hands-on techniques, Ranger Cavallaro elected, reasonably, to display her Taser to Plaintiff, in order to communicate, once again, that she was unwilling to let him flee the scene before she had established who he was—as she was lawfully entitled to do...
Plaintiff forced her hand. He turned, once again, to leave the scene. Ranger Cavallaro responded, predictably, by deploying the Taser she had been point at Plaintiff for several minutes. Her decision to do so was not knee-jerk, and it was not punitive. Rather, having exhausted other efforts to detain Plaintiff through less forceful means, Ranger Cavallaro made a reasonable choice to apply force, defuse the situation, and finally overcome Plaintiff’s active resistance...
In this telling, Hesterberg alone was responsible for needlessly escalating a stop for a minor infraction and "forced" Cavalarro to electrocute him via metal barbs and wires.
The case turned, in part, on how much of an interest the state has in compelling citizens to comply with the orders of law enforcement in stops for minor infractions. The state's position: the interest is significant enough to justify electrocution. Its argument at trial presented the altercation as a National Park Service success! "The Taser worked as intended—immobilizing Plaintiff, gaining his compliance, achieving his detention and arrest, and all with minimal injury and without increasing the physical risks to Ranger Cavallaro from further hands-on confrontation," the state's trial brief states. "As the evidence will establish, given the limited options available to Ranger Cavallaro under the circumstances, deploying the Taser was a reasonable decision, properly made in order to keep a resistive suspect in custody and, finally, to resolve the question of his identity."
Another passage in the state's trial brief suggests that an aversion to telling a park ranger one's identity is itself reason to suspect someone is guilty of a serious crime:
Plaintiff’s failure to identify himself created a very significant law-enforcement problem, and Ranger Cavallaro’s actions reflect her reasonable judgment that it was important for her to figure out the identity of someone who had given a false name and tried repeatedly to flee detention over something as unremarkable as a leash-law violation. Of course, this Court is able to look back on the encounter with a full evidentiary record and to discern that the Plaintiff is, in fact, Gary Hesterberg—someone who actually was not trying to avoid apprehension under an outstanding criminal warrant, but instead was simply being disagreeable and hostile about a routine leash-law contact. But Ranger Cavallaro did not and could not have known that at the time when she was faced with a decision about whether either to deploy her Taser or, in effect, to let Plaintiff escape.
This chain of reasoning is very common among law enforcement–a stop for any infraction, no matter how minor, warrants temporary detention to check for warrants; an aversion to that process is itself reason to presume that a citizen is hiding serious wrongdoing; it is imperative to prevent such a "suspect" from fleeing; that's the chain of reasoning that makes many officers think it is reasonable to electrocute a man in a stop over walking a dog on a trail without a leash. The significant of this case: a court, assessing the same fact pattern, declared that the National Park Service violated this man's Fourth Amendment rights.
Said the state, "the Fourth Amendment must be construed to allow a law enforcement officer to use intermediate force to detain an unidentified, disobedient, and resistant fugitive." Perhaps surprisingly, the court strongly disagreed.
* * *
United States Magistrate Judge Jacqueline Scott Corley wrote the opinion sustaining Herstberg's battery and negligence claims and awarding him damages of $50,000. In doing so, she enumerated a number of factors that she regarded as cutting in favor the state's arguments. Some afford an interesting glimpse at the contestable assumptions judges make about citizen encounters with law enforcement.
"Hesterberg’s action in pulling his arm away from Cavallaro, though a single instance of physical resistance... and his attempt to flee generally weighs in favor of some use of force," Judge Corley writes. "Further, the Court again rejects Hesterberg’s revived argument that his flight cannot be considered because he was not fleeing from a detention, not an arrest." All that sounds reasonable enough.
Judge Corley is on less solid ground in the following finding:
To the extent Hesterberg argues that the false name can be justified because Cavallaro failed to identify herself as a law enforcement officer, the Court is not persuaded. As an initial matter, the Court notes that the salient question is not whether Hesterberg knew that an NPS park ranger has the same authority as a police officer; rather, what matters are the facts relevant to Hesterberg’s knowledge of Cavallaro’s general authority to enforce the law. On that measure, Hesterberg testified that had he known Cavallaro was a law enforcement officer, he would not have lied to her and he would have corrected his lie once he found out who she was. To Hesterberg, Cavallaro was simply someone in a green uniform.
The Court does not find Hesterberg credible on this issue. On the day in question, Cavallaro wore her green duty uniform, which includes a duty belt that contains a multitude of law enforcement tools, including a gun and, of course, a taser. A reasonable person who sees this belt would understand that Cavallaro was highly likely to be some kind of law enforcement officer. The duty belt is also large, rather bulky, and easily visible. It strains credulity to believe that Hesterberg did not see it at any point in the 15-minute encounter with Cavallaro. Her uniform that day also included a jacket that had an NPS patch badge and Cavallaro’s embroidered name. Although Cavallaro’s medal badge was concealed under the jacket, the patch badge was nevertheless consistent with the signs pointing to Cavallaro’s law enforcement role.
A person with a uniform, a patch, and a utility belt may well be a law enforcement officer. Then again, he or she might be a private security guard of the sort we've all encountered at shopping malls or patrolling guard-gated communities. Even knowing that Cavallaro was a "park ranger" of some sort, countless "reasonable Americans" would be confused as to how much authority such a position confers. Approaching several strangers on the street near my house and asking whether a park ranger has more, less, or the same authority as an LAPD officer, I got a wide range of uncertain answers. "I'd guess they have more authority than a lifeguard but not as much as, like, an FBI agent," one woman told me. I then asked her what authority she believes a lifeguard to possess.
"Actually, I have no idea," she said.
Also relevant is the indisputable reality that law enforcement officers routinely mislead citizens by giving them the impression that they're not free to leave an encounter when, in fact, saying the magic words, "Am I being detained?" would result in a "no." More broadly, people in uniforms, from shopping center security guards to officers of public transportation systems, routinely give unlawful orders (for example, "you're not allowed to take photographs here,") sometimes because they're ignorant of the law, other times because they assume others are ignorant of the law. Remember, law enforcement officers are legally permitted to lie to citizens.
Hesterberg's true mindset is impossible for us to know. But it is certainly plausible that he was genuinely skeptical that Cavallaro, an unknown person in an unfamiliar uniform from an agency that had just taken jurisdiction in the park, had the lawful authority to interrogate and detain him for walking a dog off leash. Indeed, another passerby who stumbled onto the scene expressed identical skepticism, and Cavallaro's statement that she was empowered to detain Hesterberg by "the Constitution" gave him an additional reason to be skeptical of her truthfulness. After all, that explanation both sounds like and actually is bullshit.
Judge Corley also writes:
Hesterberg was likely aware of Cavallaro’s authority when Cavallaro took Hesterberg’s partially false identifying information, radioed it to her dispatch, and waited several minutes for verification from dispatch. While Hesterberg admits that he assumed that the ensuing delay was because Cavallaro was waiting for a response from the dispatcher, he denies that he had any inkling why the response was delayed. The Court, however, finds it difficult to credit Hesterberg’s denial. The reason for the delay should have been obvious to him—he gave a false name to avoid his real name being put into a database, Cavallaro radioed his information to dispatch prior to putting it into the database (which he may not have expected when he lied), and dispatch could not match the partially false identifying information with law enforcement records. The Court fails to conceive of any other logical reason that could have explained the delay under the circumstances known to Hesterberg.
It seems to me that a reasonable person who falsely gave the name "Gary Jones" to a park ranger would only expect it to result in trouble if, upon radioing the name in, there was an outstanding warrant for a Gary Jones. Put another way, the typical 50-year-old citizen with no arrest record does not think, "There is a comprehensive database out there that permits law enforcement to verify anyone's identity based on name and birthdate." Rather, they think, "law enforcement keeps a list of bad guys, but not a list of everyone. They get suspicious when you seem to be a bad guy, not when your name isn't in their system." This may be naive in our era of overzealous surveillance and big data, but reflects the belief of many, the impression that law enforcement gives when discussing its activities, and the way a majority would want law enforcement to operate.
Even if these assumptions are unduly friendly to the state's case, however, the final outcome was unaffected, for Judge Corley's more significant findings were as follows:
"...this case involves an almost imperceptibly low government interest in apprehending Hesterberg... Cavallaro had probable cause to arrest Hesterberg for only the dog-leash violation and disobeying her lawful orders to stay and to put his hands behind his back... these are non-serious offenses on their face."
"Cavallaro and her superiors viewed leash-law violations on January 29, 2012 as not meriting even a citation... the Court fails to see how the government can now plausibly claim its interest in pursuing such violations was so high as to necessitate Hesterberg’s capture with near-maximum non-deadly force."
"Hesterberg was nonviolent and posed no threat to Cavallaro or anyone else; thus, the government had no interest in capturing him because of a danger he posed."
The bottom line: "the intrusion on Hesterberg’s Fourth Amendment interest to be free from being tased," the court ruled, "greatly outweighs the minimal governmental interest in apprehending him for his violations of the law." The ruling goes on to declare, in what is arguably the most important passage that Judge Corley published, "The government’s primary contention is that, outside of the deadly force context, a law enforcement officer is never required to let a suspect flee and may always use intermediate force to apprehend a fleeing suspect if the officer exhausts her use-of-force options. But there is no rule that using non-deadly force to capture an unidentified law-breaker is per se reasonable."
In an era of Taser-happy police, that corrective is long overdue.
All around the country, parents are sitting down to have the talk with their children. Not about sex or mortality or college. They're having the talk about Gamergate. From our own comments: 
