A.N

DeShawn Morris was 18 years old when he was arrested for armed robbery on July 20, 2010. According to his mother, Zoe Mathews, Morris was excited about entering a teacher training program the next day in San Leandro, California. He had recently graduated from high school and was a mentor at Youth Radio, a non-profit, media-training organization for young adults (a program where this author also works). Out with two of his friends—who were, like him, young black men—Morris was standing near a bus stop in Oakland when a police officer approached and shined his car’s headlights on the group.

From another police car, a victim who had been robbed at gunpoint a few blocks away identified Morris as the suspect. In what Mathews says was a case of racial profiling and mistaken identity, Morris was charged with the crime. He served 56 days in juvenile hall and 152 days in a boot camp in the Mendocino National Forest called the Fouts Springs Youth Facility.

Morris was shot and killed at a park in Vallejo in June 2012. Nearly two years after her son’s death, Mathews can’t put his run-ins with the juvenile justice system behind her, and it’s not just because she disputes the robbery charge.

It’s the money.

In 57 of 58 counties in California, the state with the highest population of incarcerated youth in the country, young people don’t just pay for their crimes with their incarceration—they get billed. Juvenile offenders are charged a percentage of the counties’ costs for incarcerating them and, later, for a partial cost of probation services. In Solano County, where DeShawn Morris served time, these charges are for “Care, Support, and Maintenance”—services that include staffing, clothing, and health care.

In Alameda County, which includes Oakland and Berkeley, the practice of charging juvenile offenders for processing and probation is less than five years old. For suspects older than 16, the meter starts running even before indictment, with a $250 charge for the investigation that’s initiated after an arrest. For a juvenile who’s been detained for the average time in Alameda County—23 days—the total bill will be close to $2,000.  

“We’re trying to get blood from a stone in many situations,” said Beth Colgan, a Thomas C. Grey Fellow at Stanford Law School who’s written about the history of fees charged by the criminal justice system, which she says incur as much as 12 percent interest in some states. “These fees can be detrimental to people’s ability to get back on their feet. One of the strongest arguments against these fees is that they do perpetuate inequality and poverty in a way that might make many people uncomfortable.”

Terry Wiley, the senior deputy district attorney for Alameda County, has a different perspective: “Don’t be committing crimes, and you won’t owe any money.” This is one matter-of-fact take, but it doesn't help much once an offender is already caught up in the justice system.

For one thing, offenders, along with other taxpayers, are stuck paying for any overcharging produced by the system’s inefficiencies. In an interview for the documentary film A Matter of Respect, Wiley himself says that though local police departments may do a good job investigating a case, “what they bring over in terms of police reports and their version of events they’ve got from witnesses is not always what really happened.” In Alameda County, the fee for investigations, accurate or not, is charged even if a suspect is exonerated. And if the fees aren’t paid, judges have the discretion to reincarcerate offenders.

In California, the bills for juvenile offenders go to parents like Zoe Mathews. According to a 2011 report from the National Center for Juvenile Justice, 29 states require courts to order payment from parents. The financial responsibility begins from the moment an arrest happens. In some cases, parents can negotiate certain fees if they can’t pay, but rules vary around the country. When the bills aren’t paid, officials can involve collections agencies, deduct from parents’ wages, or take their tax refunds.

Mathews is on the hook for more than $7,500 in fees related to her son’s incarceration for the robbery charge and a previous misdemeanor. That includes 56 days in juvenile hall at $30 per day, for a total of $1,680. Probation supervision racked up an $1,800 bill. And Mathews, who’s been exceptionally persistent in chasing down answers from the juvenile justice system, isn’t prepared to pay for certain bills that she views as unfair.

In a lengthy email 2012 chain between Mathews and Jeff Liddicoat, who was then a senior staff analyst with Solano County’s Probation Department, Mathews asks for the math behind some of the line items on her bills. Liddicoat replies that he can’t comment on individual cases. But he does outline the rationale behind the bills: “To be financially prudent to the county taxpayers and voters,” he writes, “the County must collect fees for its services...to reimburse the County for services that are not provided to the general public as a whole.”

That is, taxpayers in Solano County—which has the lowest per capita income in the San Francisco Bay Area—are not expected to cover the entire cost of detaining minors.  In 2012, however, these fees were less than one percent of the Probation Department’s $28.5 million dollars in total revenue. And according to Stanford’s Beth Colgan, counties often spend a lot more money trying to collect the fees than they recoup. But, “as counties get crunched economically,” she told me, “this has been the response.” Between 2009 and 2013, at least eight states introduced legislation dealing with parental payment obligations; in 2011 alone, Utah, Idaho, and Texas all proposed such laws, the National Center for Juvenile Justice reports.

Juvenile-justice advocates tend to agree that most people aren't very well informed about the workings of the justice system and its costs unless they experience them directly. “When that happens,” National Center for Juvenile Justice Director Melissa Sickmund wrote in an email, “they often go through the process not understanding what is happening to them or their children. Advocates are pushing for use of more ‘common language’ in court. There is research that shows that even if justice decision-making goes against someone, if they have been treated fairly ... they are more likely to comply.”

Zoe Mathews is a working single mother of three. She says she can’t afford the payment arrangement determined by Solano County for fees related to her deceased child’s time in detention and on probation. She’s tried to negotiate with the county to waive the fees, she says, but the county would only lower the monthly payment.

The phone calls from county bill collections agency have stopped, but Mathews says she’s now receiving letters threatening to garnish her wages if she doesn’t pay. Although she says she understands why the county aims to recoup some of its costs, Mathews calls the fees to juvenile offenders “double-dipping.” They’re unfair, in her view, once an offender has served time.

“That’s supposed to rehabilitate you, and you’re paying your debt back to society,” she says, “so then they’re going to charge you an additional per night stay? As if you elected to do that, as if there were some options?”

She pauses, and then says, “No, I don’t think that’s right at all.”

This story is part of a special report on the U.S. juvenile justice system produced by Youth Radio. Other installments will be broadcast on the radio program "Marketplace."

The BBC's series on bizarre news events from the Victorian era has outdone itself with this story about a British sailing rig called the Margaret that set sail from the west coast of Africa with "400 cockatoos and parrots, 12 snakes, some monkeys, a gorilla, an orangutan and two crocodiles," and soon turned into "singular mix of Noah's ark and the mutiny on the Bounty."

First to die were the birds, starved when the ship's swarming rats scoffed all the corn that had been provided as feed. [...] As the ship was tossed about on wind-whipped waves, the snakes and crocodiles broke free of their crates and invaded the crew's quarters, forcing the sailors to seek shelter in the cabin for days on end.

"These reptiles, along with the rats, kept up a continual warfare until the surviving crocodile killed the last snake," said the paper, "and completed the chain of vengeance by being killed by some of the cargo shifting and falling on it".

And then the monkeys got loose, and then the gorilla, who had to be fought off by the ship's cook and a sailor with a hatchet! The Margaret docked, eventually, with only the "gorilla, three monkeys and four parrots" left. [BBC]

Rosa Pena, a 24-year-old single mom in Arizona, told the New York Times “I’ll do what I have to do,” to stay alive, including sell the groceries she buys with food stamps. Other poor women the paper interviewed in 2012 said they sell clothes for extra cash or reluctantly move back in with violent boyfriends. “One woman said she sold her child’s Social Security number ... ‘I tried to sell blood, but they told me I was anemic,’ she said."

If they can't find work, they have few other options. Payments from Temporary Assistance to Needy Families (TANF, but more colloquially referred to as welfare), once a last resort for single mothers, have declined precipitously in the past two decades, even as other government programs have grown.

In a forthcoming study for the journal Demography, Robert Moffitt, an economist at Johns Hopkins University, details how the poorest single-parent families—80 percent of which are headed by single mothers—receive 35 percent less in government transfers than they did three decades ago. Meanwhile, government spending on older and disabled adults has increased.

“We know now that there has been a large increase in total government support to low income families since 1986, but the distribution of that support has dramatically changed,” Moffitt said in a recent presentation at the Population Association of America, where he serves as president.

In 1935, Congress created three safety-net programs aimed at alleviating poverty: Social Security, which is for the old and disabled, Unemployment Insurance, which is for those temporarily out of a job, and Aid to Dependent Children, whose name was later changed to Aid to Families with Dependent Children. The latter is what we typically think of as “welfare”—cash transfers intended to help widows with children.

Food stamps, which go to low-income families or individuals, were added in 1964, and in 1975 came the Earned Income Tax Credit, or EITC, which goes to working families with a certain level of income.

AFDC was never flawless—it excluded black women until the 1960s—but it did become an important lifeline for poor mothers throughout the 1980s. By 1992, the majority of AFDC recipients were single mothers, rather than widows.

As more women entered the workforce, however, society began to sour on unemployed single mothers. Those drawing government benefits were derided as “welfare queens.”

“The expectation was that since middle-class women are working and supporting their families, that low-income families should be doing the same,” Moffitt told me.

In 1996, former President Bill Clinton pledged to “end welfare as we know it,” and AFDC morphed into TANF—Temporary Assistance to Needy Families. A five-year time limit was introduced, and mothers were required to work 30 hours per week or risk losing their benefits. States’ funds were capped, pressuring them to slice welfare rolls.

The effect was that thousands of single moms were promptly shoved off the program: “The legislation reduced the number of poor single mother families served by 63 percent within 10 years, effectively removing it as an important program in the nation’s safety net for the poor,” Moffitt writes.

Here’s a chart showing spending on all of the benefit programs over time, which Moffitt calculated using the Survey of Income and Program Participation.

But that’s not to say we were growing more tight-fisted as a nation. Spending on these programs rose from nine percent of GDP in 1985 to 12 percent in 2007. Between 1990 and 1995, SSI spending grew by 80 percent because of changes in eligibility rules. The EITC grew by 274 percent between 1988 and 1998. And though there were recently major cuts to the food-stamp program, it had expanded by 20 percent between 2003 and 2007.

Meanwhile, spending on TANF, the only program that non-disabled, non-elderly, poor single mothers are eligible for other than food stamps, was lower in 2007 than it had been in 1970.

Food stamps, meanwhile, provide an average of just $5 per day per person.

The result has been that over time, older people, disabled people, and working families have reaped the increased welfare benefits. Unemployed, single-parent families have gradually lost out.

Here’s a look at how the transfers to various groups have changed over time:

The average older adult received about 20 percent more from the government in 2004 than they did in 1983, but the average able-bodied, single parent younger than 62 received 20 percent less. And that decrease was concentrated among single-parent families who make less than half the poverty level—the poorest of the poor.

“It helps to be married and not a single person if your earnings are very low,” Moffitt said.

The 2012 New York Times story estimated that now, “one in every four low-income single mothers is jobless and without cash aid—roughly four million women and children.”

What they do for money isn’t clear, but Moffitt listed a few possibilities.

“Some find occasional jobs, but that's not enough to qualify them for the TANF program,” he told me. “Some get income from family members. Some engage in illegal activity. Some have boyfriends. All the indications are that they kind of scrape by.”

Moffitt is careful to emphasize that this doesn’t mean benefits to the disabled, elderly, or working families should be cut. But his findings do suggest that the stigma surrounding unwed mothers has made their economic lives much harder.

What’s interesting is that the idea of the "welfare queen" has persisted even as welfare itself has evaporated, as Amanda Marcotte pointed out in the Daily Beast. In December, Ann Coulter claimed on Fox & Friends that “single women look to the government as their husbands. Please provide for me, please take care of me.”

Even if single moms wanted to do that, though, they couldn’t.

I have lots of things to write about but my head is too full to get them all out.  Every day this month has been filled with joy and terror and confusion and self-doubt and gratitude and horror, and then my mind is filled up with stories that I need to get onto paper, but they all get jammed together.

It’s like when you were six and you were trying to get money out of your piggy bank, but it didn’t have a stopper so you just turn the glass pig upside down and shake it violently and loudly as each penny drops out of the opening, but then it would get jammed with pennies and you’d have to sneak a knife out of the kitchen to shove it up the thin opening, and it totally worked, but then you wiggle the knife a little too hard and suddenly the glass opening of your piggy bank  shatters and you panic and try to put the pieces back together because you instantly realize that the bank was worth way more than all the pennies inside of it, but you slice open your hand on the broken glass, and that’s when your mom realizes it’s gone terribly quiet and she walks in to find you cross-legged, wide-eyed, holding a knife and covered in blood, and she screams “WHAT HAVE YOU DONE?” as if you might have murdered your little sister, but you explain that your sister is fine and that you just got stabbed by the piggy bank, and that you’re really sorry and will take any punishment she metes out but that “it sort of seems like being stabbed is punishment enough,” and then your mom is like, “JUST PUT THE KNIFE DOWN, JENNY” as if you’re some small, terrible mugger who murdered a pig for a bunch of blood-soaked pennies.

And that’s what my head is like right now.  It’s awful and wonderful.  And it’s full of blood and stories and (metaphoric) broken glass and far too many run-on sentences.  So tonight I’m going to turn my head upside down and shake until things come loose, because sometimes the only thing harder than writing is not writing.

This post has no real point except to say that I’m still here and that one day very soon I will have shaken free the final page of the book inside my head so you can read it.  But for now I’m leaving you with a song I listen to when my head gets too overwhelmed and when I need to be reminded that writing is very much like life, in that it is sometimes incredibly hard, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t also incredibly worthwhile.

Some clever editing and a different score gives Disney’s monster hit a dark edge.

Bobby Burns via 22 Words

FCB Brasil has started the “Speaking Exchange” project for CNA language schools in Brazil, an innovative project that began by pairing up students at the CNA school in Liberdade, Brazil with residents of the Windsor Park Retirement Community in Chicago via webcam for video chats. The sessions are then uploaded to YouTube for teachers to review their progress.

“The idea is simple and it’s a win-win proposition for both the students and the American senior citizens. It’s exciting to see their reactions and contentment. It truly benefits both sides,” says Joanna Monteiro, executive creative director at FCB Brasil.

FCB Brasil via AdWeek

You may be looking at that picture and thinking, “But where is the falafel?” Well, it’s not a salad with falafel, it’s a salad made out of falafel ingredients. 

You see, I was really craving my falafel the other day, but I was too lazy to make the little patties or fry them. So, I wondered what all of the ingredients would taste like just thrown together in a bowl. Pretty damn good, that’s how it tastes.

I had to do a little tweaking, but all in all the salad super amazing. Instead of regular salad greens, it starts with a a bed of fresh parsley and cilantro. Those two herbs are what make the falafel taste so amazing and fresh. I added chickpeas for body and because chickpeas are what falafel is all about. I also added some bulgur wheat for texture. Fresh tomatoes went into the mix to make it a little more salady, and would have added diced cucumber if the selection at the store hadn’t looked so pitiful (wrinkly cucumbers are so sad). I had to find a way to get all of the falafel spices into the salad, so I mixed them right into a basic tahini lemon dressing (because you’d probably drizzle some tahini over the falafel anyway, right?). The tahini dressing was so zingy with its fresh garlic that I skipped the red onion that is in the original falafel recipe. It wasn’t missed. The end result was so amazing that I didn’t have time to notice there were no red onions.

I’m totally IN LOVE with this salad and can see myself making it at least once a week, if not only as an excuse to eat this amazing dressing. I’m pretty sure I’m going to have a jar of the tahini dressing in my fridge at all times.

NOTE: If you can’t find bulgur, you can use couscous, or even quinoa as a gluten free option.

Falafel Salad

Step by Step Photos

Make the tahini dressing first, so that the flavors have a few minutes to blend while you’re making the rest of the salad. Smash or roughly chop two cloves of garlic, then add them to a blender with 1/3 cup tahini, 1/3 cup water, 1/4 cup lemon juice, 1/2 tsp cumin, 1/4 tsp cayenne pepper, and 1/2 tsp salt. Blend the ingredients until smooth and no large chunks of garlic remain. Refrigerate the dressing until ready to use.

Next, it’s time to cook the bulgur. Again, if you can’t find bulgur (I got mine from the bulk bins at the grocery), you can use couscous or quinoa. I used 1/2 cup of dry bulgur for this salad.

Toast the bulgur slightly before cooking it to make it a little more scrumptious. Just add it to a small sauce pot and cook and stir over medium heat for about two minutes. Because there is no moisture in the pot at this point, it will toast the grains. Finally, add a cup of water, let it come back up to a boil (which will be fast because the pot is already hot), then add a lid and turn the heat down to low. Let it simmer on low for 20 minutes.

After 20 minutes, fluff the bulgur then let it sit in the fridge for about 5-10 minutes to cool. Leave the lid off while it’s in there so the excess moisture evaporates away. That way you’ll have nice little chewy bits, rather than sticky wet bits.

Now on to the vegetables… Wash the one bunch of parsley and one bunch of cilantro well. Nothing ruins a salad faster than sand. Try to get as much of the water off as possible. Pull the leaves from the stems. The stems are soft and edible, too, so you don’t have to be very precise about this. Just pull what you can off. 

Give the leaves a rough chop. I probably should have chopped mine just a bit finer, but it’s all good.

Dice two small tomatoes (yes, mine were on sale).

Rinse and drain one 19oz. can of chickpeas. If you can’t find the 19oz. size can, you can just use a 15oz. can, or if you want extra chickpeas, go for the gold and use two 15oz. cans.

Add the cilantro, parsley, chickpeas, tomatoes, and cooled bulgur to a bowl and stir them all together.

Now remember that amazing dressing? OMG it’s so good…

Pour it ALL over the salad. Honestly, the more dressing the better with this one. I used about half of the batch of dressing… and still kinda wanted more.

And then stir it all up so that everything is drenched in that amazing dressing. NOW EAT.

This made about 5 cups. Four large servings or six smaller side salad type servings. Of course, if your bunches of parsley and cilantro are different sizes than mine, you may get a different yield. Either way, I could have probably eaten at least half the batch in one sitting because it was so good. RESTRAIN YOURSELF, BETH.

The post Falafel Salad appeared first on Budget Bytes.

A Florida woman has revealed that she spent nearly a year eating free rotisserie chickens from area Publix grocery stores by taking advantage of a store policy promising all sales be priced as advertised or taken off the bill.

Janet Feldman, a 57-year-old who designs stripper costumes, first demanded the so-called 'Publix promise' after realizing many of the stores birds didn't meet the listed 2-pound minimum weight.

A year and 300 free chickens later, the Davie woman portrays herself as a sort of Robin Hood of poultry.

Having presumably built up a level of chicken tolerance that one can only develop after housing approximately one bird every 24 hours for a year—or maybe she's lying; maybe she never ate them, maybe they're dressed up in small, custom stripper outfits and just hanging out around the dinner table at her apartment trying to agree on something to Netflix—Feldman recently obtained 47 free chickens in a single day and took her hard, greasy evidence to a local newspaper, exposing Publix's underweight chickens and, in the process, her own unquenchable desire for them.

"You can’t ever stay silent," she's quoted as saying. "Everybody’s got to speak up, even if it’s about chickens." [Daily Mail]

In the field of pain studies, urban legend had it that the presence of experimenters decreased pain behavior in mice and rats, and that more pain would be recorded if experimenters left the room.

"It was sort of lab lore. A thing that people whispered about sometimes in meetings," says Dr. Jeffrey Mogil, chair of the Pain Genetics Lab at McGill University. "After hearing this story on and off for 15 years I finally said, 'Listen, if you think this is true, let's do it properly and see if it is.'"

Stress is known to have an analgesic, or pain-inhibiting, effect. So for the first experiment, Mogil and his team injected lab mice with an inflammatory agent and recorded the pain responses with an experimenter present in the room, and the mice's responses when the experimenter was absent. In subsequent experiments, the experimenter was replaced with t-shirts worn by human males and females, as well as bedding material from the mice's own cages and from different animals including other mice, guinea pigs, rats, cats, and dogs—both castrated and "gonadally intact."

The results were a "huge shock," says Mogil. The researchers' suspicions were confirmed, but only halfway: Experimenters did decrease pain in mice—but only male experimenters.

As noted in their findings, which were published in Nature Methods this week, male experimenters and olfactory stimuli produced no effect and neutralized the effect of male stimuli when presented together. On average, the pain response in the mice decreased a significant 36 percent after the introduction of stimuli from male experimenters and un-castrated male animals, and the effect proved to be "exactly as stressful" as two comparison conditions—a three-minute swim in cold water and 15 minutes of restraint in a tube.

"We weren't surprised that those [comparison conditions] would produce stress because we knew they would, but we were surprised that the simple presence of male olfactory stimuli could produce stresses of an equivalent level," Mogil says. "It's quite impressive. This is a very robust amount of stress to not know about until 2014."

He speculates that since bedding from stranger mice produces the effect, what causes the stress is the thought of imminent territorial aggression from males in general, rather than the threat of predation from human males specifically. "What they're afraid of is strange male mice," he explains. "It's just that other male mammals, including us, smell like male mice."

Mogil's theory might also explain why the presence of female researchers and olfactory stimuli defuse the effect of stress-induced analgesia: If the mice smell a mixed-sexed group, the "strange" male mouse is likely to be within a group or with its family, and much less likely to be aggressive or defending territory. The scientist has received a grant to observe whether the same effect is true for people. He believes that it will be, however, since the stress disappears once the animal convinces itself there's no actual danger, "humans would be able to do that fairly quickly"—and any observable stress response would likely be much smaller and shorter-lived.

"A lot of people may interpret this study as bad news that animal testing doesn't work or can fatally confound [research], but I don't look at it that way," says Mogil. "I think a stronger case can be made that, actually, this is good news for animal research."

Growing concerns about the ability to replicate the results of animal testing and the occurrence of false positives may be assuaged by the premise of this new explanation: That it isn't about one lab being right and another wrong, but that both labs are right given their particular environmental context.

"The biological phenomena under study are interacting with these laboratory environmental factors that we don't know about. That means that the results are true, but are just more complicated than we currently understand," says Mogil. "I've seen how much inertia there is in science, but if we started to pay attention to this sort of thing, then we would understand what factors actually matter, and that would make research going forward stronger."

In this case, while the sex effect on mice does go away after extended exposure to male olfactory stimuli, Mogil understands that it is unreasonable to mandate that a female researcher always be present in the room, or even to ask male researchers to sit in a room with mice or rats for 30 to 45 minutes before testing. Instead, he suggests the simple solution of including information about the researchers' sex in their methods section.

"Now that people know this, they can go back and look over their old data and hopefully be able to explain why, for example, they had an effect when with one student, but when a new student took over the project, the effect went away; or why they weren't able to replicate the lab in their field in another city," Mogil says. "I'm hoping that this will solve some existing mysteries."

Watching traffic moving trough this intersection in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia makes my heart race a bit faster.

From NPR's transcript of a Morning Edition story:

Group of researchers ran this interesting field experiment. They emailed more than 6,500 professors at the top 250 schools pretending to be the students. And they wrote letters saying, I really admire your work. Would you have some time to meet? The letters to the faculty were all identical, but the names of the students were all different. [...] Brad Anderson. Meredith Roberts. Lamar Washington. LaToya Brown. Juanita Martinez. Deepak Patel, Sonali Desai, Chang Wong, Mei Chen. [...]

All they were measuring was how often professors wrote back agreeing to meet with the students. And what they found was there were very large disparities. Women and minorities [were] systematically less likely to get responses from the professors and also less likely to get positive responses from the professors. Now remember, these are top faculty at the top schools in the United States and the letters were all impeccably written.

Two more kickers: "There's absolutely no benefit seen when women reach out to female faculty, nor do we see benefits from black students reaching out to black faculty or Hispanic students reaching out to Hispanic faculty," and, "In business academia, we see a 25 percentage point gap in the response rate to Caucasian males vs. women and minorities." Word, this sounds great, we're doing great. [NPR]

An illustrated guide by The Art of Manliness.

Slate's posted a letter that Rose Wilder Lane wrote to her mother Laura Ingalls Wilder after reading the first draft of By the Shores of Silver Lake, and although I was vaguely aware that Rose Wilder was a hardass whose outlook on civil society I will never ever share (she may be credited with the current use of "libertarian"), this note is really a marvel:

You have the brief scene in which Laura threatens to kill Charley with a knife, but that has to be cut out. A 12-year-old girl whose cousin wants to kiss her does not normally threaten him with a nice; she laughs and kisses him, he’s her cousin. Or if she’s shy and doesn’t like him she just escapes, and the incident is not important enough to mention. […] You cannot have [your character] acting like a slum child who has protected her virginity from street gangs since she was seven or eight. Maybe you did it, but you can not do it in fiction; you can not make it credible in under ten or twelve thousand words, and if you do make it credible it’s not a child’s book.

She follows that up with this:

I remember when I was five years old or so, and Mrs. Boast let those hoodlums take me home, I ran away from a hulking big brute who tried to kiss me, and his motive was pure sex sadism which I recognized well enough without knowing at all what it was. I suppose something of that kind was in this incident. But it is not child’s book stuff.

Whether she edited the Little House series or ghostwrote them completely, Rose knew what she was doing in terms of this "child's book stuff," but damnnnn. [Slate]

A little amusement for your Friday: furry iPhone covers with tiny dog faces. Because why not?

See more (including some cat versions) on KEORA KEORA.

I’m not a dog person. I prefer cats. Cats make you work to have a relationship with them, and I like that. But I have adopted several dogs, caving in to pressure from my kids. The first was Teddy, a rottweiler-chow mix whose bushy hair was cut into a lion mane. Kids loved him, and he grew on me, too. Teddy was probably ten years when we adopted him. Five years later he had multiple organs failing and it was time to put him to sleep.

When I arrived at the vet, he said I could drop him off. I was aghast. No. I needed to stay with Teddy. As the vet prepped the syringe to put him to sleep, I started sobbing. The vet gave me a couple minutes to collect myself and say goodbye. I held Teddy's paw until he died. Honestly, I didn't think I was that attached. 

This experience led me to undertake experiments on animal-human relations to try to understand how animals make us care so much about them. Biologically, I wanted to know if pets cause the people to release oxytocin, known as the neurochemical of love, and traditionally associated with the nurturing of one's offspring.

My lab at Claremont Graduate University in California pioneered the study of the chemical basis for human goodness. In the past decade, we have done dozens of studies showing that the brain produces the chemical oxytocin when someone treats us with kindness.

I call oxytocin the "moral molecule" because it motivates us to treat others with care and compassion. Oxytocin was classically associated with uterine contractions in humans, and in rodents caring for offspring. Our studies showed that a large number of agreeable human interactions—from trusting a stranger to hold money for you, to dancing, to meditating in a group—causes the release of oxytocin and, at least temporarily, makes us tangibly care about others, even complete strangers.

In our animal experiment, 100 participants came into my lab and we obtained blood samples from them to establish their baseline physiologic states. Then they went into a private room and played with a dog or cat for 15 minutes. We did a second blood draw after this, and then had participants interact with each other to see how they behaved toward humans, too. If animals caused oxytocin release in humans, it would explain my surprise attachment to my dog Teddy, and perhaps why people spend thousands of dollars to treat a pet medically rather than euthanize it and simply get a new animal. 

Our previous studies showed that when humans engage in social activities with each other, oxytocin levels typically increase between 10 percent and 50 percent. The change in oxytocin, measured in blood, indexes the strength of the relationship between people. When your little daughter runs to hug you, your oxytocin could increase 100 percent. When a stranger shakes your hand, it might be 5 or 10 percent. If the stranger shaking your hand is attractive, oxytocin might increase 50 percent. Oxytocin is considered a reproductive hormone. It increases powerfully during sexual climax, establishing long-term bonds between romantic partners. Our experiments focus on what causes the brain to make oxytocin and its behavioral effects.

The dog and cat study showed that neither species consistently increased oxytocin in humans. Only 30 percent of participants had an increase in oxytocin after playing with an animal. We found that one factor predicted whether playing with a dog would increase oxytocin: the lifetime number of pets of any type one had owned.

The opposite was true for those who interacted with cats. Greater lifetime pet ownership caused oxytocin to fall linearly. Dogs are simply more "people-oriented" than cats, and previous pet ownership seems to have trained our brains to bond with them. 

We also found that dogs reduced stress hormones better than cats (no surprise there!). When stress hormones were lower, people in the experiment trusted strangers with more of their own money. This may tell us why people who own dogs are judged as more trustworthy than those who don't. The human-canine bond appears to be powerful and important to both species.

Many dogs, and sometimes other mammals, exhibit another human-like behavior: play. I was curious if animals can form friendships with other animals and was invited to take part in a small-scale experiment for BBC television that would give me a chance to test this.

As in our laboratory experiment, I wanted to see if cross-species animal play causes oxytocin synthesis. This would be biological evidence for animal friendships. That's how I ended up in Arkansas with a goat in my lap.

At an animal refuge in Arkansas, where a large variety of animals interact with one another, I obtained blood samples from a domestic mixed-breed terrier and a goat that regularly played with each other. Their play involved chasing each other, jumping towards each other, and engaging in simulated fighting (baring teeth and snarling). Both animals were young males. We then placed the dog and goat into an enclosure together and let them play. A second blood sample was done after 15 minutes. 

We found that the dog had a 48 percent increase in oxytocin. This shows that the dog was quite attached to the goat. The moderate change in oxytocin suggests the dog viewed the goat as a "friend."

More striking was the goat's reaction to the dog: It had a 210 percent increase in oxytocin. At that level of increase, within the framework of oxytocin as the "love hormone," we essentially found that the goat might have been in love with the dog. The only time I have seen such a surge in oxytocin in humans is when someone sees their loved one, is romantically attracted to someone, or is shown an enormous kindness. 

Charles Darwin, in his 1872 book The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals argued that emotions are conserved across species, including dogs, goats, and humans. That animals of different species induce oxytocin release in each other suggests that they, like us, may be capable of love. It is quite possible that Fido and Boots may feel the same way about you as you do about them. You can even call it love.

By Heart is a series in which authors share and discuss their all-time favorite passages in literature. See entries from Claire Messud, Jonathan Franzen, Amy Tan, Khaled Hosseini, and more.

After Marcus Burke, author of Team Seven, learned he’d been accepted to the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, he got no Girls-style celebration. His basketball coaches and teammates at Susquehanna University were mostly baffled, even angered, by his literary hopes. They couldn’t understand why Burke, a gifted athlete having a standout season, would throw away a lifetime’s training trying to write fiction. They wanted him to keep playing in Europe, not cast his bet with the writing desk and art’s uncertain lot.

I first met Burke, who later became a classmate of mine at Iowa, when he visited the program as a prospective graduate student. When he joined us at the Foxhead, a writers’ bar in town, he seemed nervous but giddy, like someone who knows he’s about to a burn a bridge—and wants to. “People don’t get the writing thing, not at all,” I remember him saying, but I could tell he was ready to trade in his old mentors for a set of new ones.

In his interview for this series, he discussed how a line from Carter G. Woodson’s The Mis-Education of the Negro helped him build the confidence to turn from sports to literature. We discussed the ways that context, relationships, and race can come to define us, the hard work of unlearning who you’re told to be, and the ways stories can break down barriers.

Team Seven takes place south of Boston, in Milton and Mattapan, where suntanned ladies bake out along Lothrop Avenue, reggae and rap battles mix with blunt-smoke in Kelley Park, and street gangs scuffle on the streets. It’s the story of Andre Battel, a gifted athlete who lets his basketball dreams slide as he gets in deep with Team Seven, a squad of local dealers. With multiple narrators and voices that range from freestyle rap to Jamaican patois, the novel depicts a West Indian community as its young people struggle against darkness.

Marcus Burke spoke to me from his home in Iowa City.

Marcus Burke: I still remember the first sentence I ever wrote. I was a junior in high school, and we had just moved to another city from my hometown—Milton, Massachusetts. It was a rough time. I can be a person who clams up—I didn’t want to talk, but then I had a lot on my mind. One day I went to the computer, and a blank Word screen was there, waiting. I don’t know why, but I started to write:

“The holiday season reminds me of how fucked up families can be sometimes.”

That’s how it began. From there I kept going. It was a deeply personal urge to just start writing. Why did I do that? I still don’t know. Sometimes I think the law of attraction keeps the world together—you eventually come to what you’re going to do.

I kept it very quiet. My sisters knew that I would write sometimes, but I didn’t have much confidence in it. I didn’t want to show it to anybody. Senior year, while I was I playing basketball at the private school Brimmer and May, I would get rides into school from the registrar—the school was far away from where we lived, and she lived nearby. I’d read to her from my stories sometimes. She didn’t mind me cursing and cutting up in the car. Instead, she’d laugh—and say, you’re good. You should do something with this.

Writing was the highlight of my academic life, which wasn’t saying much. In public school, at least the school I’d been going to, I could squeeze by doing very little. In class, you could put your hoodie on and keep your head down on the desk, and nobody would really bother you. I had to get good enough grades to get into private school, but there I didn’t really push myself there, either. The great faculty there did their best to start molding me into a student, but I was having success on the court, and I knew what I could get away with. For me the term, “student-athlete” was something of an oxymoron. I wasn’t an NBA prospect or anything, but you couldn’t really convince me that there was going to be consequences to my lack of action.

When you get recruited it puts you in a funny mind-space—coaches and colleges all calling, and they want you. But it’s really just setting you up for a fall. Because once the ball stops bouncing, the world wants to know what else you can do.

I was recruited to play Division III basketball at Susquehanna University in Selinsgrove, Pennsylvania. By the end of my freshman year in college, I was in trouble. I was failing out of the business school. I’d gotten three Fs, and was on academic and financial aid probation. Not only that, I didn’t mesh with my coach’s system initially. So basketball hadn’t been rewarding the way I’d hoped, and chronic patellar tendinitis—jumper’s knee—kept me from being the player I’d wanted to be, too. The only thing I felt like I had any confidence in was that I liked telling stories. I didn’t know that you could even major in such a thing. I didn’t know it existed!—until I saw a little video on my school’s website about the university’s undergraduate offerings. I was like, wait—on this campus here I can major in creative writing?

I went and saw the chair of the department. I told him I wanted to change my major, and asked about what writing students do when they get out of Susquehanna. He hemmed and hawed a little, and then he told me a story about a guy who graduated and was a manager at a Chili’s. I signed up anyway.

My sophomore year, I showed up for “Intro to Fiction.” The professor was Tom Bailey, who was an alum of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and was publishing novels. The other kids were talking about all these books that they’d read, and all their favorite writers, and what their “process” was. I had no idea what they were talking about. I felt so out of place, so overwhelmed, that I skipped the second class.

But I did do the homework assignment. I wrote a story called “The Big One-Two”—it’s part of my novel now—and gave that to the class. It wasn’t very polished. It needed lots of fine-tuning. But my professor responded with praise and encouragement. It was confusing for me. I didn’t understand what he was reacting to, or what constituted good literature. I couldn’t see what they saw. But I’d been in so much academic trouble the year before, and I was struggling athletically, and I was glad at least one thing was seeming to go well.

If you guys like it, I thought, well—I do, too.

From there, I think I could feel my loyalties switching. It was a baffling paradigm shift from being a basketball player to becoming a writer, and it required a lot of soul searching. At the same time, I was out in the middle of central PA—which wasn’t the most hospitable place. I had fallen out of grace with a lot of the big basketball people, and the coach responsible for linking me into to Susquehanna wasn’t jazzed about the writing thing, and he didn’t have good things to say about it. It’s hard not to listen to what a coach you once trusted says is best. This was the guy who believed in me enough to pull me out of a bad situation in high school, and paid for me to come. It was a complicated split and it rattles your confidence to pursue another endeavor with no backing.

I’d burned a lot of my bridges at Susquehanna, by sophomore year, and the coach that put us at Susquehanna wanted us to leave. He said he saw a way forward for me. He wanted me to forget about the writing thing and go to Robert Morris, where he knew the head coach, who he thought could get me into shape. That world is all a big fraternity—he could get me a spot, he said. He’d even buy me a computer to write on if I’d behave.

The coach at Robert Morris at the time was Mike Rice—who was later fired from Rutgers for abusing his players. I was in the game early enough that I knew Coach Rice back in Boston. And I knew he was crazy—he was throwing balls at me, he was screaming at people. I left that workout feeling like I took part of something completely not OK. That man? Is a lunatic.

So, when my coach said, you go play for Mike Rice at Robert Morris, I was like: Have you lost your mind? I’ll pass on that one. And he snapped.

He said, You’re going to be an alcoholic. You’ll be suicidal. You’re not going to make any money. He said, What the hell is a writer going to do? You going to wait tables? He held his authority over my head. The message was: You’re coming out of my graces, so you better not run too far from the money pot. I knew our relationship couldn’t be the same after that.

But I had to figure something out. At a basketball camp one time I had a coach who said, “Listen guys, use the game but don’t let it use you.” In other words: don’t be 24 years old, still trying to reclassify yourself to get into a Division I school. You’re delaying the process of your life. Go to school, man! If it hasn’t happened, it hasn’t happened. The longer you skirt that truth—thinking it applies to everybody but you—the harder you fall on your face. But me, my teammates in college, nobody really prepared us for what would happen if it didn’t work out. I don’t think anyone really thought past that point. It was too hard to think, “Oh, so it’s just over now?”

So I decided to stay in Pennsylvania and keep writing, try to turn it into a viable Plan B. That summer, instead of working on my game, I stayed on campus to work in the library. I put myself in a well of books. It was total immersion. My “Intro to Fiction” teacher gave me reading suggestions—but I mostly blew them off. He broke it down for me in basketball terms: “You think your jump shot’s going to get better if you don’t work on it?” But I wasn’t a huge reader growing up. It had never been my thing. He’d kept telling me to read Love Medicine by Louise Erdrich, and though I’d tried and hadn’t cared for it, that summer I opened it again and just fell in. I had to ask myself: What the hell have I been doing? Why have I not been reading this?

I took his suggestions more seriously after that.

I remember reading “Sonny’s Blues,” “Nilda” by Junot Diaz, ZZ Packer’s stuff, Edward P. Jones, and James Alan McPherson. Jim McPherson's stuff made an impact on me especially: I’d never seen fireworks like that on the page. That’s when I started to realize, now this is the stuff I like.

As I read, my confidence in my ability to learn and comprehend grew too. And in Carter G. Woodson’s The Mis-Education of the Negro, I found a quote that I returned to countless times as I wrote Team Seven:

Philosophers have long conceded … that every man has two educations: that which is given to him, and the other that which he gives himself. Of the two kinds the latter is by far the more desirable. Indeed all that is most worthy in man he must work out and conquer for himself. It is that which constitutes our real and best nourishment. What we are merely taught seldom nourishes the mind like that which we teach ourselves.

I feel like I could have those words tattooed on my heart. I couldn’t only teach myself. I needed Tom Bailey to point out certain writers he knew I’d like, people I’d never find out about on my own. That’s the education you are given. But it’s another thing entirely to actually read these authors, see what they’re about, and decide how much they matter. Nobody can do that for you. That’s the kind of education you can only give yourself.

And it’s applicable in a broader sense, too: People are always going to be telling you who you are. But you’ve got to learn to make your own decisions about who you can and can’t be.

That fall, two things happened. I applied to the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. And I started playing the best basketball of my life.

As a senior in college, it was the first time I’d ever been healthy. At the same time, I could see my athletic life coming to a close. In my senior year bio, the first line was “Marcus Burke is healthy through preseason for the first time in his whole career.” I understood; how much longer could I do this to my body?

I would pray before every game that I didn’t get hurt. I got nervous every game. We’re all out here, and we’re all really strong. If someone hits you in the wrong way, that could be bad.

But it didn’t even necessarily take that. I saw guys get career-ending injuries just turning around on the court. Nothing drastic. I had a teammate—we were just laughing in the tunnel, and suddenly his ACL is done. Nothing dramatic had to happen. Your number can get pulled any day.

But I played. I played so well that eventually that coach reached out through my head coach on campus, and said he wanted to get back in touch. Basically, by the end of that season, me and that coach were back in touch. He said, “I can’t guarantee that you’re going to be playing the First Premier League overseas, but with these numbers you can get a roster spot somewhere. I can say you’ll be able to live, make some money, and figure out your life.”

When [Iowa Writers’ Workshop director] Sam Chang called, it was towards the end of the season. I was at team lunch, and I almost didn’t answer the call because I didn’t know the number. I answered it and Sam came through the phone—“This is the Workshop!”—I made such a fool of myself. I asked her name probably four times. I felt so vindicated. I kept yelling, “I’m going to come! I know already!” She kept saying, “slow down, slow down—I need to tell you: you have a fellowship!”

The world had taught me I could be a pretty decent basketball player. I’m grateful for that; it taught me a lot. But I taught myself, with the help of some great teachers, that I needed to write. So I went.

It’s very easy to be defined by your circumstances. We’re all dealt such drastically different hands of cards. Think about it: Some kids’ parents are 100 percent ready for their arrival. They have a dope room, great clothes, and a whole bunch of people ready to love them. Doesn’t that teach you certain things about yourself? But other kids, they pop up at a very inconvenient time for everybody. And that teaches you certain lessons, too.

Nonetheless, there comes a time when you start to just feel responsible for yourself. Yes, you’re at the mercy of whatever life grants you—but that second education is taking the power back. Developing the ability to say, well, certain things happened, but now I would like to do this or that, and I don’t see why I can’t. We’re always being told who we can be or we can’t be, we’re always having labels slapped on. This is what black guys do, exclusively. Or if you do that, you’re maybe not such a black guy. Of if you’re an athlete, you can’t write—and so on. The second education means broadening your horizons—taking risks to definite yourself against all odds. History is written every day, and nothing is certain. Maybe you’re writing towards a thought of school or tradition that you’re not really aware of yet—and maybe it doesn’t yet exist. But you can come to define it.

This is part of what’s at stake for me in literature. I refuse to be put in a box. I think I wrote a novel that’s not just “street lit.” And yes, while I’m an African-American writer—if you even want to say that, because it’s just a P.C. term for “black”—I’m not African-American in the way most people consider it, because my family comes from Jamaica, and not so long ago. (Jim McPherson would always joke—“The reason you get so charged up is because your family hasn’t been here that long. Your people are still trying to learn to be a minority. Your people in their recent past where in the land of majority, where they are. Don’t be a moral dandy, kid.”)

There aren’t many white characters in this novel, but I never thought about it. I wasn’t really trying to write “black” characters either. I’m blessed to say that everybody that I’ve worked with doesn’t really subscribe to that nonsense. One of the things that charmed me about my editor when we spoke—something that really moved me was, he said, “This isn’t just a ‘black’ story or a ‘white’ story. This is an international story. I wouldn’t want to ghettoize this story.”

Just because I’m a black guy doesn’t mean that every action that I make defines who I am in relation to my blackness. Of course, I know that people are tribal. Mankind doesn’t like what it doesn’t understand—if people can’t drop a couple boxes around something, we have a hard time saying what it is. We rely on those kinds of categories. It’s human nature. I don’t even look at it as a bad thing, necessarily. Every time you look at somebody, a whole bunch of boxes get checked. A certain amount of this is unavoidable.

And still, I think, we can transcend these labels, too. That is another one of my stakes in literature. When I came out to visit Iowa City, I went out to a bar to watch the Red Sox play. And there was a guy sitting there in a Pawtucket Red Sox hat. I thought, what is this guy doing out here, in the middle of Iowa, wearing a hat for the Red Sox minor league team? We started talking, and it turned out it was the writer Paul Harding—he was teaching at the Workshop that semester, and a few weeks later won the Pulitzer Prize. We had so much more in common than I could have known, sitting there: Boston guys, sports fans, writers. And that night, he told me something I’ll always remember.

“One of the only requirements for literature,” he said, “is that the reader can feel a heart pulsing back from them on the other side of the page.”

That feeling is indiscriminate. It’s not black or white; it’s classless, sexless. It doesn’t matter where you fall on any kind of spectrum: emotional truth is emotional truth. And this is the standard I’m trying to reach for. People are different and aesthetics are different—there’s so much variety in literature. But the universal needs the singular, and the singular must contain the universal. If you can put yourself in it, the labels fall away and it becomes art. 

When Sandra Hassan created the I Am Alive app, her intention was mostly dark humor. A 26-year-old graduate student in Paris, Hassan had gotten sick of worrying about family and friends whenever she heard news of a suicide bombing in her hometown of Beirut. A detonation on January 21, in the same neighborhood where a car bomb had exploded just three weeks earlier, spurred her to action. In what she describes as an “expression of discontent,” Hassan developed an app that allows users, with one touch, to tweet a reassuring message to their followers: “I am still alive! #Lebanon #LatestBombing.”

The app quickly caught on: within a month, it was downloaded more than 5,000 times. In addition to cultural commentary, it has provided a much-needed service to people who live in areas targeted by terrorists—and to those who care about them. The moments following a suicide bombing are, after all, among the worst times to make a phone call. Networks jam. Getting sent to voice mail induces dread. “It’s the same cycle each time,” Hassan says. “You have to rush to your phone or Facebook or Twitter to try to make sure that everyone you know is okay. It’s a horrible feeling.” On the ground, the trilling of victims’ phones becomes an eerie score to the aftermath.

Hassan now offers hashtags for other countries and allows users to post their statuses to Facebook. She also realized that the app might help in all kinds of crises. To that end, she is working with the nonprofit International Crisis Group to develop a version for use in situations from natural disasters to mass-transit accidents.

In the meantime, Hassan says she’s gotten e-mails from many people who are using the app “in much more peaceful ways.” Members of one jet-setting family told her that they use it to let one another know when their planes have safely touched the ground.

There was no transition at all, no sense of approaching danger. It was as if I had suddenly gone blind and deaf. I was aware that my legs were surrounded by water, but my top half was almost dry. I seemed to be trapped in something slimy. There was a terrible, sulphurous smell, like rotten eggs, and a tremendous pressure against my chest. My arms were trapped but I managed to free one hand and felt around – my palm passed through the wiry bristles of the hippo's snout. It was only then that I realised I was underwater, trapped up to my waist in his mouth.

-There is no way I would have survived this hippo attack, but this man did, and wrote about it at the Guardian.

RECIFE, Brazil — When Ivana Borges learned she was pregnant, she told her obstetrician that she wanted a natural birth. Her mother had delivered five children without surgery or medication, and Borges wanted to follow her example.

But when she returned the hospital after her water broke, the same doctor began persuading her that she should instead deliver by caesarean section.

“He told me I wasn’t getting dilated enough,” Borges told me the other day in Recife. “I said, ‘I can wait!’ Then he started joking that I couldn’t handle the pain.”

He pestered her while she labored for six hours, and gradually the then-24-year-old Borges began feeling powerless and overwhelmed. She caved. The C-section commenced, but that wasn’t the end of the doctor’s heckling.

“He was saying, ‘I was at a birthday party, and I want this done fast because I want to go back and finish my whiskey,’” she said.

Borges said the experience was so traumatic that she sought psychiatric help for depression after the birth.

Doctors and activists here say Borges's experience is fairly common among women who give birth in the country’s private hospitals, where 82 percent of all babies are born by C-section. Brazil has a free, public healthcare system, but many of its wealthier residents–about a quarter of the population–use a private insurance scheme that functions much like the U.S. medical system.

With the higher price of the private system comes better amenities and shorter wait times, but also all of the trappings of fee-for-service medical care. C-sections can be easily scheduled and quickly executed, so doctors schedule and bill as many as eight procedures a day rather than wait around for one or two natural births to wrap up.

“It’s a money machine,” Borges said.

The economics of private insurance certainly play a role, but culture is a big part of what drives the C-section epidemic here.

“Childbirth is something that is primitive, ugly, nasty, inconvenient,” Simone Diniz, associate professor in the department of maternal and child health at the University of São Paulo, said. “It takes long, and the idea is we have to make it fast. It’s impolite for doctors to leave cases for the doctors on the next shift–there’s a sense that you need to either accelerate it or do a C-section.”

Even in public hospitals, the C-section rate is roughly half. Because so many patients are booked in advance for C-section procedures, women who want natural births find themselves on zero-hour sojourns to find free beds. One Sao Paulo doctor told me that some physicians ask for bribes in exchange for allowing mothers to deliver naturally. And in an extreme example from earlier this month, a woman named Adelir Carmen Lemos de Goés was forced by police to deliver by C-section in the southern Brazilian state of Rio Grande do Sul.       

"There is no doubt that, even if it contains unnecessary or even greater risk to the mother or the newborn, ceasarean section has a much lower risk for the obstetrician,” wrote a 2005 editorial in the Brazilian Journal of Obstetrics and Gynecology.

Granted, many women ask for the procedure of their own accord, seeing the convenience and sterility of it all as a marker of liberation rather than oppression. Rio and Sao Paulo are dotted with upscale C-section resort clinics where women get post-op manicures and room service.

But a 2001 study of Brazilian women published in the British Medical Journal concluded that the country’s rise in C-sections was driven primarily by unwanted procedures rather than personal preference. And some women elect to go under the knife only after hearing about the rough treatment of mothers who choose the alternative.

"Here, when a woman is going to give birth, even natural birth, the first thing many hospitals do is tie her to the bed by putting an IV in her arm, so she can't walk, can't take a bath, can't hug her husband. The use of drugs to accelerate contractions is very common, as are episiotomies," Maria do Carmo Leal, a researcher at the National Public Health School at the Oswaldo Cruz Foundation, told the AP. "What you get is a lot of pain, and a horror of childbirth. This makes a cesarean a dream for many women."

Many physicians’ attitudes toward childbirth weave together Brazil’s macho culture with traditional sexual mores.

“There’s the idea that the experience of childbirth should be humiliating,” Diniz said. “When women are in labor, some doctors say, ‘When you were doing it, you didn't complain, but now that you're here, you cry.’”

This brashness manifests itself in other types of interventions during labor. Though Brazilian law mandates that all women be allowed doulas or birthing companions, few moms are actually accompanied by such helpers. In past years, some Brazilian cities tried to bar companions from hospitals entirely.

Diniz said many doctors unnecessarily overuse fundal pressure – pushing on the pregnant woman’s stomach – to speed things along, and that they administer the labor hormone oxytocin more frequently than needed. The vast majority of women who give birth vaginally also have episiotomies, or surgical cuts to the vagina that are intended to make delivery easier.

“We have a really serious problem in Brazil that the doctors over-cite evidence [of fetal distress],” said Paula Viana, head of a women’s rights nonprofit in Recife. “They think they can interfere as they would like."

***

There’s nothing wrong with C-sections, of course – they can be life-saving for women with distressed babies or difficult deliveries. And most of the activists who are concerned about rising C-section rates think women should be able to opt for the procedure if they really want one.

But it’s still a major abdominal surgery that brings with it a chance of complications, infection, and neonatal challenges, not to mention placental problems that might impact future births. Women who have C-sections that are not medically necessary are at a greater risk of death, blood transfusions, and hysterectomies, a 2010 World Health Organization study found. The WHO has, until recently, recommended that C-sections be limited to only 15 percent of all births.

But the rate in many other countries, including Brazil, is much higher. In China, nearly half of all babies are delivered this way, with some women finding it a simple way to choose a “lucky” birthday. In the U.S., the rate has reached 30 percent after rising for decades. Experts say that among American doctors, fear of litigation is what prompts them to reach for the scalpel.

The increase is “really based on protecting the institution and ourselves,” obstetrician Peter Doelger told WNPR. “And, you can’t blame them. Getting sued is a horrible thing for the physician, a horrible thing for the nurse, and a horrible thing for the institution."

Jesusa Ricoy-Olariaga, a Spanish doula and mothers’ rights activist, helped organize a series of rallies in multiple countries on Friday that called for the improved treatment of women in labor worldwide. The protesters used the social media hashtag #SomasTodasAdelir – we are all Adelir.

“Brazil has highlighted this issue, but it's shouting a secret,” Ricoy-Olariaga told me by phone. “The issue is the same in other countries, but in a different manner. There are countries where birth is industrialized and dominated by men, and there's very little input from women.”

For its part, Brazil is working to reverse course and promote natural births. The federal government is spending $4 billion on a program – dubbed “the Stork Network” – that plans to educate both mothers and doctors about the benefits of giving birth the old-fashioned way.

But women at the small #SomasTodasAdelir rally in Recife on Friday said it will take a major cultural shift, as well. Mariana Bahia told me that when she miscarried a few months ago, her obstetrician treated her brusquely because she suspected Bahia had attempted to abort her fetus, which is illegal here.

Bahia said she wants to see women wield greater autonomy in the maternity ward – and to see doctors’ bullying behavior punished.

“There’s no horizontality between patients and doctors,” Bahia said. “Doctors are always above us.”

Olga Khazan is reporting from Brazil as a fellow with the International Reporting Project.

You guys have likely read the BBC story about the 13-year-old Kazakh girl who hunts with eagles in western Mongolia; if you haven't, you must; the Ashol-Pan Lifetime Admiration Society starts now and ends never. ("I will endeavor to make myself worthy of you for the rest of my life, you eagle-wielding teen who strides the narrow world," wrote Mallory Ortberg yesterday.) It's a tough fucking life being a young girl in Central Asia, let alone one who is challenging gender norms, let alone one who is doing so by hunting with eagles: after a year of being harassed out of my skull in Kyrgyzstan I'd still barely seen things my female students already counted unremarkable. In a couple of those beautiful photos Ashol-Pan (off-duty) wears the same space-maid schoolgirl aprons they did, sits in one of those meticulous unheated schoolrooms with the blue-green walls and the white mountain light filtering in from the side. She looks, actually, a lot like an eighth-grade girl I taught once:

She's hidden in there among all the other Ashol-Pans. Bless the teenagers of Central Asia. These kids weren't eagle hunting but they were certainly better than me in almost every way: kinder, more generous, more spontaneous, more loving, more brave. Yesterday I was reading that Salon piece about how young girls often view assault as normal male behavior; two years ago I was listening to my 12-year-old host sister, who spoke four languages and halfway ran the household, tell me matter-of-factly that I shouldn't wear a skirt on the bus because men, as she knew from experience, would try to get under it. I guess what I'm trying to say about Ashol-Pan is that there is only one of her, as there should be with all perfect beings, but there are also a million of her, girls who are used to having to build the fires that keep them warm at night, and I hope they ride the sea change that's happening in their generation to enormous ahistorical things.

One day, some drug dealer bought a particular digital scale—the AWS-100— on the retail site, Amazon.com. And then another drug dealer bought the same scale. Then another. Then another.

Amazon's data-tracking software watched what else these people purchased, and now, if you buy the AWS-100 scale, Amazon serves up a quickstart kit for selling drugs.

Along with various scale-related paraphernalia, we find: 

• Many "spice" grinders
• Pipe screens
• A rolling paper and tray bundle
• Bulk pure caffeine powder (perhaps to cut heroin?)
• Baggies
• More baggies
• Skull baggies
• Pot-leaf baggies
• An encapsulation machine and gelatin capsules
• A scientific spatula
• A diamond tester (?!)
• "Air Tight Odorless Medical Jar Herb Stash Medicine Container"
• Digital caliper
• Tweezer and snifter set for "miners and prospectors"
• A tool for cleaning a gun part
• A safe in the form of a Dr. Pepper can
• Potassium Metabisulfite (for decontamination?)
• A drug testing kit ("this kit contains the same reagent chemicals as found in Justice Department test kits")
• A really powerful magnet
• "TAP DAT ASH" ashtray
• Beta alanine powder (maybe for bodybuilders?)
• An actual drug called kratom (big in Thailand, apparently)

This is classic data mining at work. Even if each scale purchaser only made one other drug-related purchase, when you look at the clusters, the pattern becomes obvious.

Amazon clearly did not set out to create such a field-tested kit for starting an illicit business. But looking at the list of items, it sure seems like they've created a group of products by looking at the purchasing habits of people who may not be recording all of their incomes on W-2s and 1099s. Not everyone who buys one of these scales is a drug dealer, but... it sure seems popular among a demographic in need of baggies. 

So, how long until police departments find an AWS-100 scale and request account information from Amazon?

The digital-rights advocacy group, EFF, has dinged Amazon's terms of service for its lack of transparency around how they cooperate with law enforcement: "The service is not making clear to their users what standards and rules law enforcement must follow when they seek access to sensitive user data." 

Privacy, such as it is on the web, is collective. Beware who you share purchases or click-patterns with. 

Are you kidding me right now. [via]