Andrea

It was well known that Seattle Mayor Jenny Durkan is running a secretive administration, but a whistleblower complaint last week revealed a bombshell revelation that Durkan likely committed a felony while seeking to shield her personal text messages from the public eye in an apparent coverup. Stacy Irwin, a public records officer in the Mayor’s Office, filed the whistleblower complaint, and she told The Seattle Times that Durkan placed her on unpaid administration leave in apparent retaliation. Irwin’s coworker Kim Ferreiro supported her whistleblower complaint and resigned, partly out of fear in retaliation.

The Seattle Times reported that 10 months of text messages from one of the Mayor’s work phones had been deleted in violation of public disclosure laws. The period covered the first four weeks of protests following George Floyd’s murder when Mayor Durkan oversaw the repeated tear gassing of Capitol Hill, brutal police tactics against protesters, and the abandonment of the East Precinct building.

“Durkan’s texts were not retained from late August 2019 to June 25, 2020, a whistleblower investigation report revealed last week,” Lewis Kamb and Daniel Beekman wrote. “In an email Tuesday responding to several days of questions about how that happened, the Mayor’s Office said a forensic analysis has determined that Durkan’s text retention was set to 30 days ‘on one of the three phones issued’ to her at some point between late August 2019 and July 24, 2020.”

“At all times, the Mayor believed and had assumed all her text messages (iMessages and SMS messages), calendar and emails were backed up and available to anyone and would be quickly and fully produced,” Durkan’s chief of staff, Stephanie Formas, said in a statement to The Seattle Times. That claim hardly holds up to scrutiny for a number of reasons.

Very likely that Mayor Durkan committed a felony by setting her work phone to delete text messages after 30 days. https://t.co/Q1pQoccQdF

— The Urbanist (@UrbanistOrg) May 12, 2021

No innocent mistake

First off, anyone who had submitted a public disclosure request to the Mayor’s Office can testify they are never completed quickly and fully. A request often takes six months and comes heavily redacted typically.

Erica C. Barnett of Publicola noted she had placed six requests specifically asking for text messages and reported she had never been informed that a huge chunk of text messages was missing and had received responses with only emails pretending like the missing text messages never existed — nor has she received an explanation now that the news is out. Apparently, only The Seattle Times and KUOW were deemed worthy of that information. That means they violated public disclosure laws again by not informing journalists who made public records requests for text messages that they had lost them and filling those requests as if nothing was amiss.

Secondly, Durkan had been reprimanded in a 2019 settlement stemming from Deputy Mayors deleting text messages during the head tax debacle. She and the legal counsel (Michelle Chen) she continues to employ were instructed to get “refresher training” on public disclosure rules and recordkeeping practices. To proceed to destroy 10 months of text messages within the next year does not seem an accident. It would appear either grossly negligent or a purposeful coverup.

A Mayor already reprimanded for deleting text messages setting her phone to delete text messages after 30 days better be very sure they were being backed up elsewhere. A responsible public servant would verify before choosing this setting, which isn’t a default. Safer options of deleting text messages after a year or never deleting them were sitting right there. The claim of ignorance here is hard to take.

Thirdly, the context suggests a coverup. These suspicions are bolstered by the fact that five members of senior command at the Seattle Police Department also deleted their text messages. That means the question of who ordered the abandonment of East Precinct hasn’t been definitively answered, with both Durkan and former Police Chief Carmen Best denying they gave the order. It’s possible a subordinate made the call independently as they claim, but without the text messages to confirm this story, it’s a very convenient explanation.

City Attorney Pete Holmes is investigating the whistleblower complaint and found that both Police Chief Best and Fire Chief Harold Scoggins had deleted or lost their text messages from June. “The six other officials whose texts weren’t retained, per [City Attorney spokesperson Dan] Nolte, include four members of the Police Department’s command staff: Chris Fisher, Eric Greening, Valarie Anderson and Deanna Nollette,” Kamb and Beekman reported. While Scoggins’ text messages were apparently lost when he got locked out of his phone, Nolte said they are still investigating why Best’s text messages disappeared.

Mayoral candidates react, spar with each other

The scandalous news elicited a variety of responses from candidates running to replace Durkan as mayor. Andrew Grant Houston is the only candidate to specifically call for Mayor Durkan’s removal and reiterated his support for the campaign to recall Durkan, which wasn’t able to convince a judge to allow the recall measure to proceed last year — though that campaign hadn’t had the full public records to make their case.

“The answer is not more systems and Seattle Process. It’s not ‘elect me, I’m a good one’ and calls for less bureaucracy. It’s not punting the issue to someone else as someone who themselves deletes communications when it no longer serves them but certainly haven’t taken a different stance either,” Houston wrote in a statement. “The answer is removing our current Mayor who, time and time again, has shown us she is incapable of leading and following the law, even as a career prosecutor. We’ve called for Durkan’s resignation and/or recall for a year now. This is long overdue.”

As Council President, Lorena González is in the unique position to bring about out her proposed accountability measures — granted that power is limited in scope. Recent entry into the Mayoral race, Deputy Mayor Casey Sixkiller is in the opposite position of being a part of the administration in coverup and cleanup mode, and seems to have sidestepped the issue.

Meanwhile Colleen Echohawk, called on Washington State Attorney General (AG) Bob Ferguson to investigate the Mayor, which he is yet to take her up on. In her letter, she cast shade on the idea this was just a innocent series of accidents:

“Perhaps there genuinely was an ‘unknown technological issue’ that simultaneously affected the Mayor, the Police Chief and the Fire Chief, in which case the City should immediately undertake a significant security assessment of those communication systems,” Echohawk’s letter to the AG’s office reads. “Or, perhaps they conspired to destroy evidence and violate the law to cover up their actions and escape the unavoidable public scrutiny of incredibly divisive decisions.”

González has proposed putting together an independent office to manage recordkeeping and public disclosure requests in partnership with the City Attorney’s Office. Fellow candidate Jessyn Farrell, meanwhile, argued that amounts to government waste and a symbolic non-solution: “This is why our city’s leaders have failed to solve big problems like homelessness. Rather than exercising fiscal discipline tethered to our values, they are just adding process after process at the taxpayers’ expense,” she tweeted.

This is why our city's leaders have failed to solve big problems like homelessness. Rather than exercising fiscal discipline tethered to our values, they are just adding process after process at the taxpayers' expense.

We need more than the appearance of action. We need results.

— Jessyn Farrell (@jessynfarrell) May 10, 2021

Whether leaders who claim to be “tethered to our values” will stay that way in the heat of a scandal is a pretty big leap of faith. Mayor Durkan has made a mockery of public disclosure laws and basic transparency. To restore institutional trust after such a scandal-prone, bumbling administration will likely take more than pinky swears.

This article has been updated with Colleen Echohawk’s statement.

Jenny Durkan Is a Failed Mayor

We've written about Bill C-10, the Canadian government's attempt to bring online services under the auspices of the country's broadcast regulator, the CRTC, and the way the story about the bill keeps shifting and the promises about what it supposedly won't do keep being broken.

Now, work on the the bill has been paused after lawmakers from all four parties voted to ask the Department of Justice for a fresh analysis of its legality under the Charter of Rights and Freedoms. They've also asked for the bill's champion, Heritage Minister Steven Guilbeault, and others to come before the committee and discuss its implications. But Guilbeault has consistently demonstrated a total inability to give clear answers (or, sometimes, any answers at all) to questions people raise about their concerns with the bill. This has been made "crystal clear" (a term Guilbeault has wrongly applied to the muddy and vague bill itself) by some of his responses over the past couple of weeks.

First, at the end of April, Guilbeault was pressed for details in an interview on the CBC, with host David Common asking why the exclusion for social media content was removed from the bill and how the Minister can still claim it won't be impacted (you can watch the full interview here). As you can see, his answer — inasmuch as it constitutes an answer — is not very convincing:

Why won't Bill C-10 impact user content on social media? Because they're "not interested" in doing that and it's not the bill's "purpose". Oh and also the bill isn't finished. The fact that an exclusion to specifically prevent regulation of social media was removed is, apparently, irrelevant. The powers granted by the actual text of the bill are, apparently, irrelevant. The idea that regulators would use the regulatory powers given to them by the bill "has no basis in reality". Just trust him.

Not convinced? Well, a few days later in the legislature, Guilbeault was pressed by an opposition Member of Parliament on the free expression implications of the bill, and he gave even less of an answer:

Yes, you saw that — Guilbeault immediately pivoted to the completely unrelated topic of reproductive rights and lobbed accusations of hypocrisy at the questioner. Those accusations might not be entirely baseless, but they are entirely irrelevant to this subject that is of extreme importance to all Canadians, not just those on the opposite side of the political aisle from Guilbeault. The Minister also accused another MP of lying about the bill, and was reprimanded in the House of Commons and pressed to withdraw his statement. The Liberal party would very much like it if people viewed opposition to Bill C-10 as a purely partisan effort coming from disingenuous and dishonest opposition politicians, but nothing could be further from the truth.

But Guilbeault's evasiveness and foundering doesn't stop there. The latest interview (watch the whole thing here), in which he changed his previous story and stated that the bill will enable the regulation of users on platforms like YouTube, might be the worst one yet:

Guilbeault manages to contradict himself in a matter of seconds. After the understandably frustrated interviewer presses him, yet again, on his promises that the bill won't regulate social media users, he emphatically insists "individuals are exempt from this la-" and can't quite make it to the end of the word "law" before cutting himself off to say "or will be, once it's adopted". Then, in the very next sentence, he says that the bill will apply to individuals who "act like broadcasters" then vaguely asserts that such people are somehow completely distinct from "everyday citizens". As we discussed in the previous post, he then goes on to be completely unable to clarify how this line would be drawn. And then, the next day, he backtracked these comments and made more insistent promises that users will not be regulated.

Even Canadians who know very little about the subject of online regulation are noticing how desperate and vague Guilbeault gets every time he's pressed for details, and are unimpressed by his obviously evasive deflections in parliament. Now even MPs from his own party are seeking answers. If the government is going to do what it should and toss out C-10 to start over with a brand new bill, it also needs to find a more capable and trustworthy champion for it.

Netflix released Bridgerton on Christmas Day, and while it’s not meant to be a strictly historical portrayal of Regency life, the big inaccuracy that caught my eye just from the trailer was the costumes. Not only did the show seem to be using costumes from different centuries, with typical Regency looks from around the late eighteen-teens mashed against much earlier looks from forty years prior, but they also did the thing I hate in period movies and made a joke about a woman not being able to breathe in a corset.

You see, pretty much everything you think you know about corsets, bodices, stays, and period undergarments, in general, is probably wrong.

First off, let’s get some terminology out of the way because it can get very messy, even for dress historians, thanks to the way language evolves. Just ask Abby Cox, who did a really comprehensive video on her YouTube channel about the distinction last month, and whose content on corsets and stays, in general, is amazing. “Corsets” as a term for a boned and laced support garment is a relatively new term, according to Cox. The word corset didn’t quite take off until maybe the Victorian era, and usually meant a support garment that wasn’t boned.

Before this most such garments were called “stays,” or “bodies” in an earlier era. (You can see how “bodies” possibly morphed into the word “bodice.”) What we think of as a “corset,” with tight lacing meant to constrict the waist specifically, reached peak popularity in the Victorian era. But before that, undergarments were actually far more comfortable than what movies would have us believe.

Let’s discuss the Rocco/Georgian period first. The typical undergarment of this era, usually stays, varied, like all clothes do, but the emphasis was on conical torso shape, a flat front, and not necessarily on a teeny-tiny waist. The illusion of a smaller waist was created by large skirts, padding, and hoop structure, and but the purpose of a pair of stays, or bodies, was as more bust support and posture than it was to make someone appear thinner. Here’s an example from the Fashion Museum in Bath:

Stays and corsets of the ers would often be embellished and visible under a dress. And they were also highly adjustable for those days when you were a bit more bloated, or for pregnancy. But these were what most women wore, day-to-day; what women worked and lived in. They supported busts and made clothes look better over them. They weren’t the torture devices we like to think of when it comes to ye olde days.

This was even more true of undergarments in the Empire and Regency eras. The fashions of this era were crafted in a direct counterpoint to the frilly, structured, over-the-top fashion of the pre-revolutionary era and a response to the supposed decadence of things like the French monarchy. Women’s clothes of the era were meant to emphasize a more natural silhouette and soft curves. This not only makes the mixing of style in Bridgerton even more confusing, but it also reminds us that restrictive, waist-cinching corsets just … were not a thing in the era of Austen. Waistlines were very high, right below the bust (we call that an empire waist for a reason!) and so there was no need for tummy flattening or waist reduction.

That means that the scene from the trailers and seen in the top image would never have happened!

That’s not to say there were no undergarments, but they were more concerned with providing structure and support for the bust, which was emphasized. It wasn’t until decades later that corsets cam back in style, and even then, the Victorian “wasp waist” was even later and not nearly as prevalent a fashion as you might think. Most fashionable silhouettes were achieved through a combination of corsetry, padding, and tailoring. And even so, that fashionable silhouette was always evolving.

In fact, what really defines our ideas about corsets and other such garments isn’t the body standards of the past, but those of the present. While it’s true that corsets were restrictive in many eras, that wasn’t always the case. We see it that way because that’s what beauty standards are doing to women right now.

The idea that stays, bodies, and corsets existed to squeeze women into an ideal thin shape is not really accurate, because the veneration of extreme thinness as the female ideal body is something that’s in many ways a modern idea. The “ideal” body has varied tremendously over the years, and when we assume corsets of ages past only existed to make people look skinny, we’re placing our modern ideal onto the garments.

In movies and shows like Bridgerton or Pirates of the Caribbean or Ever After filmmakers use corsetry inaccurately as shorthand for female oppression and unfair body standards. But corsets so tight you couldn’t breathe simply were not the standard in the eras in which these films were set. And it’s even more offensive because often the women getting forced into these evil, restrive garments are already super skinny. That’s just lazy and it should stop.

Screenwriters and costume designers often fall back on our ideas and stereotypes about the past, instead of doing their research. They’ve seen a dozen movies going back to Gone With The Wind where women were forcefully laced into corsets to meet some barbaric beauty standard so they just throw it in their show too. But real history is far more complex and the history of fashion is as complex as the history of humanity.

Hollywood can’t pat themselves for being so evolved that we don’t wear corsets anymore while it still promotes all but unattainable body images. Just like with so many other things, we can’t excuse the present by demonizing the past as a means of saying we’ve improved. We need to be honest about both and give ourselves so real breathing room.

(image: Netflix)

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The post Pretty Much Everything Movies Have Told You About Corsets Is Wrong first appeared on The Mary Sue.

When the Walt Disney Company spent $4 billion to acquire Lucasfilm in 2012, they were amassing a galaxy’s worth of characters, sagas, and intellectual property. In short order, Disney churned out a new trilogy, standalone films, a hit series, a theme park and more, all in service of the world of Star Wars. But as Disney rakes in billions in Star Wars revenue, they refuse to pay royalties on the franchise’s novelizations.

According to the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America association, Star Wars novelists have been shut off from royalties, as have fellow novelists for 20th Century Fox’s library, which include books set in the worlds of Alien and Buffy the Vampire Slayer, among others.

One such novelist is Alan Dean Foster, who wrote the original novelization of Star Wars: A New Hope and has penned countless Star Wars novelizations since. In his original contract with George Lucas in the 1970s, Foster was paid $7,500 upfront, with a 0.5% royalty on sales that have since earned him that original fee several times over. Foster, a notable name among fans the world over, is now in his mid-70s, and doesn’t understand why a multi-billion dollar corporation like Disney is bilking him out of a few thousand dollars.

“I’m not Steve Spielberg. I’m not Steve King. I don’t even have a name that starts with Steve,” Foster said. He only discovered the lack of royalty checks after the Disney-Fox merger in 2019, when he abruptly stopped receiving royalties for the three Alien novels he penned. His lawyer contacted Disney, where he was told that while the company acquired the rights to the books, they were not beholden to any royalties.

If that sounds ridiculous to you, imagine how it must sound to Foster. “Disney has acquired a house with a mortgage on it. They want to keep living in the house. They don’t want to pay the mortgage,” he said succintly. And he’s not alone: Donald Glut, who novelized The Empire Strikes Back, and James Kahn, who wrote the book for Return of the Jedi, have both claimed they were missing royalty checks as well.

In an open letter to Disney, Foster wrote, “All these books are all still very much in print. They still earn money. For you. When one company buys another, they acquire its liabilities as well as its assets. You’re certainly reaping the benefits of the assets. I’d very much like my miniscule (though it’s not small to me) share.”

The Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America association is raising awareness on the issue with the hashtag #DisneyMustPay. SFWA’s President, Mary Robinette Kowal, released a statement saying,

“In my decade with the organization, the fact that we are forced to present this publicly is unprecedented. So too, are the problems. The simple problem is that we have a writer who is not being paid.

The larger problem has the potential to affect every writer. Disney’s argument is that they have purchased the rights but not the obligations of the contract. In other words, they believe they have the right to publish work, but are not obligated to pay the writer no matter what the contract says. If we let this stand, it could set precedent to fundamentally alter the way copyright and contracts operate in the United States. All a publisher would have to do to break a contract would be to sell it to a sibling company.”

Disney released their own statement, saying “We are carefully reviewing whether any royalty payments may have been missed as a result of acquisition integration and will take appropriate remedial steps if that is the case.” It’s still a puzzling decision considering that these royalties are a mere drop in the bucket for the multi-billion dollar corporation.

Many took to social media in support of Foster and his fellow authors, demanding that Disney pay these writers what they’re owed.

…he is not alone. At least half a dozen authors have come forward to report that #DisneyMustPay them royalties for their novelizations of Disney properties as well. If you are having a similar problem, please report it here: https://t.co/0f2KKEVncv
To raise awareness, RT. pic.twitter.com/EAwBvo8ks4

— Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America (@sfwa) December 19, 2020

I did not like that episode of that show as much as you liked that episode of that show. And that’s okay. Also, #DisneyMustPay Alan Dean Foster, Mike Stackpole, and other writers please and thank you.

— Chuck Wendig (@ChuckWendig) December 19, 2020

Can't wait to watch the Mandalorian and join the convo once Disney pays Alan Dean Foster.#DisneyMustPay

— E.E. Knight (@EE_Knight) December 19, 2020

Disney must pay the writers.
Alan Dean Foster is due his royalties.#disneymustpay pic.twitter.com/4SuemhNEik

— Owen K.C. Stephens has a Patreon! (@Owen_Stephens) December 13, 2020

The best part of the Mandalorian season finale is when Mando straightens up and looks to the horizon and everything is still and perfect and despite his helmet you can see him thinking about how Disney needs to pay its fucking writers otherwise there’s no content #disneymustpay pic.twitter.com/OZi1sWd5Ir

— E. Catherine Tobler (@ECthetwit) December 18, 2020

(via Wall Street Journal, featured image: Del Rey/Ballantine Books)

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The post Disney Bails on Paying Book Royalties to Star Wars Novelists first appeared on The Mary Sue.

I've never been brought back to Earth so fast. pic.twitter.com/p7g96UzNOL

— Mike Scollins (@mikescollins) December 15, 2020

Here's a rather odd juxtaposition of a Nightline promo read over the end credits of A Muppet Family Christmas. Even stranger are those responding to the tweet who seemingly missed the entire point of it:

I think what @mikescollins is trying to say with this tweet is that the infants life is worth more but it'd be good if he clarified

— David Hill (@davehill77) December 16, 2020

Restaurants are getting creative with their winter setups. But some changes might make dining out riskier.

To the surprise of many restaurant patrons and public health experts, outdoor dining has begun to migrate indoors. Or, as one Twitter user put it, it’s become “indoor dining on the sidewalk.”

Pandemic restrictions on restaurants vary by jurisdiction or state, with some enacting bans or requiring reduced capacity on indoor dining. Many restaurants, therefore, heavily invested in outdoor dining setups when stay-at-home orders were lifted or lightened. That drew in customers — at least until temperatures began to drop.

In parts of the country with colder winters, restaurants have drummed up temporary solutions to persuade guests to dine out for as long as possible, before snow-induced winter hibernation sets in. Many establishments have been tasked with figuring out how to make outdoor dining appear invitingly cozy, with little to no federal or state regulations on how streetery setups should look.

Outdoor restaurants have exchanged their bright Campari umbrellas for space heaters and heat lamps, canopy tents with vinyl flaps, and plastic bubble igloos decked out with string lights. Some have even hired workers to construct semi-enclosed wooden huts, which serve as restaurant-adjacent sunrooms with more dining space. Most of these creative architectural creations are intended to keep customers warm in the winter. It might not, though, keep them safe — or as safe as outdoor dining could be with uninterrupted airflow and plenty of space between patrons.

People have become more attuned to how performative measures championed by restaurants and bars (temperature checks and frequent surface sanitizing) don’t do a good job at protecting customers in high-risk situations. But with the cold weather, it seems that patrons have been lulled into believing that “outdoor” dining — even when it isn’t really outdoors — is not as risky.

An environmental engineering professor told Vice News that it’s no longer accurate to categorize a setup as “outdoor dining” if there are multiple walls or sides to an enclosure. It might be tempting to think that a semi-enclosed vinyl tent or bubble has just the right amount of outdoor air mixed with indoor warmth. However, the air exchange rate might be lower than that of a completely outdoor space.

“You’re actually creating an environment where the virus is within the enclosure,” Abraar Karan, a doctor at Brigham and Women’s Hospital, told the New York Times. Epidemiologists have emphasized how ventilation is crucial when it comes to preventing airborne spread of the coronavirus, which is more likely to occur in communal indoor spaces. There are no perfectly safe indoor environments during the pandemic, even if the space is well-ventilated or equipped with air purifiers. Plus, patrons aren’t able to wear masks when they’re eating or drinking. More often than not, streetery tents and huts are flimsy and small, and diners are usually seated closer than the six feet apart recommended by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

William Bahnfleth, a Pennsylvania State University professor of architectural engineering, told me in October that restaurants should focus on increasing their indoor air change rate, which is the frequency at which air in a space is recycled. This reduces the likelihood of customers inhaling viral particles. Plexiglass partitions or vinyl flaps, for example, could impede the natural airflow of an environment. It’s a trade-off some restaurants have to consider: Airflow is important, but how long will a guest stay seated if they’re bombarded by chilly winds?

“My feeling is that it’s very hard to tell if a space is well-ventilated,” Bahnfleth said. “You might be able to tell if it’s poorly ventilated, but even that could be misleading. I would recommend that you dine entirely outside where there’s good air movement.”

Bloomberg reported that New York City is one of the few jurisdictions that have policies to define outdoor dining as part of its Open Restaurants program. If a restaurant has two or more open side walls, the city allows the setup to operate under outdoor dining guidelines (patrons six feet apart, and no parties larger than 10); if there are three or more side walls, the 25 percent capacity rule for indoor dining must be applied. For plastic domes, igloos, and other enclosed structures, there must be “adequate ventilation to allow for air circulation.” That said, it’s uncertain whether city officials are actively enforcing these rules.

Restaurant operators are spending thousands of additional dollars to erect their winter setups, as cities and states implement policies in response to climbing Covid-19 case numbers. These expenses are arriving at the end of a financially disastrous year. Small businesses have received little to no support from the federal government; some don’t qualify for assistance from the Paycheck Protection Program (PPP) or have held back from spending the money, out of fear that they won’t be able to repay the loans, Eater reported.

On top of the devil’s bargain restaurants have been forced to make, there’s the added concern about how severe the winter will be, and whether their setups are weatherproof and worth the investment. In New York City’s East Village, at least one wooden dining structure was toppled onto the street by strong gusts of wind. The restaurant owner told Curbed this was the third time it has happened, and that he’s unable to spend more money to make it sturdier (its construction cost $2,000).

Most cash-strapped businesses don’t have the means to invest in an entirely new outdoor setup to stay open through the winter months — especially when the promise of customers is fickle. More people are being urged to stay home due to rising case numbers, or deterred by the cold weather. It’s also possible that cities can shut down outdoor dining temporarily, as Los Angeles did for three weeks. It’s a lot of risk to winterize a space with little reward.

At 5:20pm Monday, Bellevue Police received a call about a pedestrian-driver collision near Crossroads Park. A 92-year-old gentleman was walking along NE 8th St and only a block away from his home when a driver struck him in the roadway, killing him.

Update: the 92-year-old victim was out for a walk & attempted to cross NE 8th St to go home. The male driver, in his 50s, says he never saw the victim enter the roadway. The driver is cooperating with investigators—no sign of impairment. pic.twitter.com/Z27pJqvnbg

— Bellevue, WA Police (@BvuePD) December 1, 2020

This tragedy marks the fourth death on city streets in 2020 and the ninth in the last 15 months. Eight victims have been pedestrians or cyclists who were struck by drivers, and seven of those have been people over 60 years of age. 2019 saw the most deaths plus serious injuries on Bellevue streets in more than a decade, and 2020 isn’t faring much better.

Much is left to be investigated about how this collision occurred, but that hasn’t stopped the internet comment wars about who is ultimately at fault for this incident. That police were quick to note the cooperative and unimpaired nature of the driver as they listened to his side of the story will invariably lead people to blame the pedestrian for his own death–I believe it’s unfortunate that we will not be able to grant the same privilege of attentive listening to the victim. However, I would argue that this isolated search for fault (which is frustratingly so fundamental to our legal system and our perception of guilt) pits residents against one another and misses a larger picture. The statistics I just cited show that this collision is not an isolated incident. In fact, this is the third fatality on NE 8th St in the last 15 months alone.

The framework of Vision Zero (a pledge adopted in many cities, including Bellevue, to reduce collision fatalities and serious injuries to zero by 2030) rightly emphasizes a systemic approach to road safety. Proposals that focus on individual responsibility, such as public awareness campaigns and enforcement, can only go so far, because people will make mistakes. The key to achieving our Vision Zero goals will lie in adaptations to our transportation infrastructure that make it impossible for such injuries and fatalities to occur–even when people make mistakes. Although this may sound like a monumental task, the application of quick, tactical road modifications to improve transit, bicycle, and pedestrian mobility while introducing road conditions that encourage lower vehicle speeds has been accomplished worldwide with significant success.

And even though our history of suburban land use patterns currently makes mobility outside of a car in many areas difficult, that does not make us unique, special, or immune from applying these known solutions — especially in our mixed-use areas with frequent pedestrian and cyclist traffic. Bellevue, ever the data-oriented city, already knows which streets are in the most urgent need of safety modifications. Through study and analysis, city staff know that 56% of Bellevue’s fatality and serious injury crashes occur on just 7% of the city’s street network.

And guess which road comes out on top as having the most collisions?

With this context in mind (and until we have more information regarding the exact circumstances of Monday’s collision), let’s examine what we can: the dangerous conditions on NE 8th that can so often lead to tragedy.

And let’s start at the scene of Monday’s collision, pictured above. The first thing I notice while traversing the sidewalks on this section of NE 8th St is how narrow they are. At only 6 feet wide and immediately adjacent to the road, there is no protection offered from the traffic that often greatly exceeds the posted 30 mph speed limit, especially as cars head downhill going westbound. The five-foot painted bike lanes are suitable for only the most confident of riders, certainly not for families or for people who are just learning to cycle. Perhaps worst of all for people walking and rolling on this key commercial and residential corridor is the sheer lack of marked crosswalks connecting establishments on either side of the street. The gentleman in Monday’s collision, for example, was several hundred feet from the nearest crosswalk to the east. Alternatively, he would have needed to head over 1000 feet to the west to access a signalized intersection, one that likely would have prioritized the mobility of cars over his own and left him waiting.

For mobility-impaired individuals, this need to double back and wait for signals that do not prioritize pedestrian movement can add several minutes to a journey and represent a prohibitive barrier from undertaking a trip in the first place. At a bare minimum, the addition of crosswalks in front of key destinations, such as the retirement center and the restaurants on 160th Ave NE, would provide more frequent opportunities for residents to access the places they need to get to. When combined with lower speeds, this portion of the corridor could be made markedly safer for everybody who’s just trying to get where they need to go.

If you live, work, or study in Bellevue, sign Complete Streets Bellevue’s letter to City Council.

Just a few hundred feet to the west, however, NE 8th St becomes the five-lane behemoth that Bellevue loves to use to move cars.

This road configuration, actively hostile to pedestrian and cyclist mobility while expressly designed to move as many cars as quickly as possible, is the core danger behind NE 8th St. Any attempt to make this street safer must acknowledge that the design of this street and the driving conditions it enables are fundamentally incompatible with the mission of Vision Zero. They leave no room for cyclists to safely avoid collisions with vehicles, killing them. They enable drivers to strike pedestrians who are legally in crosswalks at high speeds, killing them. As a city, we cannot merely choose to paint a bike lane, add a planted buffer next to a sidewalk, and call it a day. We must address the fundamental issues with our city’s land use, street widths, vehicle speeds, and urban design choices that have made swathes of Bellevue inhospitable and actively dangerous for those walking, rolling, and biking.

Although certainly not a panacea for these multiple deep-rooted problems, there is room for hope in the city’s current budget deliberations. A Vision Zero Capital Investment Program (CIP) Project has been introduced that would fund rapid-build, tactical fixes to improve safety on several of Bellevue’s most dangerous roads, including NE 8th St.

The city’s original draft budget would see this funding begin in 2023, but thanks to an amendment proposed by Councilmember Janice Zahn, Bellevue residents could see this money make a difference as soon as next year. Monday’s collision, and the series of deaths we’ve had over the last 10 years, remind us that these road design changes are long overdue and too late for too many. But if Bellevue City Council shows leadership and approves Councilmember Zahn’s amendment, they can meaningfully support Vision Zero action at the second best time: now.

To learn more or join the fight, check out Complete Streets Bellevue. If you live, work, or study in the city, sign the organization’s letter to City Council.

Bellevue Uses Crowd-Sourced Data Project To Delay Safe Street Designs

Vanity Fair reports that Barack and Michelle Obama are producing a comedy series for Netflix based on Michael Lewis's book The Fifth Risk that documented "the historic chaos and mismanagement that occurred in the Departments of Agriculture, Commerce, and Energy during the handoff between the administrations." — Read the rest

Thank you Kottke for surfacing this fascinating piece on raising children in a gender-neutral way. Thought provoking.

A law enforcement agency looking to dodge oversight has a few options. First, there's the 1033 program, which allows agencies to pick up useful things like guns, bullets, armored vehicles, grenade launchers… and… um… filing cabinets, I guess. Going this route means spending federal money rather than local money. So, if you're not spending local tax dollars, you really don't need to ask permission.

Another accountability dodge is the discretionary spending allowed by civil asset forfeiture. Law enforcement agencies directly profit from property seized and are given a lot of latitude on spending those dollars. City/county oversight is rarely involved. Very few localities have implemented strict reporting on seizures so the money flows from victims through cop shops and into the hands of cop tech purveyors.

There's a third option: use private money. Donors with deep pockets and minimal concerns about the people they're bypassing pay for surveillance tech and other law enforcement goodies. Again, because no public money is involved, the public is left out of the equation. This happened in Baltimore, where a Texas philanthropist purchased an aerial surveillance system capable of covering the entire city. No one was told about it until after it went up in the air.

The same thing is happening elsewhere. Lots of private companies and individuals are buying stuff for police departments, allowing them to circumvent accountability measures. Some of these "private" concerns should be considered public, considering their narrow focus. As ProPublica reported in 2014, the Los Angeles Police Foundation -- a "private" charity -- asked for $200,000 from Target Corp. to buy the Los Angeles Police Department data analytics software from Palantir. It also purchased several automatic license plate readers for the department. No public oversight was involved since it was "private" money.

Joseph Cox reports on more of this public/private bullshit for Motherboard. Another "private" charity -- the San Diego Police Foundation -- has gifted local cops with a high tech phone cracking tool.

"The GrayKey was purchased by the Police Foundation and donated to the lab," an official from the San Diego Police Department's Crime Laboratory wrote in a 2018 email to a contracting officer, referring to the iPhone unlocking technology GrayKey.

Grayshift's flagship product generates a pretty strong revenue stream. The following year the Police Foundation helped the SDPD reup its license… which costs exactly as much as the original buy-in.

"This is the phone unlocking technique that the Police Foundation purchased for us (for 15k). Apparently the software 'upgrade' costs the same as the initial purchase each year. :/ They are the only ones that offer a tool that can crack iPhones, so they charge A LOT!," the email reads.

No one's arguing police departments shouldn't have access to tools like these. But if they're using these to perform their public duties, they owe it to the public to inform them about their acquisitions and allow their oversight to do its job. Forming a bunch of "private charities" specifically to provide police departments with off-the-books tech is a spectacularly lousy way to engage in public service.

Safety first.

The first federal National Pedestrian Safety Month starts tomorrow, but activists are demanding that the Trump Administration save the platitudes and pedestrian-blaming and actually pass policy reforms that will save lives.

A diverse coalition of powerful transportation safety, public health and consumer advocacy groups co-authored an open letter yesterday urging Department of Transportation Secretary Elaine Chao to push for laws aimed at decreasing the pedestrian death toll on America’s roadways, which reached a 30-year high of 6,590 last year.

The letter is pragmatic rather than visionary by design. All five of the coalition’s recommendations concern vehicle design, rather than more politically challenging reforms to infrastructure and traffic laws, and all of them have already approved by Congress in July as a part of the Democratic transportation mega-bill the Moving Forward Act. The larger bill languished in the Senate because of its aggressive stance on ending transportation-related climate change emissions, but nothing is stopping the DOT from implementing the aspects of the proposed legislation related to saving walkers’ lives — and advocates think Chao has a moral obligation to do so.

“There is a groundswell of support for these measures in Congress,” said Catherine Chase, president of the Advocates for Highway and Auto Safety, and the lead signatory on the letter. “These types of technologies have already been proven to work, but the problem is, they’re not standard equipment. They’re typically only features in luxury cars that get bundled together with other bells and whistles like heated seats and heated steering wheels. We don’t think that safety should just be a luxury for people who have a lot of money.”

The coalition wants the US DOT to:

• Require the installation of pedestrian detection systems, automatic emergency braking, and other automated driver assistance technology on all new cars;
• Require the installation of systems that onboard alcohol sensors or other technologies that detect erratic driving behavior from drunk motorists on all new cars;
• Require automakers to redesign hoods and bumpers to make cars more forgiving in crashes involving pedestrians and bicyclists, using better crumple zone technology;
• Enhance headlight visibility standards for new cars to help prevent the 76 percent of pedestrians crashes that happen at night;
• And last but not least, finally join the rest of the planet in requiring automakers to test how safe their vehicles are for vulnerable road users in the event of a crash, rather than just the people inside vehicles. 

Those kinds of common-sense reforms, though, are decidedly not the focus of National Pedestrian Safety Month, which is little more than a public awareness campaign dedicated to amplifying the myth that pedestrians can always prevent their own deaths by simply being alert to their surroundings. (Our coverage is here.)

The National Transportation Safety Administration kicked off the festivities yesterday with a webinar that emphasized dubious catchphrases like “safety is a shared responsibility” — ignoring the fact that the “responsibilities” of walkers, who have little more than a bit of protected infrastructure to keep them safe, are drastically different than the responsibilities of drivers, who are operating multi-ton vehicles capable of taking a human life with the press of a toe.

Within 10 seconds, @NHTSAgov's "National Pedestrian Safety Month" kickoff webinar leads with "safety is a shared responsibility," and police officers talking about "engagement and enforcement."

Not a good start, but let's see what the presenters have to say. pic.twitter.com/4zyyj4vLLi

— WalkSafe (@iWalkSafe) September 29, 2020

The Advocates for Highway and Auto Safety, which authored the letter before the Administration revealed the details of its effort, were disappointed but not surprised to learn they had a fight ahead of them.

“They’re taking the easy way out,” said Chase. “It’s always easier to put the onus on a pedestrian, when what [NHTSA] should be doing, as the agency charged with protecting all road users, is rulemaking on making vehicles and road users safer.”

The signatories of the letter — including members of organizations such as Consumers for America, Families for Safe Streets, the League of American Bicyclists, and even a former administrator of NHTSA itself, Joan Claybrook — say continuing pressure on the Administration will be key in getting them to take action.

“I would encourage everyone to reach out to their members of Congress and members of the Administration and express support for these policies, and remind them that they are charged with protecting the safety of all road users, says Chase. “We could make every month Pedestrian Safety Month, but until pass these measures, the bottom line is that people are going to continue to die.”

The first-ever federally funded “National Pedestrian Safety Month” kicks off tomorrow, and — surprise! — it’s centered around a press campaign aimed at convincing Americans of the debunked myth that the key to ending traffic violence is personal responsibility, mostly for walkers themselves.

The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration released its plans for the month-long public awareness effort yesterday, which includes a cache of social media graphics rife with some of the most toxic lies and misperceptions about how to keep walkers safe — and zero mention of real policy and infrastructure reforms that could actually saves lives.

Here are just a few of the low-lights.

Myth #1: Pedestrians have to keep themselves safe

This Instagram graphic trots out one of the most stubborn myths in the book: that walkers can save their own lives if they just turn themselves into human disco balls after dark.

Rather than a graphic announcing that the agency is funding streetlight improvements to make pedestrians visible without hi-viz vests, mandating better headlights on cars (as top safety advocates want them to do), or even simply acknowledging that people wearing light-colored clothing get killed by drivers, too, NHTSA chooses to focus on the personal responsibility of walkers — and ignore the responsibilities of every other contributor to fatal crashes.

Myth #2: The distracted pedestrian

Here’s another oldie-but-goodie: the myth of the distracted pedestrian, rampaging through American streets, somehow endangering everyone around her with her…cell phone.

But here’s the problem: only about 2 percent of pedestrian crashes involve the use of a mobile phone by the walker, and it’s a safe bet that none of them injured anyone but the walker herself, since a human body doesn’t tend to do much damage to a motor vehicle, much less the driver inside it.

Distracted driving, meanwhile, was considered a factor in the deaths of at least 2,841 people in 2018 according to the Administration’s own data, or about 7.7 percent of all fatalities. And that may even be an undercount, since many states don’t even include a field for law enforcement officers to report driver distraction on crash reports.

There is no graphic about the dangers of distracted driving in the Administration’s toolkit.

Myth #3: Drunk walking kills

This graphic needs a little demystifying: yes, alcohol is a factor in many pedestrian deaths, and a lot of the time — roughly a third — walkers themselves are drunk when they’re struck by car drivers. But here’s the thing: walking while drunk, in and of itself, is not a crime, nor is it inherently dangerous to other road users. And in some cases — say, when you can’t afford a taxi, and your city has insufficient public transit — it’s a responsible way to get home from the bar, at least compared to climbing behind the wheel after you’ve had a few beers.

Driving while drunk, of course, is illegal, and for good reason — and despite decades of public awareness campaigns and millions of dollars in advocacy efforts, 16 percent of drivers who killed walkers last year were drunk, according to NHTSA’s press materials.

Operating an easily weaponizable motor vehicle is indisputably an activity that demands a maximum amount of mental and physical acuity, and staying sober is the absolute least a driver can do. Using a sidewalk, on the other hand, shouldn’t require that level of acumen, because differently abled people, children, the elderly, and — yes — addicts all have a fundamental human right to public space that they don’t have to the space behind a wheel. A roadway that does require that walkers maintain total self awareness and lightning-fast response times should be redesigned — period.

Conflating the non-crime of drunk walking and the massive public health threat of drunk driving is a dangerous and manipulative way to blame pedestrians for their own deaths — not to mention adding dangerous stigma to addiction in a society that already fails to support recovery from the disease of alcoholism.

Myth #4: Old people die in traffic a lot for…reasons we don’t know?

Okay, this one’s just confusing.

Yes, friends, it’s true: older people are more likely to be killed by cars! But is NHTSA’s graphic announcing that cities must lengthen crosswalk signal timing to give elderly people with physical disabilities more time?

Or enhance zoning codes so older Americans, 14 percent of whom live in poverty, can afford to live in comprehensively walkable areas?

Or give the elderly better transit options when walking is no longer a great option for them?

Nope! None of that. The Administration’s just letting you know that a lot of dead walkers are seniors…and maybe implying, offensively, they shouldn’t walk outside their homes at all if they have the misfortune to live in an area whose streets weren’t designed with their needs in mind.

Myth #5: A safe walk to school starts with…ultra-responsible kids?

Here’s another baffling insinuation: that surviving the walk to your local elementary school starts with…uh, presumably those little cartoon children.

Let’s be clear: a safe route to school starts — and ends — with drivers not running over children. (And, in the case of non-white children, especially, police officers not murdering children.) Engineers can make that a whole lot easier by designing roads that compel drivers to slow down and reduce their chances of committing vehicular manslaughter, even when a little kid gets excited and jogs into the intersection a moment too soon.

But if the difference between life and death of a preschooler is the judgment of the preschooler, rather than the choices of the adults behind the wheel, the road design, or the badge, we’ve got a problem on our hands that a public awareness alone campaign can’t solve.

The Administration also assembled a handy packet of press releases that you can customize to put all manner of bogus traffic violence facts into the mouths of your local officials or non-profit leaders of choice. Those are already getting pretty well dragged on Twitter, but here’s a quick fix on this one to inspire you to join the fray:

Thanks to Studio Ghibli, you can hide piles of laundry and errant messes while videoconferencing from home with one of 400 stills from classic animations. The renowned Japanese animation studio recently released an online archive of images— which boasts iconic frames from films like Hayao Miyazaki’s Ponyo and Spirited Away and Isao Takahata’s The Tale of the Princess Kaguya available—for free download. Each month, Studio Ghibli will add an additional eight images, mostly derived from new works.

This recent collection appears to be an extension of the studio’s release of video-conferencing backgrounds earlier this year. Explore the entire archive and watch for upcoming projects, which include a new Miyazaki-directed film, on the studio’s site. (via Hyperallergic)

 

IKEA’s transition from photography to all-CGI advertising is almost complete. After moving most of their catalog “photography” over to CGI many years ago, IKEA Japan’s latest ad campaign takes this approach to the next level by using a CGI model. Specifically, the campaign features CGI Instagram ‘Influencer’ Imma.

It might all sound a bit Black Mirror, but it’s true: IKEA Japan’s latest ad campaign, titled IKEA with Imma, features a fake CGI model who “lived” inside a small IKEA-decorated apartment for three days and posted images of her “life” inside that apartment on Instagram.

Her “living room” was on display on an LED screen in the window of the new Harajuku district store in Tokyo, where passers by could watch Imma live her IKEA-strewn life. Other than the occasional outing, she spend three full days inside that apartment: cooking, cleaning, exercising, playing with her dog Einstein, and taking & posting Instagram photo the entire time.

You can see how it turned out below, or watch 10 hours worth of livestream here.

And here’s a peek inside Imma’s “room” at IKEA in Tokyo:

Unlike some of the agencies and projects that generate portraits of fake people for ad campaigns and other uses, Imma is sort of… half real. According to My Modern Met, her photos are created by transposing her 3D animated head onto a live-action body and background.

The IKEA campaign was probably created in a similar way: a real person with Imma’s 3D head transposed on top of it actually had to live in a room for three days and take all those pictures; their life was then played out on an LCD screen and the pictures were posted as they were being “taken” in the virtual world.

Knowing that this is a half-real person might take a bit of the “magic” out of it, but it still represents a curious “next step” further away from genuine photography and videography for IKEA. In 2014, they were already using CGI “photos” of furniture; in 2020, they don’t even need real people anymore.

(via Fast Company)

There have been so many atrocities been reported out of the ICE detention centers holding immigrants and refugees. Now a nurse from the Irwin County Detention Center in Georgia has come forward with a complaint against the facility, accusing them of, among other medical abuses, forcing mass hysterectomies on detainees.

The whistleblower is Dawn Wooten, who says she was retaliated against for speaking up about the center’s mismanagement of the coronavirus crisis. In July, the CEO of LaSalle Corrections, which runs Irwin and 17 other detention centers, claimed in a letter to Congress that no one at any LaSalle facility had “succumbed” to COVID-19, when in reality, as The Intercept writes, “at least two LaSalle guards and one member of medical staff have died of the disease.” 31 detainees at Irwin alone have tested positive for the virus, while Wooten suspects that by the time of that letter, at least 50 people had been infected.

A complaint submitted by the legal advocacy group Project South on Wooten’s behalf details many more grievances beyond the response to COVID-19, although on its own that is incredibly troubling. But the accusations of “high rates of hysterectomies” being performed on immigrant women and the circumstances around those procedures are an entirely different level of horror.

According to Wooten and numerous other sources included in the complaint, women were not told why they were receiving the procedure, which removes all or part of the uterus, or they were given reasons that didn’t make any sense. One woman was reportedly told the surgery would help with her heavy period, though she says that had never been an issue in the first place.

Another woman was told she was getting an ovarian cyst drained. But according to the complaint, “The officer who was transporting her to the hospital told her that she was receiving a hysterectomy to have her womb removed. When the hospital refused to operate on her because her COVID-19 test came back positive for antibodies, she was transferred back to ICDC where the ICDC nurse said that the procedure she was going to have done entailed dilating her vagina and scraping tissue off.”

Yet another woman was told she had to have her left ovary removed because of a cyst. According to Wooten, the doctor accidentally removed her right ovary instead. “She was upset,” Wooten says in the complaint. “She had to go back to take out the left and she wound up with a total hysterectomy. She still wanted children—so she has to go back home now and tell her husband that she can’t bear kids… she said she was not all the way out under anesthesia and heard [the doctor] tell the nurse that he took the wrong ovary.”

Wooten says that many of the nurses tried to communicate with the women by “Googling Spanish” or by asking another detainee to translate, rather than the official language services they’re supposed to use.

Wooten also says that all of these (often presumably unnecessary) surgeries were done by the same doctor.

“When I met all these women who had had surgeries, I thought this was like an experimental concentration camp. It was like they’re experimenting with our bodies,” the detainee said.

According to Wooten, ICDC consistently used a particular gynecologist – outside the facility – who almost always opted to remove all or part of the uterus of his female detainee patients.

“Everybody he sees has a hysterectomy—just about everybody,” Wooten said, adding that, “everybody’s uterus cannot be that bad.”

“We’ve questioned among ourselves like goodness he’s taking everybody’s stuff out…That’s his specialty, he’s the uterus collector. I know that’s ugly…is he collecting these things or something…Everybody he sees, he’s taking all their uteruses out or he’s taken their tubes out. What in the world.”

There is a long, shameful history of performing sterilizations and medical experiments on women of color and other marginalized groups, from J. Marion Sims–the “father of modern gynecology” who experimented on slaves without anesthesia–to the experiments done on prisoners during the Holocaust. In the U.S., Black women, Indigenous women, Latina women, as well as disabled people, have all had mass non-consensual sterilization forced on their communities. And while many people would like to write that off as ancient history, Wooten’s complaint makes it clear this kind of atrocity is very much still happening today.

(via The Intercept, Law & Crime, image: David Ryder/Getty Images)
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In “Selfish,” what opens with a benign scene at a sushi restaurant quickly turns into a dire assessment of plastic pollution. Created by Canada-based animator PoChien Chen, the appropriately named film begins by a chef plucking a detergent bottle from a pile of fresh fish, assembling various dishes made entirely of waste material, and subsequently serving them to a horrified trio of aquatic life. It then dives into a disturbing series of facts and figures about the current state of our oceans and the effects of pollution on wildlife.

Chen said in a statement that the critical animation was inspired by a visit to a small island in Taiwan two years ago:

It was the closest I’d lived to the sea, being only a 10 minute drive away. Everyone can enjoy the beach with its white sand and turquoise ocean. At the time, I went snorkeling almost every week. Seeing such alluring tropical fish and coral reefs sill lingers in my mind. However, I also cannot forget the scenes of tons of human waste lying around the shore as if it were a part of nature.

See how Chen animated the project—which has garnered an impressive list of awards from film festivals around the world—on Behance, and check out more his films on Vimeo.

 

After seeing countless viral clips of anti-maskers acting out in public, engineer Allen Pan of the Sufficiently Advanced YouTube channel indulged in a bit of wish fulfillment: He cobbled together a CO2-powered "gun" that fires face masks directly onto people's faces.

After an impressively straightforward design/build process, Pan then brought his device to California's conservative Huntington Beach in search of volunteer testers:

A couple of months ago, automotive photographer Jack Schroeder and model Britni Sumida filed a lawsuit against car maker Volvo, accusing them of “willful and wanton” copyright infringement. In a major update to the case, Volvo is trying to get the suit thrown out by claiming that all public Instagram photos are basically free to use and share.

The story begins in April of 2019 when Schroeder and Sumida teamed up for a personal portfolio photo shoot featuring the Volvo S60 sedan.

After posting the images to Instagram, Volvo’s account reached out multiple times asking for permission to use the images without compensation. Schroeder refused this offer and instead reached out to Volvo over email to see if they were interested in licensing his images. He never heard back, but then in November he saw his photos—including two that never appeared on Instagram but were allegedly posted to Behance—pop up on Volvo’s Instagram and Pinterest accounts,

You can see some of the infringing image use in the exhibits from the lawsuit below:

The infringement obviously upset Schroeder, but it was arguably a bigger deal for Sumida, who was now in violation of an active modeling contract she’d signed with another car maker. After multiple failed attempts to address the issue with Volvo directly, the duo ultimately filed a lawsuit, which brings us up to this week…

In an attempt to get the suit thrown out, Volvo has filed a pretty aggressive motion. Not only do they claim that Instagram grants them a sublicense to re-share any public photo—something that IG has officially denied in the past—the motion also claims that “because Schroeder set his account to ‘public,’ Schroeder granted Volvo a direct license to re-share the Instagram Photographs,” referencing Instagram’s TOS about how User Content may be “re-shared by others” once you’ve made it public.

Claiming that Instagram grants users a sublicense to embed public images or share them as part of a new IG story is an ongoing debate, but saying that making one’s account Public grants Volvo a “direct, express license” to re-share content and “allows Volvo to post copies of Instagram content on other sites” takes this argument much further. From the motion:

The terms of the direct and indirect usage rights licensed to users under the IG Terms are extremely broad. The terms of these licenses do not state, nor can they
reasonably be interpreted as stating, that Volvo may only re-share publicly posted
content on the Instagram platform. Volvo thus had the right to make copies of the
publicly posted Instagram Photographs and post those copies on third party sites or
platforms such as Pinterest.

Furthermore, Volvo says Behance’s TOS grants them authorization to post images on external sites like Pinterest, and claims that “tagging Volvo … granted Volvo an implied non-exclusive license to share the Instagram photographs.”

You can read the full motion below:

In addition to social media Terms of Service and Privacy Policy arguments that Volvo is trying to make, the motion takes direct aim at both Schroeder and Sumida personally, accusing them of “try[ing] to make a mountain out of a molehill as they continue to exploit the brand, image, reputation and substantial social media reach of a venerable automotive company to promote themselves professionally.”

The car maker’s argument is, more or less, that this was not some sort of international advertising campaign, as the plaintiffs allege. Instead, Volvo “simply used basic social media sharing/publishing platform features to re-post Schroeder’s artistic depictions of … the Volvo S60.”

Schroeder and Sumida’s lawyers (obviously) vehemently disagree.

“Volvo’s argument, that they can allegedly take and exploit ANY photo publicly posted on Instagram, is dangerous, chilling, and wrong. The entire global creative community should be on high alert, and Instagram should speak up immediately,” Jeff Gluck, one of the duo’s lawyers, told PetaPixel over email. “It goes without saying that Volvo’s argument has absolutely zero legal merit and we look forward to further educating their counsel during trial. We will make sure that this case proceeds to a final verdict in order to protect the creative rights of millions of people.”

Whatever your opinion of the legal arguments presented above, this case is quickly turning into one of the ugliest copyright disputes we’ve seen. But, more importantly, it has the potential to establish a very broad reading of Instagram’s Terms of Service that would be dangerous to any and every photographer and creative professional.

Now would be a good time for Instagram to update their Terms… and maybe add a feature that allows you to disable embedding and explicitly prevent re-sharing.

---

Image credits: Photos by Jack Schroeder used with permission.

The conversation around U.S. schools reopening has been maddening for so many reasons, not least of which is the insistence that starting schools back up is safe as long as there are “proper precautions” in place. That sounds fine until you realize that those precautions involve expecting everyone from kindergarteners up to teenagers to do things like socially distance, not touch each other, and keep masks on throughout the day.

The notion that that was a possibility was quickly dispelled by photos from a school in Georgia during the first day back this week:

This is the first day of school in Paulding County, Georgia. pic.twitter.com/fzdidaAABM

— 🇯🇲Black🇭🇹Aziz🇳🇬aNANsi🇹🇹 (@Freeyourmindkid) August 4, 2020

How many masks do you see in that crowded hallway? Five? That looks like a coronavirus petri dish.

As if that sight weren’t bad enough, the explanation given by that school districts’s superintendent is even worse. After that photo went viral, Dr. Paul Ott sent a letter to parents in which he wrote, “Wearing a mask is a personal choice and there is no practical way to enforce a mandate to wear them. What we will do is continue to strongly encourage all students and staff to wear masks.”

Speaking as someone that spent many years of my life being told I couldn’t wear spaghetti strap tank tops to school, that statement is total bull.

This is trash. Schools enforce dress code ALL. THE. TIME. T-shirts w/ “vulgar” messages, shorts that are “too revealing”, faculty can certainly enforce masks. Why the far right wants to put thousands of kids & teachers at risk of #COVID19 is beyond me
https://t.co/r3tEBlJYDH pic.twitter.com/8OYey5IPJi

— Jason Johnson (@DrJasonJohnson) August 5, 2020

Superintendent Brian Otott said, “Wearing a mask is a personal choice and there is no practical way to enforce a mandate to wear them.”

So crazy. Bc GA schools sent me home several times for having tank top straps that weren’t wide enough. https://t.co/6t8foA9GAm

— Linz DeFranco (@LinzDeFranco) August 5, 2020

As practically any FEMALE who attended a public school in America can attest… if school admins could send us home for our skirts/shorts being too short, our tank tops not thick enough & our blouses showing too much cleavage … you can enforce a freaking mask mandate. https://t.co/vIcyOcPdzH

— Ashley W (@_aswesterman) August 7, 2020

Anyone else laughing at how ridiculous it is that some schools are claiming that they can’t enforce mask policies when they’re constantly policing what students wear from hair to tank tops to hats. https://t.co/4DcyzgpN0V

— Farrah Khan (@farrahsafiakhan) August 7, 2020

Schools have never had any trouble policing girls’ bodies. Our bodies are called a “distraction,” impeding on male students’ right to an education. How is requiring a nose and mouth to be covered any different, logistically speaking, than requiring thighs or cleavage or shoulders to be covered? Isn’t a major public health risk also a distraction and an impediment to young people’s education?

In yet another example of schools doling out extreme punishments to young women and girls, Hannah Watters, the 10th-grade student who took that photo, was suspended for doing so. The suspension has since been rescinded (with no explanation given) but it’s ridiculous that it was issued in the first place.

Watters told CNN her reasoning for taking the photo, explaining, “I was concerned for the safety of everyone in that building and everyone in the county because precautions that the CDC and guidelines that the CDC has been telling us for months now, weren’t being followed.”

(image: Andressa Anholete/Getty Images)

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*Checks calendar* … Nope, it’s not April 1st. There really is a “Potato Photographer of the Year 2020” contest, judged by the likes of Martin Parr, and they really did just reveal the winners of the contest earlier this week.

Potato Photographer of the Year 2020 is a silly photo contest created in partnership with the contest platform Photocrowd to benefit the Trussell Trust food banks. The competition was inspired by photographer Kevin Abosch’s famous photo Potato #345 (2010), which sold for a staggering $1 million at auction in 2016.

This year, the honorary of Potato Photographer of the Year goes to photographer Ray Spence for his photo of a spud getting a haircut, titled “End of Lockdown.”

“This picture manages to introduce a topical lockdown obsession to the brief of photographing a potato,” says Nigel Atherton, Editor of the magazine Amateur Photographer and contest judge. “It takes a great imagination to see a sprouting potato as a head covered with hair, and there is a lot of humour in the way the picture has been executed.”

In addition to bragging rights, Spence wins a Fujifilm X-A7, one year membership to the Royal Photographic Society, a one-day workshop with photographer Benedict Brain in Bath, and a 3-year ‘master-level’ Photocrowd subscription. Not a bad haul given that submitting a photo cost him only a £5 ($6.50) donation to the food bank.

Scroll down to see some of the runners up, and if you want to see the full shortlist or read the judge’s comments about each winning photo, head over to the contest page on Photocrowd.

2nd Place

3rd Place

4th Place

5th Place

We’ll be honest: we’re not sure the idea behind Potato Photographer of the Year has the legs to become an annual thing. But if it does, we’ll hope to see a lot more entries like Spence’s winning image in the coming years.

To learn more about this year’s contest, the judges, and the charities involved, click here.

(via Camera Jabber)

If you’ve ever wondered how Nintendo’s classic games evolved before they reached store shelves, you might have a good chance to find out. According to VGC, (via Eurogamer) a “gigaleak” of Nintendo art assets and source code from the mid-1990s has sur...

This story was originally published by Mother Jones and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

Amber Kelley has a “super-cool way” to make fish tacos. “You’re going to start with the natural gas flame,” the teenage one-time Food Network Star Kids winner explained in a professionally produced video to her 6,700 Instagram followers, adding, “because the flames actually come up, you can heat and cook your tortilla.”

Kelley’s not the only Instagram influencer praising the flames of her stove. “Chef Jenna,” a 20-something with cool-girl rainbow hair and 15,800 followers, posted, “Who’s up for some breakfast-for-dinner? Chef Jenna is bringing you some stovetop Huevos Rancheros this evening! Did you know natural gas provides better cooking results? Pretty nifty, huh?!” The Instagram account @kokoshanne, an “adventurous mama” with 131,000 followers, wrote in a post about easy weeknight dinners that natural gas “helps cook food faster.”

“#cookingwithgas makes food taste better,” says Camille, an L.A.-based foodie who poses artfully with her spatula, to her 16,700 followers.

The gas cooking Insta–trend is no accident. It’s the result of a carefully orchestrated campaign dreamed up by marketers for representatives with the American Gas Association and American Public Gas Association, two trade groups that draw their funding from a mix of investor- and publicly owned utilities. Since at least 2018, social media and wellness personalities have been hired to post more than 100 posts extolling the virtues of their stoves in sponsored posts. Documents from the fossil fuel watchdog Climate Investigations Center show that another trade group, the American Public Gas Association, intends to spend another $300,000 on its millennial-centric “Natural Gas Genius” campaign in 2020.

View this post on Instagram

Cooking up my family’s favorite holiday breakfast, starting with all the veggies!

A post shared by Camille • Foodie Meets World (@foodiemeetsworld) on Dec 18, 2018 at 5:38pm PST

What the polished posts don’t mention is that those perfectly charred tacos and fast weeknight meals come at a steep price: Gas stoves expose tens of millions of people in the United States to levels of pollution so high that they would be considered illegal outdoors. Counting on the allure of Instagram stars to help fend off alternatives backed by environmentalists, the gas industry doesn’t want you to realize how much its paid marketing has influenced public thinking that gas stoves are stylish, innocuous, and necessary home appliances. To the contrary, lifestyle bloggers are building their healthy, clean-living brands on one of the most dangerous home appliances on the market.

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Americans have a lot of feelings about their stovetops, and the prevailing opinion is that electric can’t hold a candle to gas ranges. Gas stoves, we’re told, fire up faster, work smoothly with cast iron cookware, and allows better control.

As it turns out, the industry has been working on convincing us of these supposed benefits of gas stoves for a long time — Instagram campaigns are just the latest twist in a 90-year-old advertising campaign. In the 1930s, groups like the American Gas Association needed to stave off competition from wood and electric stoves. An enterprising executive at AGA came up with the slogan to promote the superior experience of its product that has lasted over a century later: “Now you’re cooking with gas.”

And the industry has long used pop culture to spread its message. In the 1940s, comedian Bob Hope incorporated the slogan into his routines. In 1956, it was actresses playing housewives selling gas-fired appliances in a 13-minute infomercial. In 1988, the phrase took an unfortunate turn in a rap by the National Fuel Gas Distributors, which featured lyrics like:

I cook with gas cause broiling’s so clean

The flame consumes the smoke and grease

You know what I mean.

Presentations from the PR firms Bellomy and Porter Novelli highlight the thinking behind the ongoing influencer campaign. The intention was never to have ultra-famous influencers on board, the slides show, because these mid-level accounts with a few thousand followers apiece are cheaper and can still reach the desired niche audiences. So with its $300,000 budget from the American Public Gas Association, the PR firm Porter Novelli promises “snackable” content geared towards desirable millennial target audiences, “hispanic millennials,” “design enthusiasts,” “promising families,” and “young city solos.”

“You can’t help but cringe,” Rocky Mountain Institute’s report author Brady Seals says when she looks at the #cookingwithgas hashtag of gorgeous kitchens and massive gas stoves, because they clearly lack a ventilation system.

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Every time you ignite a gas stove, you’re filling your home with many of the same pollutants in exhaust from cars — carbon monoxide, nitrogen oxides, particulate matter, and formaldehyde, which are all associated with a range of chronic health problems like respiratory problems and cardiovascular disease.

The problem is worse the smaller the space; cramped apartments fill up more quickly with pollutants. And lower-income African American and Hispanic adults and children face the biggest toll as populations already facing higher rates of asthma exacerbated by more polluted outdoor air.

Two studies out in May added to that research with a closer look at one gas in particular: nitrogen oxide, a building block for smog, that is harmful even in short spurts and at lower levels. And in homes with gas stoves, the concentration of nitrogen dioxide is anywhere between 50 to 400 percent higher than homes with electric stoves. One report, a literature review from the policy think tank Rocky Mountain Institute, Mothers Out Front, Physicians for Social Responsibility, and the Sierra Club, found that children, with their growing lungs and smaller bodies, are especially vulnerable: A gas stove can put them at 42 percent greater risk of developing asthma symptoms, and 24 percent risk of lifelong asthma, in addition to impacting their brains and cardiovascular systems. A second study by UCLA and commissioned by Sierra Club found that if your gas stove and oven were both on for an hour, you’d have enough nitrogen dioxide build up inside your home that it would be considered illegal if you were outdoors.

Indoor air quality has long gotten short shrift because our homes are, of course, private property—there is no agency formally responsible for keeping our indoor environments clean. So while the United States has made progress on outdoor pollution, the indoors—where we spent about 90 percent of our days—can be up to 100 times more polluted than the outside due to emissions from gas stoves and ovens, according to the RMI study. Other gas-powered appliances like water heaters and gas furnaces face more federal regulation requiring ventilation, but stoves have mostly escaped oversight.

The influencer campaigns from the gas industry have ramped up as environmentalists succeeded in convincing 30 cities in California (Seattle and Bellingham in Washington state have considered it) to use electricity instead of gas in new building construction. Though the electrification fights are about bigger battles than cooking, the gas industry saw an opportunity to convince Americans that banning gas would make their food taste less delicious. It’s working: For example, when Berkeley ordered new construction to go all-electric, the California Restaurant Association sued, noting the “uniquely negative impacts” on the culinary community.

As for the health effects of gas cooking, the industry assures consumers that it’s easy to reduce pollution: To minimize the fumes, experts say, you should cook only on the back burners, use the fan, and open windows if you can. Yet the industry marketing campaigns do not mention these safety measures, nor do any of the sponsored Instagram posts.

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Surprise! I’m excited to share my new project with @aga_natgas to bring you new #cookingwithgas recipes. One more week until the first video.

A post shared by Amber Kelley (@cookwithamber) on Nov 26, 2019 at 4:49pm PST

What’s more, most stovetops aren’t outfitted with the kind of range hoods that reach overhead to suck up the fumes to vent outside. Instead, most stoves come with a flimsy fan that does little more than recirculate the dirty air already in your home. While there’s no national data on this, less than 35 percent of California residents use any kind of fan when they cook, and even less have the right kind of hood, according to the UCLA study. (APGA points out that the Consumer Product Safety Commission and Environmental Protection Agency have tested emissions from gas stoves and do not consider them hazardous enough to regulate. “Virtually all gas utilities have existing policies in place evaluating acceptable CO emissions levels from residential gas equipment,” a spokesperson emailed.)

Environmentalists are calling for federal gas stove ventilation standards, but until that happens, there is an alternative that the gas industry doesn’t want consumers to know about: As my colleague Tom Philpott has written, the electric induction range is a glass-top alternative that uses a magnetic field to heat up pans. Though relatively expensive, the method is more precise, faster, and slightly more energy-efficient than gas rivals. Best of all, it doesn’t fill your kitchen with fumes.

Despite the well-documented health risks, gas stoves are still the norm in American households, while just 1 percent have adopted induction—far below what Asian and European countries have adopted. Like the tobacco industry’s misleading marketing campaigns, the gas companies have given the public false faith in these stovetops’ safety in the face of a growing body of research that proves otherwise.

“There’s just a black hole when it comes to indoor air,” Seals says. “It’s a shift to think we have something unvented right in the space that we breathe.”

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline The gas industry is paying Instagram influencers to gush over gas stoves on Jun 19, 2020.

Pop quiz: a couple publishes a relatively small news website critical of your massive and hugely profitable corporation.

Do you:

A: Simply ignore the criticism.

B: Consider whether the grievances are legitimate then take steps to improve your company, or

C: unleash a brutal, summer long campaign of terror and surveillance that includes sending the website publishers threatening DMs, live spiders, pornography, and dead pigs.

Apparently if you're employed at eBay, the answer is an enthusiastic C. Six (now former) executives and employees of eBay are facing federal charges after they participated in massive, grotesque harassment campaign targeting the publishers of a small news outlet (Ecommercebytes.com, published by David and Ina Steiner) critical of eBay. Said harassment campaign included sending porn to the Steiners' neighbor under their name, and also sending them live spiders, bloody pig masks, cockroaches, and even a dead pig fetus. Why? They were upset by both the newsletter and anonymous commenters:

"Members of the executive leadership team at eBay followed the newsletter’s posts, often taking issue with its content and the anonymous comments underneath the editor’s stories. It is alleged that in August 2019, after the newsletter published an article about litigation involving eBay, two members of eBay’s executive leadership team sent or forwarded text messages suggesting that it was time to “take down” the newsletter’s editor.

In response, Baugh, Harville, Popp, Gilbert, Zea, Stockwell, and others allegedly executed a three-part harassment campaign. Among other things, several of the defendants ordered anonymous and disturbing deliveries to the victims’ home, including a preserved fetal pig, a bloody pig Halloween mask, a funeral wreath, a book on surviving the loss of a spouse, and pornography – the last of these addressed to the newsletter’s publisher but sent to his neighbors’ homes."

These weren't all low level employees, either. They included eBay’s senior manager of global intelligence, a manager of eBay's global intelligence center (GIC), a contractor who worked as an intelligence analyst within the GIC, and a senior manager of special operations for eBay’s global security team --and a former cop. In short, all folks who should have known better. And if you spend some time reading the articles at the newsletter in question, it appears to be just a largely polite trade mag. That it set these executives off to such a degree is just bizarre.

U.S. Attorney Andrew Lelling indicated at a press conference that this appeared to be a "one off," and not part of a broader campaign against those critical of eBay. But he also made it very clear he'd never seen anything quite this grotesque and idiotic:

According to the government complaint (pdf) and press release, the plan was apparently three-phased. First, the executives decided they'd harass the couple, then they'd step in and approach the victims pretending to fix the problem they created. All in a bizarre effort to try and glean some good press for eBay in a newsletter that (no offense to the Steiners) isn't even that big:

"As part of the second phase of the campaign, some of the defendants allegedly sent private Twitter messages and public tweets criticizing the newsletter’s content and threatening to visit the victims in Natick. The documents allege that Baugh, Gilbert, Popp and another eBay security employee planned these messages to become increasingly disturbing, culminating with “doxing” the victims (i.e., publishing their home address). It is alleged that the very same group intended then to have Gilbert, a former Santa Clara police captain, approach the victims with an offer to help stop the harassment that the defendants were secretly causing, in an effort to promote good will towards eBay, generate more favorable coverage in the newsletter, and identify the individuals behind the anonymous comments."

But wait, it gets crazier. After engaging in grotesque harassment, then pretending to help in the belief it would net eBay some good press, the folks involved in the effort decided to engage in surveillance of the couple, at times justified by falsely claiming they had threatened eBay executives. At least some of these efforts may have had the blessing of former eBay CEO Devin Wenig (who urged executives to "take her down," according to the complaint). Those involved even crafted fake documents to help them lie about the effort should they get questioned by the police:

"The third phase of the campaign allegedly involved covertly surveilling the victims in their home and community. According to the complaint, Harville and Zea registered for a software development conference to explain their trip to Boston on Aug. 15, 2019. Baugh, Harville, and Zea (and later Popp) allegedly drove to the victims’ home in Natick several times, with Harville and Baugh intending at one point to break into the victims’ garage and install a GPS tracking device on their car. As protection in the event they were stopped by local police, Baugh and Harville allegedly carried false documents purporting to show that they were investigating the victims as “Persons of Interest” who had threatened eBay executives."

Those involved then lied to law enforcement and eBay lawyers about what they'd been up to. While Lelling's office indicates this was a one off and an eBay statement downplays the scandal, it takes a very specific corporate culture to generate executives who thought this was in any way a good idea, and who were able to engage in this behavior without running into any company or institutional guard rails whatsoever (until after the fact). Meanwhile the Steiner's newsletter will ultimately wind up getting more attention than ever. Bang up job all around.

In March of 2019 — about a year after the Parkland shooting at Marjory Stoneham Douglas High School — the ACLU released a report titled "Cops and No Counselors: How the Lack of School Mental Health Staff Is Harming Students." Based on publicly available federal civil rights data from 2015-2016, this report offered a comprehensive analysis of the school support resources, breaking it down by state and demographic, to get a better look at how we're serving students in America.

The results were not good:

The ACLU’s report found over 90 percent of students nationwide attend schools that fail to meet the nationally recommended ratios for student-to-counselors, psychologists, nurses, and social workers. Over 14 million of these students were in schools that reported having law enforcement present despite lacking critical mental and physical health personnel. The report cites research indicating that students would benefit more from increased access to mental health professionals than the increased school hardening the commission recommends.

[…]

• The average number of students each school counselor serves is 444 — nearly double the already limited recommended student-counselor ratio of 250:1
• At least 43 percent of our nation's students attend schools with onsite police, and in some states more than 68 percent of schools have police
• 31 percent of the nation's students attend schools that have school police, but no psychologist, nurse, social worker, and/or counselor
• Black girls account for 16 percent of girls enrolled nationwide, but account for 39 percent of the girls arrested in school
• Native American and Pacific Islander students were more than twice as likely to be arrested as white students nationwide
• Black and Latino boys with disabilities are 3 percent of students, but were 12 percent of school arrests.

What I personally found most staggering was that 94 percent of "serious offenses" by students involved threats or actual physical fights … without a weapon.

It's not crazy to think that some kids are going to scrap in the schoolyard. Yet somehow, that qualifies as a "serious offense." And only a small chance of anything worse than a fight.

But this is still how we focus our resources:

When people worry about what would happen if we didn't have police in schools — well, the data shows that it can't be much worse than what's already happening when we do have police in schools. Police don't prevent mass shootings, for example; social workers do.

ACLU Report Highlights Staff Shortages, Over-policing, and Discriminatory Discipline in Schools

Image: Public Domain via U.S. Air Force photo by Airman 1st Class Zoe M. Wockenfuss

Anti-police brutality protesters gather near the White House in Washington, DC, on May 30. | Probal Rashid/LightRocket/Getty Images

Police killings have trended upward in recent years — and black men are more likely to be killed.

The protests that have risen up in nearly every city in the United States over the past week were sparked by the killing of an unarmed black man, George Floyd, by now-fired police officers in Minneapolis. Even though one former officer, Derek Chauvin, has been charged with third-degree murder, protests have continued night after night because they are not just about that single killing but what it represents: rampant police brutality that seems to have no consequences.

In fact, a recent analysis by advocacy group Mapping Police Violence found that 99 percent of police killings from 2014 to 2019 did not result in officers even being charged with, let alone convicted of, a crime.

Mapping Police Violence’s data, which is gathered from public databases and law enforcement records, also shows that the number of police killings has trended slightly upward from 2013 to 2019 — in that span, the number of killings falls to a low of 1,050 in 2014, and has a high of 1,143 in 2018. For comparison, 373 people were killed in mass shootings in 2018 and about 1,010 Americans died of Covid-19 on May 30.

Numbers such as these are a stark reminder that despite years of demonstrations and advocacy — and even changes in policy, such as the adoption of body cameras or requirements that officers use deescalation techniques before resorting to violence — little has changed numerically.

Those numbers are of killings of people of all races — but the same can be said when looking at the data broken down by ethnicity: killings of black Americans by police appears to be trending slightly downward, as are the killings of white Americans; the killings of Latinx Americans are slightly up. Police killings of Native and Asian Americans have spiked, then fallen; the killings of Americans of unknown race are very much up.

Those are totals, and reminders that police killings are not just a problem suffered by black Americans — that they affect Americans of all ethnicities. But controlling for population (that is, looking at killings per million people) shows that it is black Americans who are most likely to be killed by police officers — that they are nearly twice as likely to be killed as a Latinx person and nearly three times more likely to be killed than a white person. Black Americans are also about 1.4 times more likely to be unarmed in fatal interactions with police than white Americans are (and about 1.2 times more likely to be killed unarmed than Latinx Americans).

This disparity is such that in eight US cities — including Reno, Nevada; Oklahoma City, Oklahoma; and Scottsdale, Arizona — the rate at which police killed black men was higher than the US murder rate. And in 27 of the country’s 50 largest cities, the rates of police killings (of people of all races) is higher than the rates of violent crime. In many cities, like Kansas City, Missouri, and Columbus, Ohio, counting police killings as violent crimes would more than double the rate of violent crime.

It is this reality that people are protesting. There have been many protests against police killing unarmed black men in recent years, some of which have gone on for weeks, like the 2017 St. Louis protests over the killing of Anthony Lamar Smith by former police officer Jason Stockley, and the 2014 uprisings in Ferguson that followed the killing of Michael Brown. Out of those protests have come the Black Lives Matter movement and other advocacy initiatives, as well as oversight, like the consent decree the Baltimore Police Department entered into with the Department of Justice following the 2015 killing of Freddie Gray.

And some studies have shown that the adoption of measures pushed for by these advocates has helped reduce police killings broadly — a Mapping Police Violence analysis of data from the Police Use of Force Project found that chokehold and stronghold bans reduced killings by 22 percent, for instance.

Those reductions, however, have not been enough. The protests have not been enough. Mapping Police Violence’s analysis shows this, as do other studies, like one from researchers at Rutgers University, the University of Michigan, and Washington University in St. Louis recently explained by my colleague Dylan Scott.

Using data from 2013 to 2018, the researchers worked to understand how at risk American men and women were of being killed by police. The results showed black men had a 1 in 1,000 chance in being killed by police — just higher than the odds the the average American has of dying in a motorcycle crash, according to the National Safety Council.

PNAS

If past protests have not changed this tragic paradigm, it is not clear that the present ones will either. But there is little else protesters can do than to draw attention to this problem that has not gone away. While many have been encouraged to vote, Mapping Police Violence’s data shows that these killings take place in cities with a broad range of leadership types, and regardless of which party is in control.

Many advocates argue that no change can come about until policies are put in place weakening police unions, and ensuring police cannot be militarized or demilitarized at the whim of the president of the United States. The decision to offer police military equipment is not made at the local, but federal level. And police union officials, who often shape the rules police officers are governed by, are voted in by officers in the union — not by the public.

Also, as Scott notes, complaints about police action are not always looked into — Chauvin had 18 complaints against him, but was nevertheless allowed on the street the day of Floyd’s killing. And again, 99 percent of officers are not charged following killings. With little other recourse than to attempt to press for change — and with decades, even centuries, of frustration fueling them — the protests will continue.

As Olga Hall, a protester in Washington, DC, told the Associated Press Saturday night, “We’re sick of it. The cops are out of control. They’re wild.”

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Support Vox’s explanatory journalism

Every day at Vox, we aim to answer your most important questions and provide you, and our audience around the world, with information that has the power to save lives. Our mission has never been more vital than it is in this moment: to empower you through understanding. Vox’s work is reaching more people than ever, but our distinctive brand of explanatory journalism takes resources — particularly during a pandemic and an economic downturn. Your financial contribution will not constitute a donation, but it will enable our staff to continue to offer free articles, videos, and podcasts at the quality and volume that this moment requires. Please consider making a contribution to Vox today.

A journalist is seen bleeding after police started firing tear gas and rubber bullets into crowds near the Fifth Police Precinct in Minneapolis, on May 30. | Chandan Khanna/AFP/Getty Images

Though police were responsible for most of the violence, some protesters got in on the act too.

On Friday night, photojournalist Linda Tirado was shot in the eye by a rubber bullet while covering an anti-police brutality protest in Minneapolis — one of more than two dozen incidents of journalists experiencing violence while covering the recent demonstrations.

Tirado says she’s permanently blind in her left eye. (She is thankful she uses her right eye to take photos, so the injury is not career-ending.)

The Minneapolis Police Department and Mayor Jacob Frey’s office didn’t respond to requests for comment about Tirado’s injury.

Across the country journalists have been targeted by police, facing arrest, detention, and violence, including being pepper sprayed and shot by rubber bullets. Journalists were targeted by police in the Ferguson protests in 2015 and during the civil rights era, and that pattern of violence and arrests continued into this weekend’s protests.

“Targeted attacks on journalists, media crews, and news organizations covering the demonstrations show a complete disregard for their critical role in documenting issues of public interest and are an unacceptable attempt to intimidate them,” said Carlos Martínez de la Serna, program director at the nonprofit advocacy group Committee to Protect Journalists, in a statement Saturday. “Authorities in cities across the U.S. need to instruct police not to target journalists and ensure they can report safely on the protests without fear of injury or retaliation.”

Police shot at journalists with rubber bullets

A reporter and her camera crew were shot at by police in Louisville. Vox’s Alex Ward has more detailed coverage of the Louisville incident here.

Ali Velshi and his MSNBC camera crew were shot at by Minneapolis police live on the air while covering a peaceful protest.

Canadian Broadcasting Corporation journalist Susan Ormiston was hit with rubber bullets and tear gas fired by Minneapolis police live on the air Saturday.

Two members of a Reuters TV camera crew were hit by rubber bullets in Minneapolis Saturday.

Reporter and photojournalist Sarah Belle Lin was hit in the thigh by a rubber bullet fired by police while covering protests in Oakland, California, Saturday evening.

A man with a video camera and a press helmet was filmed by CNN getting shot with rubber bullets by Minneapolis police Saturday.

CBS News reporter Michael George reported that police in Minneapolis fired rubber bullets at his crew, striking sound engineer John Marschitz in the arm.

Police hit reporters with tear gas and pepper spray

LA Times reporter Molly Hennessy-Fiske reported that Minnesota State Patrol troopers fired tear gas at reporters and camera crews in Minneapolis Saturday.

On Rodeo Drive in Santa Monica, California, an ABC7 reporter and his crew were hit with tear gas Saturday.

Several Detroit Free Press reporters were pepper sprayed by Detroit police Saturday, including one who held up a press badge while police targeted him.

KSTP reporter Ryan Raiche was with a group of media in Minneapolis before they were tear gassed and pepper sprayed by police Saturday.

VICE News correspondent Michael Adams reported that police raided a gas station where several members of the press were taking shelter. He said police threw him to the ground and pepper sprayed him.

Police threatened and arrested journalists

On Friday morning, CNN reporter Omar Jimenez and his crew were arrested live on the air in Minneapolis. Vox’s Matthew Yglesias has more detailed coverage here.

HuffPost reporter Christopher Mathias, who photos show with his press badge clearly visible to officers, was arrested while covering protests in Brooklyn Saturday evening. He was later released and in good condition, according to several of his HuffPost colleagues.

Minneapolis-based reporter Madeleine Baran tweeted that a Minneapolis police officer pointed a weapon at her and did not lower it when she identified herself as a reporter. The incident prompted her to leave and stop reporting on the protest.

Journalist Simon Moya-Smith was pepper sprayed and arrested after being told “Roll on your side, Mr. Journalist,” by a Minneapolis police officer Saturday.

CNN commentator Keith Boykin tweeted that he was arrested by NYPD Saturday.

Police weren’t the only people targeting journalists this weekend

But it was unfortunately not just police targeting journalists over the weekend. Fox News reporter Leland Vittert and his crew were harassed, assaulted, and chased off the scene near the White House in Washington, DC, Friday. Their camera was broken in the process.

A crowd surrounded, defaced, and smashed windows at CNN’s Atlanta headquarters Friday, though it should be noted there is a police precinct headquarters inside the CNN Center.

CBS5 reporter Briana Whitney was grabbed by a man on live television while reporting on protests outside Phoenix Police Department headquarters.

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Support Vox’s explanatory journalism

Every day at Vox, we aim to answer your most important questions and provide you, and our audience around the world, with information that has the power to save lives. Our mission has never been more vital than it is in this moment: to empower you through understanding. Vox’s work is reaching more people than ever, but our distinctive brand of explanatory journalism takes resources — particularly during a pandemic and an economic downturn. Your financial contribution will not constitute a donation, but it will enable our staff to continue to offer free articles, videos, and podcasts at the quality and volume that this moment requires. Please consider making a contribution to Vox today.

The call center on the 11th floor of this 19-story office building in downtown Seoul had a layout that would look familiar to many a white-collar worker: Long rows of shared desks line each side of the open floor, with a handful of smaller meeting rooms and private offices tucked into the corners. On February 25, one of the 216 people who worked on the floor started experiencing symptoms of coronavirus. Swiftly, a cluster of cases began to ping-pong across the office, until the government caught wind and the building was shut down.

The Korea Centers for Disease Control and Prevention tracked down anyone who lived in, worked in, or had visited the office and apartment development, revealing the path of the virus as it leapt from warm body to warm body. Of the more than a thousand people they tested, 97 had contracted Covid-19. Nearly all of them worked together on the 11th floor. An infection map released by researchers showed that one side of the room, filled with lines of tables where at least six employees sat on each side, was hit hardest. In all, 94 of the 216 densely-packed employees tested positive for the disease, the cases scattered across the office like a checkerboard.

For companies now hoping to invite employees back to work, that infection map serves as a sobering blueprint: The open-plan office that so many companies have adopted in recent years looks like an extreme public health hazard.

Open offices were popularized in the 1980s as a scheme to lower real estate costs and break down divisions between teams; with fewer walls, bosses can claim they’re emphasizing transparency and collaboration while maximizing their square footage per employee. Despite evidence-based complaints that the layout is distracting and noisy, hampers productivity, and actually discourages in-person interaction, by 2017, 7 in 10 offices had adopted the model. (Among the proponents of open-plan office design is Bloomberg LP, the parent of CityLab, and the company’s founder and majority owner, Michael Bloomberg.)

Coronavirus introduces a new challenge to the primacy/tyranny of the open office. In the short term, architects, designers, property managers and public health professionals say that pretty much every aspect of this kind of workspace will have to change, to get fewer people inside it at a time. But don’t mourn — or celebrate — its death yet: A pivot to walls is probably still a long way away.

“From the standpoint of making significant physical changes, everyone’s in a sort of wait-and-see mode,” said Chris Coldoff, a principal and studio leader in the Los Angeles office of the architecture and design firm Gensler. (He’s been working at home for the past 8 weeks and counting.)

Rather than investing in costly remodels, organizations are now trying to reconfigure existing spaces, with an eye towards keeping employees safe from infection and giving them the peace of mind needed to return. “Companies are basically planning for Covid to be a part of our lives and the way we work for at least the next 18, to 24, to 36 months — until there is a vaccine or treatment,” said Brian Chen, co-founder and CEO of ROOM, a company that makes soundproof phone booths for open offices.

Most essential workers have not had the luxury to wait at home as their employers figured out how to safely allow them to do their jobs: They’ve been risking infection to show up in hospitals, grocery stores, and other critical workplaces since the pandemic began. But open-plan office jobs will be some of the last to return as local economies sputter back to life, because many of the white-collar industries that favor the design find it easier to do their work remotely. They have more time to get it right.

The first and most important push is to reduce density. Instead of squeezing eight employees onto a bench desk, office designers are advising companies to seat just three; instead of bringing outside clients deep into the office for meetings, they’ll be routed into low-trafficked side rooms (or not invited in at all). Alternate desks will have clear signage marking them off-limits. New signs outside break-out rooms will announce adjusted maximum occupancy levels. All-hands team meetings might be broken up into virtual and physical components, where only four people gather in conference rooms and the others tune in from farther-flung desks or from home. Elevators might hold six people, and likely fewer; in the lobbies of high-rises, employees will queue before entering.

All this leaves offices with a geometry problem: How are they supposed to safely space out their old workforce, with the same amount of square footage? The short answer is, they’re not. At least not for a while.

Bergmeyer, a design collaborative with open-plan offices in Boston and L.A., is currently planning to invite employees back to work on Monday, May 18, but the return will be done in phases. In the Boston office, people will come back in three waves, over three-week cycles. About a third of the office will be sorted into each wave, and divided in two again: half will come in Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays and the other half on Tuesdays and Thursdays. If people want to avoid rush hour on public transit, managers are suggesting people stagger their arrivals each day, just making sure they’re around during “peak business hours” — from 11 a.m. to 4 p.m. Eastern time, when workers on both coasts are online.

“It was like a giant chess board, trying to figure out how to take into account each one of our employees’ preferences, but also make some sort of regularity to it,” said Rachel Zsembery, Bergmeyer’s vice president.

To help organizations structure phased returns, Gensler developed a tool called “ReRun,” which uses an office floor plan to calculate how many people a given space can fit, and where they could sit, depending on how much space is desired between each of them. “It’s something that our clients were struggling with and doing manually,” said Coldoff. “Some had millions of square feet, and they’re going in with measuring stick trying to figure out how many people they can fit.”

In total, workplaces are looking to reduce capacity by 50% to 60%, says Lenny Beaudoin, the executive managing director of a CBRE team that leads workspace strategy. Now offices are figuring out how to subdivide their workforces. Some staffers need to come back to the office (because their work demands it), and others might want to come back (because they miss their desk or their commute or their colleagues); on the other side of the ledger are those who don’t want to come back, don’t need to, or simply can’t, because of concerns like childcare.

Flexibility is an approach favored by offices big and small: In advance of an expected loosening of social distancing requirements in the Bay Area, Facebook announced that all its employees can work from home for the rest of the year. Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey announced that some employees can work from home indefinitely.

To accommodate teams that might have some members staying remote and others coming into the office, “Zoom rooms” may become fixtures of the coronavirus workplace. Bergmeyer is turning all of its smaller conference rooms into video chat spaces, for example, and experimenting with backgrounds that work well for remote meetings.

The Netherlands branch of Cushman and Wakefield, a real estate company, developed a plan for spacing out employees by putting round stickers on the floor showing what a six-foot berth really looks like. Bergmeyer has a similar series of branded signs that will direct the flow of traffic around the space, Zsembery says.

Six-foot distance isn’t a foolproof infection guard, however, and the protocols extend beyond density reduction. CBRE is advising landlords to up their ventilation circulation (and paying for the extra energy necessary to do it), and install new air filtration systems. New hand sanitizing stations need to be mounted, and new schedules need to be drawn up for janitorial staff to deep clean. Coldoff expects to see a turn towards touchless everything: personal keyfobs will open doors, personal handsets will do the job of corded phones; no more shared desktops or computer mice.

Then there’s the office kitchen, that germ-intensive zone of water-cooler chatter and sticky microwaves. Pantries will be a challenging task in post-pandemic workplace rethinks, but for now, bring-your-own caffeine is the plan at Bergmeyer: The coffee maker won’t come back into action until at least mid-July.

***

There’s a deeper question that needs to be solved at the heart of this effort to virus-proof the open office. What, exactly, is so valuable about working together in the same physical space? If the goal is to again nurture in-person collaboration, office design will have to find ways of making such face-to-face interactions feel safe and comfortable again.   

“If you can do the same work at home, the burden on the office is that it needs to be a better environment than your home,” said ROOM’s Chen.

Since the spray released by speaking is believed to be particularly likely to spread coronavirus, auditory and visual privacy is taking on on new importance. Pre-Covid open offices also struggled with this dilemma. You’re breathing on your colleagues, but you’re also listening to their every chew and smelling their ramen; their personal phone calls pierce your concentration just as often as their backpack gets caught under your chair leg. The Band-Aid fix for an increasing number of offices that tore down walls are portable phone booths: encased pods that are, ostensibly, soundproof.

But there’s already less of an appetite for shared, often poorly ventilated, enclosed micro-offices. Room and Zenbooth, another office phone booth company, reported plummeting orders as offices shuttered; Zenbooth reported half of its previously forecast sales in March, and about 40% of what it planned for April. (They are, however, getting a lot more requests for pod deliveries to private homes, as remote workers are installing them in garages and living rooms as an escape hatch from kids or roommates.)

Both companies have pivoted their operations to other forms of modular furniture and room dividers, which they predict will have more of a central role in the post-pandemic office. Zenbooth has also turned its attention to the health care space, manufacturing plexiglass sneeze guards and dividers for essential businesses, and for medical workers interacting with patients. Similar designs will be appearing in other kinds of offices, says Sam Johnson, Zenbooth’s CEO: “You don’t want to be breathing into your colleague’s face.”

Floor-to-ceiling plexiglass dividers could help reduce the airborne transmission of Covid-19, says CBRE’s Beaudoin, but such measures may have more of a psychological effect. Installing them could also be counterproductive, he suggested, lowering vigilance to other distancing and sanitizing considerations.

The design of the dividers will matter, too, Johnson says. Far from replicating boxed-in cubicles, he thinks effective dividers should be translucent or semi-translucent. “If workplaces protect their workers, they have to be careful not to over-protect them in a way that’s harmful,” he said. “We’re all physically separated at the moment, and that’s causing all sorts of psychological issues. We don’t want to go back into a workplace where it feels like we’re in a prison.”

There are other, non-design-related things employers can do to support anxious workers. (Providing ample sick leave, for example, can help encourage people who aren’t feeling well to avoid the workplace.) But no matter what, returning to the office after a long period away is probably going to feel weird, says Dr. K. Luan Phan, the chair of Ohio State University’s Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Health.

“As people return to work or they return to public spaces, they’re always going to wonder, are there enough precautions in place that make me feel good about this return?” said Phan. “Are there safeguards in place that make me feel better about all the work that I put in these last two or three months to be safe and be healthy?”

The key is to communicate what’s changing, and how. “It’s got to be consistent, transparent, and it ultimately has to be true,” says Phan.

Zsembery says that Bergmeyer, like so many individuals and households and companies during this unusual time, is trying to remain flexible in case new waves of infection require re-shuttering the office in the winter, or sooner.

“Some people are ready today, to come back,” said Zsembery, “and there are people that aren’t going to be ready for another four or five months.”

Supreme Court Associate Justices Samuel Alito (L) and Elana Kagan testify about the Court’s budget during a hearing of the House Appropriations Committee’s Financial Services and General Government Subcommittee on March 7, 2019, in Washington, DC. | Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images

The Court’s pragmatic voices appeared to gain the upper hand in a case about “faithless electors.”

When the Supreme Court heard arguments Wednesday over whether states can control “faithless electors” — members of the Electoral College who refuse to vote for their state’s winner of the popular vote — the justices didn’t divide along traditional partisan lines.

Chiafalo v. Washington and Colorado Department of State v. Baca, two consolidated faithless electors cases the Supreme Court heard on Wednesday, are unusual ones. They involve fundamental questions about how the United States conducts its presidential elections, but the cases are not especially ideological or partisan: Both the Republican National Committee and the Colorado Democratic Party filed briefs on the same side.

The state of Washington fines faithless electors, while Colorado removes and replaces faithless electors before they can cast a ballot. The question in both Chiafalo and Baca is whether states are allowed to exercise such control over members of the Electoral College after they are appointed.

In election-related cases, the justices often split along partisan lines, with the Court’s five Republicans preferring the outcome favored by the GOP, and its four Democrats dissenting. But, in Chiafalo and Baca, both political parties filed briefs opposing faithless electors and supporting states’ power to ensure that electors vote for the candidate they are pledged to support.

These cases do not present a particularly partisan conflict, and the judges appeared to divide along different lines. Formalists, like Justices Clarence Thomas and Elena Kagan, largely asked about what the text of the Constitution has to say about faithless electors. Meanwhile, pragmatists like Justice Stephen Breyer or Samuel Alito, worried more about how a constitutional rule permitting faithless electors would play out in practice.

There are strong formalistic arguments on both sides of this case, and those arguments turn on arcane interpretations of words like “appoint” and “ballot.” It is far from clear how judges should decide this case based solely on the text of the Constitution and its history.

Yet, as several justices noted, there are strong pragmatic reasons not to permit faithless electors, and those pragmatic concerns appeared likely to carry the day. As Justice Brett Kavanaugh remarked at one point, there is an “avoid chaos principle of judging.” If a case is a close call, and one outcome is likely to cause chaos, then judges should choose the other outcome.

How we got here

Chiafalo and Baca turn on a very narrow distinction. In Ray v. Blair (1952), the Supreme Court held that, before someone is appointed as an elector, they may be required to pledge that they will support their party’s nominee. But Ray also left unanswered what can happen to that elector if they violate their pledge.

The Constitution provides that each state shall appoint electors “in such manner as the Legislature thereof may direct,” but all 50 states use a popular election to select members of the Electoral College (although Maine and Nebraska award some electoral votes to the winner of each individual congressional district, rather than awarding all of their state’s electors to the winner of the state as a whole). Ray suggests that, before an elector is appointed, the state has broad power to impose conditions on electors.

But what happens after someone is formally appointed to the Electoral College? Larry Lessig, a Harvard Law professor and the lawyer representing faithless electors in Chiafalo and Baca, suggested in his briefs that the state’s power to control an elector ends the moment that elector joins the Electoral College.

Think of it this way: The president appoints federal judges with the consent of the Senate, but neither the president nor the Senate may remove a federal judge because they disagree with how the judge voted in a particular case. Similarly, members of Congress are chosen by voters, but once a senator begins their six-year term, they cannot be removed during that term if they break a pledge that they made to voters in order to get elected.

Colorado and Washington, meanwhile, argue that judges and members of Congress are exceptions to a broader rule. As Washington claims in its brief, “the ‘default rule’ is that the power to ‘appoint’ includes the power to remove.” Judges cannot be removed by the person who appointed them because the Constitution explicitly states that federal judges “shall hold their offices during good behaviour,” and senators cannot be removed because the Constitution provides that senators shall serve “for six years.”

But absent constitutional language indicating that members of the Electoral College must serve for a particular amount of time, the states claim, the default rule is that the same state that appointed an elector can remove that elector.

As a matter of constitutional text, neither of these arguments is a slam dunk. The Court’s formalists — justices who tend to rely more on technical legal arguments and less on how the law functions in practice — appeared quite aware of that fact. At one point, Justice Kagan asked Washington state solicitor general Noah Purcell if he could simply explain the best textualist argument for his position. Justice Thomas proposed a completely different textual argument that played only a small role in the parties’ briefs.

The Tenth Amendment provides that “the powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the states, are reserved to the states respectively, or to the people.” Thomas appeared to suggest that, under this amendment, a close question should be resolved in favor of the states. After all, if the Constitution does not prohibit the states from acting in a certain way, then the Tenth Amendment suggests that they may act that way.

But the strongest, and most forceful arguments against faithless electors came from the Court’s pragmatic wing — the justices most likely to weigh the practical impacts of their rulings.

There are powerful pragmatic arguments against faithless electors

Suppose, Justice Alito worried at one point, that an elector is bribed to vote for a particular candidate after they are appointed. Are states really powerless to remove an elector who is tainted by corruption?

Alito was also the first justice to warn that faithless electors could trigger “chaos.” If an election were close, and faithless electors are allowed to do whatever they want, the losing political party would likely launch a campaign to influence electors. The result would be months of uncertainty about who actually won the presidential election. And the eventual “winner” might be so tainted by a perception that they won through logrolling and skulduggery that many Americans would not accept that president as legitimate.

Indeed, as Purcell argued at one point, the practical consequences of allowing faithless electors could be even worse. A foreign power might seek to bribe electors in order to install a president who is sympathetic to that nation. Or they might conduct cyberattacks to uncover embarrassing personal information about electors, and then blackmail those electors into voting for a particular candidate.

These potential scenarios apparently bothered Justice Kavanaugh enough to trigger his suggestion that the Court should apply a “tiebreaker” in favor of the view that is most likely to “avoid chaos.”

Meanwhile Justice Neil Gorsuch, who ordinarily takes a formalistic approach to the law, raised a different pragmatic concern. If Ray allows a state to require electors to pledge to vote a certain way, why couldn’t the state require them to make that pledge under oath? And then, if the elector violates their oath, why couldn’t they be prosecuted for perjury?

The distinction between regulating electors before they are appointed, and regulating them after they are appointed, Gorsuch appeared to suggest, doesn’t actually mean very much.

Justice Sonia Sotomayor offered a third reason to reject faithless electors. Even if the framers originally expected electors to exercise individual discretion, the historical practice stretching back for nearly all of American history is that electors cast a vote for whoever their state supports. This history, Sotomayor suggested, offers a practical gloss on the Constitution, which judges should respect.

Current circumstances, though, make it harder than usual to assess how the Court views a particular case from oral arguments. Ordinary, in-person arguments are a scrum, where any justice can interrupt the lawyers at any time. In this setting, justices tend to interject a lot when they disagree with a particular lawyer, often staying silent while the side they support is arguing.

In an age of social distancing and telephone arguments, however, the Court uses a different format. Each justice is given a few minutes to ask questions of each lawyer, with no interruptions from their colleagues. That means that every justice tends to ask questions of both sides, even if they are already inclined to support one side or the other.

So it is not entirely clear how each justice will vote in Chiafalo and Baca. But there also appeared to be considerable support for the pragmatic concerns raised by Alito, Sotomayor, Kavanaugh, and others. It appears likely that the Supreme Court will not allow faithless electors. And they may even oppose faithless electors by a very lopsided margin.

That’s good news if, like much of the Court’s pragmatic wing, you fear the chaos that could result from placing the power to select the president in the hands of a few hundred largely unknown individuals.

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My Irish ancestors all came to America between 1847 and 1849 — during the time of An Gorta Mór, the Great Hunger, when the British Empire hoarded all the food they were producing on colonized Irish land and left the native people with nothing but diseased potatoes to survive. This plight resonated with the Choctaw Nation, who lived in and around modern-day Alabama, Florida, Mississippi, and Louisiana, and of course had had their own experiences with a systematic genocide at the hands of a land-greedy colonizing force just a decade earlier. So the Choctaw rallied their resources, and sent $170 over the Atlantic to the starving people in Ireland — the equivalent of either $5,000 or $20,000 dollars today, depending on your calculations.

To commemorate this generous act, a statue was erected in Midleton, County Cork in 2017.

But solidarity is even better than a statue. Which is why, as Native Americans have disproportionately suffered from the impacts of COVID-19, Irish people rallied to the cause, raising more than a million dollars for the Navajo & Hopi Families COVID-19 Relief Fund on GoFundMe in just a few days. The effort was largely spearheaded — or at least publicized — by Irish journalist Naomi O'Leary, who also spoke about the historical relationship and the legacy of colonialism on the Irish Passport podcast:

From O'Leary's Irish Times article on the initiative:

Many comments on the GoFundMe page referenced the Choctaw donation. Some read “Ní neart go cur le chéile” ["No strength without unity"] and others simply “Ireland remembers”. “173 years ago, the people of the Choctaw nation showed Ireland unimaginable generosity,” wrote donor Michael Foy. “I am donating today in memory of our shared past, and to help overcome this crisis together – just as we did nearly two centuries ago.”

Cassandra Begay, a member of the Navajo Nation and one of the team organising the fundraiser, burst into tears as she told The Irish Times of seeing the donations flood in.

“We noticed that we were getting a lot of donations from Ireland so we were wondering why . . . sorry I get emotional talking about this part,” Ms Begay broke off. “And I learned about what the Choctaw did for the Irish people, and it was so beautiful.”

You can still support the Navajo and Hopi GoFundMe campaign, which is up to $2.5 million as of this writing.

Coronavirus: Irish donate to hard-hit Native Americans to repay famine aid [Naomi O'Leary / The Irish Times]

Irish return an old favor, helping Native Americans battling the virus [Ed O'Loughlin and Mihir Zaveri / The New York Times]

Navajo & Hopi Families COVID-19 Relief Fund

Image: Kindred Spirits Choctaw Memorial in Midleton, Co. Cork, Éire, taken by Gavin Sheridan via Wikimedia Commons/CC 4.0