When the number of approved textbooks for Russia’s 14 million schoolchildren was slashed by more than half, one publisher with close ties to President Vladimir V. Putin profited handsomely.
Nevermore will Boston's Edgar Allan Poe Square be without an Edgar Allen Poe statue. Artist Stefanie Rocknack's life-sized bronze tribute to Poe is now standing two blocks from the writer's birthplace.
[Good space policy requires] smarter regulation to encourage
entrepreneurship and accept risk. For instance, current law
prevents the Federal Aviation Administration’s Office of Space
Transportation (FAA-AST) from regulating the safety of passengers
aboard spacecraft; it is constrained to regulating only those
issues that affect uninvolved third parties.
The hand of the state has rested lightly on the space industry
so far, thanks to that 2004 law, which imposed an eight-year
moratorium on regulation. The view at the time was that until
private space passenger vehicles actually took flight, the industry
was too poorly understood to intelligently regulate. The moratorium
is about to expire, and the House is willing to extend it to cover
another eight years after flights begin. But the Senate is
resisting the extension, demanding stricter regulation while
simultaneously seeking to cut the budget of the FAA-AST. If the
stalemate continues, the industry could wind up regulated out of
existence before it even gets off the ground.
This FAA policy was hard won and may now be in jeopardy if
politicians get in the mood to Do Something.
With halloween approaching, I figured I’d repost my haunted house mini, but all in one place this time. No more of that split-across-a-bunch-of-posts nonsense.
1. the disgrace or the reproach incurred by conduct considered outrageously shameful; infamy.
2. a cause or object of such disgrace or reproach.
3. fall from grace; ignominy.
Etymology: first attested 1656, from Latin opprobrium, “reproach, disgrace”, from opprōbrō, “reproach, taunt”, from ob, “against” + probrum, “disgrace, dishonour”.
There's definitely a difference between comments that require a response from the listener - because they're threatening, persistent, or crazy enough to make people unsure what you're capable of - and those that are simply salutations.
Sometimes, when I read the Twitter, I feel myself morphing into Andrea Peyser or the dudes on Fox News. Case in point! The “catcall” video from evvvvery day, alllll week, which everybody is very SEE!???! about. There is much outrage from our feminist sistren, and much shamed head-hanging from our feminist men.
But the video — of a white woman walking through the mean streets of New York City, being greeted almost 100 percent respectfully by a cavalcade of mostly minority men because they edited out all the white guys — well. This is what has us upset today? Too many people said “good morning” and “good evening” and even leered “God bless”?
(Nota bene: Please do not follow a woman for five minutes, you’re the worst; and instructing a woman that she should “say thank you” for your compliments is disgusting, unless you are her mother. But greeting a woman? Addressing her pleasantly even though you have had no introduction because we don’t actually live in Regency England? Some of us would politely raise our hands and demur when faced with the UNIVERSAL OUTRAGE at that.)
Babyfeminist sisters, I am not trying to #slatepitch you. You can take offense to whatever you’d like. We all have different limbo bars for outrage. I would personally get offended whenever I was walking my dog in a robe and slippers at 6 in the morning, and the gentlemen trawling my LA neighborhood for the trans* sexworkers who occupied it overnight would slow down to ask my price. I also get offended when someone comments on a particular body part; often, when someone comments on someone else’s “nice tits,” they say it with a sneer, as if they do not think those tits are nice at all!
(One particularly angry-looking middle-aged fellow snarled “NICE TITS” to me in a truck stop diner in rural Colorado, while I was lunching there with my eight-year-old boy. I stopped and asked, my face composed, if he was really going to talk to me that way in front of my young son? He, of course, was a GIANT PUSSY, and said nothing back, just avoided eye contact and seethed. But he undoubtedly went on to rape and murder some truckstop girls, so I guess that was a win for him.)
“But it’s the privileged demand for her attention!” I hear my little sisters cry. “It’s the weight of so many interactions piling up over time!” Well, I am not calling you delicate flowers. Personally, I like it when men tell me I am looking fine this morning, even if they say it like they would like to do sex on me, and even if it’s as often as every six minutes. I usually even say thank you instead of punching them in the face, unless I’m lost in my own thoughts. You don’t have to say thank you! You can yell at them, or something, I guess. Then you can yell at someone for holding a door. Different strokes!
There is genuine gross street harassment, meant to demean us and make us feel like nothing more than three-holed fuckdolls. But when you’re mad because too many people say hello to you, you seem, to me, to be coming to the end of outrage.
You want genuine street harassment? Walk by a frat house, or through the tailgaters in a baseball stadium parking lot. There will be very few pleasant, respectful “good mornings” or even “you look very nice today!” It will be instead about what those nice men will do to your body, quite graphically, and not at all polite, at all!
I like living in cities where the sidewalks are interactive, where people look at each other and acknowledge each other and even wish to put their penises into women’s vaginas. When I think of cities where we can “walk down the streets minding our own business,” I think of a city where humanity’s lost, and everyone hurries through it, head down, looking at their iPhones in their matching gray suits. To me, that’s a sad dystopia. Even if it makes me Andrea Peyser now.
We all know "Tainted Love." Most probably became familiar with the song from Soft Cell's undying (undead?) version, released in 1981 and essentially inescapable after that, whether you're at a wedding or a leather bar. Many (younger) listeners wrongly assume it was a Soft Cell original, which isn't the case at all: Motown powerhouse Gloria Jones released her version of the Ed Cobb-penned song all the way back in the heady days of '64. It's since been covered by a whole pop smorgasbord of folks, the most recent big example being Marilyn Manson's 2001 edition (for the soundtrack to Not Another Teen Movie, of all things.) The less said about that the better, especially because Coil did an infinitely creepier industrial cover of "Tainted Love" sixteen years earlier, with the appropriately 80's gothic video accompaniment it deserves. Listen to those spooooky choirs! That dolorous, downtuned church bell! The fucking ten-ton guitar stabs coming down on you like the knife through the shower curtain! This is the "Tainted Love" you should bust out at your Halloween party to properly set the mood.
A number of current medical treatments involve a process in which one type of human cell is converted to another, such as stem cells being converted to skin cells. During this process, there’s a stage called the stem cell stage, where the original cells are at risk of converting into multiple types of cells, rather than the single, desired type. But now a team of scientists from Washington University in the US has figured out how to avoid the stem cell stage altogether, and have successfully converted skin cells directly into functioning brain cells.
The team produced a specific type of brain cell called a medium spiny neuron. These nerve cells are important for controlling movement of the body and are the main cell type affected inHuntington’s disease.
The findings, which are published in the journal Neuron, report that the cells were implanted in the brains of mice, and survived for at least six months.
"Not only did these transplanted cells survive in the mouse brain, they showed functional properties similar to those of native cells," said developmental biologist and lead author of the study, Andrew S. Yoo, in a press release. ”These cells are known to extend projections into certain brain regions. And we found the human transplanted cells also connected to these distant targets in the mouse brain. That’s a landmark point about this paper.”
The team grew the human skin cells in an environment that resembled that of brain cells. Next they exposed the cultured cells to two microRNAs - small non-coding molecules - that unravelled the DNA needed for brain cells. The next hurdle was to reprogram the cells into specific medium spiny neurons, and this was done by exposing them to transcription factors - molecules that control the activity of a gene.
The team is now reprogramming cells taken from patients with Huntington’s disease into medium spiny neurons, using this method.
This new approach presents the possibility of using a patient’s own cells in regenerative medicine, drastically reducing the risk of the cells being rejected by the immune system.
It shouldn't be a surprise to anyone that genetics affect susceptibility, but, having such a stark delineation in such well-understood populations is good reason to hope that human-relevant factors can be picked out.
A false-color image of the virus, showing its unusual filamentous appearance.
The outcome of Ebola infections often depends on a patient's access to sophisticated medical care. But there's the possibility that it could be influenced by genetics as well. That suggestion comes from the authors of a new paper that looked at what happens when genetically diverse groups of mice were exposed to the virus. As it turns out, the results ranged from losing a bit of weight to complete mortality.
The work doesn't seem to have been inspired by looking for insight into the progression of hemorrhagic fever in humans. Instead, the researchers involved appear to have been frustrated by the fact that the most convenient research mammal, the mouse, doesn't experience the symptoms typical of Ebola infections in humans: no problems with blood coagulation, no hemorrhages, and no shock. So they decided to see if they could find a mouse strain that did show these symptoms (and would thus enable convenient studies).
To do so, they started with something called the Collaborative Cross collection. Most of the mouse strains used in research have been inbred until all members of the strain are genetically identical. There are, however, differences between strains; C57 mice are genetically distinct from 129 mice. So it's possible to see very different things happen if you do the same experiment in different strains.
Juno Calypso once spent three days on her mom's dining room table, standing in a cake, surrounded by sweetly rotting prawns and pineapples on sticks. The artist, art director and filmmaker uses her alter ego, Joyce, to create intriguing, unsettling scenes of suburban frustration, female isolation and the hopeless fight against time, often surrounded by food, masks, and saturated soft furnishings.
Of course, the silent pastel fury of suburbia has inspired artists ever since cities started to creep out of their urban womb in the 1930s. From Philip Larkin to David Lynch we've long been fascinated by the strange modern hinterland of twitching curtains, empty streets, tarmac-paved silence, and hidden domestic mystery. But in Calypso's pictures the viewer is invited into a world on the border of suburbia, science fiction, and S&M. We go behind the curtain, and we're not sure we like what we find.
I spoke to the 25-year-old London-based artist to find out what the hell is going on.
VICE: Pork, prawns, pineapple: Why do you use food in your work so much?
Juno Calypso: I've always been attracted to the texture of food in photos. I suppose it all began with Popcorn Venus, the photo where I'm popping out of a cake. I started to think about how we photograph women in the same way we photograph food, as these very glossy, artificial things pumped full of preservatives. We'll do anything to stop both decaying.
In Popcorn Venus there's a very prominent sliced sausage in the foreground-was that intentionally phallic?
In the 70s they served a lot of platters and they always had these big sausages-the kind of things you find in Turkish supermarkets. I love how obscene, huge and pink they are. They're seen as disgusting and fake.
Joyce's expression is so at odds with what she's doing. She's jumping out of a cake and yet there's no joy in her face.
There are all these ideas about how you're supposed to look into the camera to be sexy-make your eyes droopy, your mouth pouty. But if you exaggerate that just a bit, you look ridiculous, tired, and pissed off.
She looks almost sedated, disorientated-like she doesn't quite realize what's happening.
She looks tired because I was tired. I felt like I was trapped in that cake. All that food was laid out for three days and nothing changed, nothing went moldy. Even the prawns. Eventually it just started to smell sweet-like the sweet smell of death.
In Reconstituted Meat Slices the tin of meat is both horribly flesh-like and yet completely artificial. Did you intend for it to be the same color as your skin?
I wanted to exaggerate that color. I found the tin of meat in a supermarket, and it looked like something straight out of the 50s. It stank. A lot of people think she's dead in that photo, and the food looks dead too-artificial, canned, processed. She's the embodiment of all that. I wore a lot of fake tan that day.
Reconstituted Meat Slices
That image, that pose, is echoed in a new photo where you're wearing a silicon mask. But this time you're staring right at the camera. What changed?
I feel like she's getting more powerless. I want to be submissive and tired. The eyes are red like she's been crying. I found the mask on eBay-it's a Japanese silicon sauna mask. You feel completely disgusting, trapped behind this hot, sticky piece of plastic. It's supposed to make you look younger, preserve you, stop age and time.
It reminds me of Twelve Reasons You're Tired all the Time, where you're wearing a weird pink plastic mask in what looks like a front room.
That mask is called the Linda Evans Rejuvenique Facial Toning System. On the inside are all these gold metal pins and when you turn it on it electrocutes your face. These things are all on the border between beauty, torture, and science fiction. I thought it was historic, but it actually came out in 2000 and they're still being produced now.
Twelve Reasons You're Tired all the Time
These products aren't just about making you look young-they're also trying to hold back death, aren't they?
Oh, they're all incredibly morbid. They're designed to make you mourn your lost youth but also be scared of the future. So you're never really just living inside your body, you're always thinking about either the past or the future. They're selling you these products through terror and sadness.
It's like we-well, men-are trying to confront their own fear of death by stopping women age.
The scary old woman is a universally horrific image-from The Exorcist to Snow White-because she is the opposite of sexually attractive. There's so much decay under women's bodies but we have to hide it, keep it under wraps. A few months ago I went to The Anti-Ageing Show-a convention at Olympia-and it was the scariest thing I've ever been to. They gave you a discount on treatments if you had them there, so when you walked in there were all these women lying on beds, having treatments. It looked like a morgue. It was like walking into an embalming centre, with dead bodies everywhere.
Artificial Sweetener
Oh God. When you look back at an image like Artificial Sweetener, where you're three years younger, how do you feel about the woman in that picture?
I can't tell if I look young or old. I just look grotesque. But I love inhabiting the grotesque. I'd love to learn prosthetics-at the moment I'm just using fake teeth, eyelashes, and makeup, but I'd love to give myself huge lips, something that's not quite believable.
The Eternal Beauty image where you're standing behind the door-where is that?
I shot it in my friend's studio. They're actually film stills. I thought it would be fun to film, rather than taking loads of pictures. It's meant to be this imaginary beauty clinic-you're not quite sure what they're doing to women but you know it's sinister. There's no narrative or script; the pictures are just there for people to imagine around.
I put cling film around my hair. It was sweaty and itchy. Like when you're in a salon and having your hair bleached, but instead of trying to make myself beautiful, I'm enduring all the discomfort to make a picture.
I started it at night time. I drank loads of coffee and worked through the night, until the sun came up. That's the sun coming through in the background.
It feels like the decline of Joyce. She's gone from jumping out of a cake to being laid out on the floor like an autopsy.
Yes, it's like she's been incubated.
Cyril Connolly called suburbs "incubators of apathy and delirium".
Suburbs are creepy. And yet they're supposed to be this dream of the perfect life, perfect home, husband, and sofa. I grew up in London, I've never lived in suburbia, but they seem like a doll's house. The house that I shot Artificial Sweetener in was my ex-boyfriend's parents' house. His mum had decorated the whole thing, sewed the curtains, picked the wallpaper. She made it all match.
There's also a sexual frustration bubbling under a lot of the images. In Modern Hallucination you're lying on a bed, on your back, like you've just had a wank.
I love the twin beds in that image. Twin beds: That's just sexual frustration in bed form. Is it for children? Or just a couple who don't have sex anymore? So she's lying there, completely frustrated and defeated.
Has your process changed much since you started the Joyce series?
I'm now very aware of the process. There's less showing off. I started this project while I was still at uni, and I wanted to make people laugh, make myself look ridiculous. But now, working by myself, there's no big cake. I'm just making work for myself.
"A cockroach ... was enjoying a stroll on my plate while I was eating. The server saw the cockroach crawling on our table and he didn't even pretend to look embarrassed. (Forget an apology!) He grabbed the cockroach with a napkin and left."
That's from a one-star Yelp review of an Italian restaurant in DC. It's gross, it's useful. I won't go to that restaurant. (Also because the bruschetta's apparently nothing to write home about either.) But you know who should go there? Health inspectors.
That's one use for Yelp data, CEO Jeremy Stoppelman told Bloomberg's Jonathan Allen at the Washington Ideas Form on Thursday. Think of it as CompStat for restaurants. The NYPD developed CompStat, its computerized crime statistics tool, in the 1990s in order to better direct limited resources to highest-crime areas. Put "cops on the dots," in Commissioner William Bratton's words—that is, send them to where crime is concentrated, as indicated by dots on the precinct map—and you're more likely to catch perpetrators.
Health inspectors, too, are a limited resource. They can only visit so many restaurants. So one way to decide where they should go is essentially the opposite of how you should decide when you're hungry—look for the one-star reviews, the reports of critters, the accounts of taco-induced nausea. Researchers in some cities, Stoppelman said, have started looking into this possibility, developing lists of words, like "cockroach," whose appearance in Yelp reviews could be associated with a higher likelihood of health code violations.
In the meantime Yelp, along with the cities of San Francisco and New York, has developed a system to allow municipalities to upload health-inspection grades to restaurant reviews. So here's to better gastrointestinal health through data—and at the Tex-Mex place as on the subway, if you see something, by all means say something.
Over the summer, media outlets across the country fixated on the mounting death toll of young people in inner cities across America. “11 shot, including 3-year-old boy, as Chicago gun violence worsens,” read the large headline of one major U.S. newspaper, while another, the Chicago Tribune, published a painfully graphic photo essay that chronicled the degree to which gun violence in particular had shocked and destabilized entire neighborhoods in 2014.
This fall, television reporters still stand nightly outside of dimly-lit apartment buildings and row houses, telling yet more stories of children felled by bullets and showing new heartbreaking scenes of mothers wracked by sobs. And yet, other headlines suggest that this nation is far safer and much less violent than it used to be. They note that gun violence has plummeted a startling 49 percent since 1993 and, aside from some brief spikes and dips in the last few years, most policymakers seem to feel quite good about America’s overall crime rate, which is also at a noticeable low.
Why is it then that some American neighborhoods, from the south side of Chicago to the north side of Philadelphia to all sides of Detroit, still endure so much collective distress? Might there be something about these particular neighborhoods, pundits wonder, that make them more prone to violence?
According to one well-respected scholar, "high rates of black crime" continue to exist despite declining crime rates nationally because African Americans live in highly segregated and deeply impoverished neighborhoods. Not only does his work suggest that both segregation and poverty breed violence but, more disturbingly, that the ways in which poor blacks decide collectively and individually to protect themselves seems only to "fuel the violence," and gives it "a self-perpetuating character."
Segregation and poverty are indeed serious problems today, and too many of America’s poorest all-black and all-brown communities also suffer a level of violence that, if one disregards the horrific killing sprees in places like Columbine, Seattle, or Sandy Hook, is largely unknown in whiter, more affluent neighborhoods. Whereas the violent crime rate in the mostly black city of Detroit was 21.23 per 1,000 (15,011 violent crimes) in 2012, that same year the virtually all-white city of Grosse Point, Michigan nearby reported a rate of only 1.12 per 1,000 (6 violent crimes).
Notwithstanding such seemingly damning statistics, though, we have all seriously misunderstood the origins of the almost-paralyzing violence that our most racially-segregated communities now experience and, as troublingly, we have seriously mischaracterized the nature of so much of the violence that the residents of these communities suffer.
To start, today’s concentrated levels of gun violence in hyper-segregation and highly concentrated poverty is quite ahistorical. As any careful look at the past makes clear, neither of these social ills is new and, therefore, neither can adequately explain why it is only recently that so many children of color are being shot or killed in their own communities.
Indeed, throughout the 20th century, racially-segregated communities have been the norm. Everything from restrictive covenants to discriminatory federal housing policies ensured that throughout the postwar period, neighborhoods in cities such as Detroit or Chicago would be either all white or all non-white and, until now, none of these segregated spaces experienced sustained rates of violence so completely out of step with national trends.
To suggest, as both scholars and the media have, that the violence experienced by all-black or all-brown neighborhoods today stems in large part from their residential isolation is problematic for other reasons as well. It leads some to suspect that if people of color simply spent more time with white people, lived next to them, and went to school with them, they would be less violent—they would perhaps learn better ways to resolve disputes and deal with stress and anger. Again, though, history belies this logic.
White Americans also have a long history of violence—not only when asked to share residential space with African Americans or even to treat them as equals in schools or on the job, but also when nary a person of color is near. From the lynching of blacks in the Jim Crow era to the crimes committed against African Americans every time they tried to move onto a white block after World War I and World War II, ugly incidents of white violence were both regular and unremarkable. Even among those who look just like them, whites historically have engaged in a variety of violent behaviors that would make many shudder—from their propensity to engage in brutal duels and to “eye gouge” their fellow whites in the decades before the Civil War, to their involvement in mass shootings in more recent years.
Just as hyper-segregation doesn’t explain the violence that so many have to endure today in America’s inner city communities while still raising children, attending church, and trying to make ends meet, neither does highly-concentrated poverty. Because of their exclusion from virtually every program and policy that helped eventually to build an American middle class, non-whites have always had far less wealth than whites. From the ability to maintain land ownership after the Civil War, to the virtual guarantee of welfare benefits such as Social Security and FHA loans during the New Deal, to preferential access to employment and housing in the postwar period, white communities have always had considerably more economic advantage than communities of color. And yet, no matter how poor they were, America’s most impoverished communities have never been plagued by the level of violence they are today.
But if neither racial segregation nor the racial poverty gap can account for the degree to which poor communities of color are traumatized today, then what does? What is altogether new is the extent to which these communities are devastated by the working of our nation’s criminal justice system in general and by mass incarceration in particular.
Today's rates of incarceration in America's poorest, blackest, and brownest neighborhoods are historically unprecedented. By 2001, one in six black men had been incarcerated and, by the close of 2013, black and Latino inmates comprised almost 60% of the nation’s federal and state prison population. The numbers of incarcerated black women are also stark. According to the Bureau of Justice Statistics, young black women ages 18 to 19 were almost five times more likely to be imprisoned than white women of the same age in 2010.
When President Lyndon B. Johnson passed the Law Enforcement Assistance Act in 1965—legislation which, in turn, made possible the most aggressive war on crime this nation ever waged—he was reacting not to remarkable crime rates but to the civil rights upheaval that had erupted nationwide just the year before. This activism, he and other politicians believed, represented not participatory democracy in action, but instead a criminal element that would only grow more dangerous if not checked.
Notably, the national policy embrace of targeted and more aggressive policing as well as highly punitive laws and sentences—the so-called “War on Crime” that led eventually to such catastrophic rates of imprisonment—predated the remarkable levels of violence that now impact poor communities of color so disproportionately.
In fact, the U.S. homicide rate in 1965 was significantly lower than it had been in several previous moments in American history: 5.5 per 100,000 U.S. residents as compared, for example, with 9.7 per 100,000 in 1933. Importantly, though, whereas the violent crime rate was 200.2 per 100,000 U.S. residents in 1965, it more than tripled to a horrifying 684.6 per 100,000 by 1995. Though mass incarceration did not originate in extraordinarily high rates of violence, mass incarceration created the conditions in which violence would surely fester.
The quadrupling of the incarceration rate in America since 1970 has had devastating collateral consequences. Already economically-fragile communities sank into depths of poverty unknown for generations, simply because anyone with a criminal record is forever “marked” as dangerous and thus rendered all but permanently unemployable. With blacks incarcerated at six times and Latinos at three times the rate of whites by 2010, millions of children living in communities of color had effectively been orphaned. Worse yet, these kids often experience high rates of post-traumatic shock from having witnessed the often-brutal arrests of their parents and having been suddenly ripped from them.
De-industrialization and suburbanization surely did their part to erode our nation’s black and brown neighborhoods, but staggering rates of incarceration is what literally emptied them out. As this Pew Center of the States graphic on Detroit shows, the overwhelmingly-black east side of the Motor City has been ravaged by the effects of targeted policing and mass incarceration in recent years with one in twenty-two adults there under some form of correctional control. In some neighborhoods, the rate is as high as one in sixteen.
Pew Center for the States
Such concentrated levels of imprisonment have torn at the social fabric of inner city neighborhoods in ways that even people who live there find hard to comprehend, let alone outsiders. As the research of criminologist Todd Clear makes clear, extraordinary levels of incarceration create the conditions for extraordinary levels of violence. But even mass incarceration does not, in itself, explain the particularly brutal nature of the violence that erupts today in, for example, the south side of Chicago. To explain that, we must look carefully and critically at our nation’s criminal justice system.
The level of gun violence in today's inner cities is the direct product of our criminal-justice policies—specifically, the decision to wage a brutal War on Drugs. When federal and state politicians such as New York Governor Nelson Rockefeller opted to criminalize addiction by passing unprecedentedly punitive possession laws rather than to treat it as a public health crisis, unwittingly or not, a high level of violence in poor communities of color was not only assured but was guaranteed to be particularly ugly. This new drug war created a brand-new market for illegal drugs—an underground marketplace that would be inherently dangerous and would necessarily be regulated by both guns and violence.
Indeed, without the War on Drugs, the level of gun violence that plagues so many poor inner-city neighborhoods today simply would not exist. The last time we saw so much violence from the use of firearms was, notably, during Prohibition. “[As] underground profit margins surged, gang rivalries emerged, and criminal activity mounted” during Prohibition, writes historian Abigail Perkiss, “the homicide rate across the nation rose 78 percent…[and] in Chicago alone, there were more than 400 gang-related murders a year.”
As important as it is to rethink the origins of the violence that poor inner city residents still endure, we must also be careful even when using the term “violence,” particularly when seeking to explain “what seems to be wrong” with America’s most disadvantaged communities. A level of state violence is also employed daily in these communities that rarely gets mentioned and yet it is as brutal, and perhaps even more devastating, than the violence that is so often experienced as a result of the informal economy in now-illegal drugs.
This is a violence that comes in the form of police harassment, surveillance, profiling, and even killings—the ugly realities of how law enforcement wages America’s War on Drugs. Today, young black men today are 21 times more likely than their white peers to be killed by the police and, according to a recent ProPublica report, black children have fared just as badly. Since 1980, a full 67 percent of the 151 teenagers and 66 percent of the 41 kids under 14 who have been killed by police were African American. Between 2010 and 2012 alone, police officers shot and killed fifteen teens running away from them; all but one of them black.
This is the violence that undergirded the 4.4 million stop-and-frisks in New York City between 2004 and 2014. This is the violence that led to the deaths of black men and boys such as Kimani Gray, Amadou Diallo, Sean Bell, Oscar Grant, and Michael Brown. This is the violence that led to the deaths of black women and girls such as Rekia Boyd, Yvette Smith, and 7-year-old Aiyana Stanley-Jones. And this is the violence that has touched off months of protests in Ferguson, Missouri just as it also touched off nearly a decade of urban rebellions after 1964.
A close look at the violence that today haunts America’s most impoverished and most segregated cities, in fact, fundamentally challenges conventional assumptions about perpetrators and victims. America’s black and brown people not only don’t have a monopoly on violence, but, in fact, a great deal of the violence being waged in their communities is perpetrated by those who are at least officially charged with protecting, not harming, them. As residents of Ferguson well know, for example, in the same month that Michael Brown was shot to death by a police officer, four other unarmed black men were also killed by members of law enforcement.
Indeed, the true origins of today’s high rates of violence in America’s most highly segregated, most deeply impoverished, and blackest and brownest neighborhoods—whoever perpetrates it—are located well outside of these same communities. Simply put, America’s poorest people of color had no seat the policy table where mass incarceration was made. But though they did not create the policies that led to so much community and state violence in inner cities today, they nevertheless now suffer from them in unimaginable ways.
Sure, walking down the street as a woman comes with constant catcalls and unwanted attention, microaggressions that add up to an uncomfortable experience no matter how benign any single incident may appear. But have you tried being a man? It's awesome!
One pilot was killed and
another was injured today in a crash during a test
flight of Virgin Galactic's space tourism craft, SpaceShipTwo.
SpaceShipTwo was lost. The jet that carried the ship aloft,
WhiteKnightTwo, is fine. This was the 55th test flight for
SpaceShipTwo and the 35th for WhiteKnightTwo.
Sometimes, when I read the Twitter, I feel myself morphing into Andrea Peyser or the dudes on Fox News. Case in point! The “catcall” video from evvvvery day, alllll week, which everybody is very SEE!???! about. There is much outrage from our feminist sistren, and much shamed head-hanging from our feminist men.
