A reader writes:
In terms of creepy game show hosts, nobody can top Richard Dawson of the Family Feud, who made it a point to kiss all of the female contestants, typically on the lips, and fondle them during the fast money round. He actually wound up marrying a contestant.
National Lampoon's European Vacation parodied Dawson in the opening scene.
"You want it to be so real-looking that heads turn and say, 'Oh what a beautiful baby, can I hold it?'"
None
It is a remarkable picture. A single woman stands in the roadway, feet firmly planted. She poses no obvious threat. She is there to protest the excessive force which Baton Rouge police allegedly deploy against the city’s black citizens. She stands in front of police headquarters, on Saturday. And she is being arrested by officers who look better prepared for a war than a peaceful protest.
There are images that are impossible to forget, searing themselves into our collective consciousness. One man staring down a column of tanks in Tiananmen Square. A high school student attacked by police dogs in Birmingham, Alabama. This is such a photo.
Once seen, it cannot be unseen.
The Baton Rouge police department lists the virtues it seeks to instill in its officers. Protection. Obligation. Leadership. Integrity. Courage. Excellence. I wonder what these officers thought about as they hauled her away. (Update: As explained below, there were multiple agencies on the scene; the officers in the picture were apparently Louisiana State Police.)
The city is not a hot bed of racial tension. It is a culturally relevant urban center with innovative policing—and other cities should learn from it.
If ever an American city were unworthy of the strife of a black man killing five white police officers during a Black Lives Matter protest, it is Dallas.
Once maligned as the “City of Hate,” after the assassination of John F. Kennedy more than 50 years ago, Dallas has come a long way. Today’s Dallas is diverse, Democratic, and pioneering in its policing. Its once bombed-out-looking downtown is filling in with people, restaurants, and businesses. These days, instead of widespread hate, controversy in Dallas looks more like the enduring fracas over Trinity Park, an expensive effort to turn a floodplain into parkland along the banks of the green Trinity River.
Dallas isn’t perfect of course. Its inequality is shaped like a doughnut: nearly empty at the center and richer and denser in its farthest suburbs, with all the attendant problems that brings. But undoubtedly, the politicians and the propagandists will try to shoehorn Dallas into a national story of racial division and distrust; less than 24 hours after the shootings, some already have. Texas’s Republican lieutenant governor, Dan Patrick, lashed out at the protesters. Former Republican Representative Joe Walsh threatened the president and all but declared a race war. They are already trying to turn Dallas into a metaphor. But Dallas will stubbornly resist, which, in turn, makes one wonder about how local tragedies are remade into simplistic and divisive national narratives—and whether that makes any sense at all.
It's natural for humans to pay attention to all their romantic options, and new research shows Facebook helps them do that.
One episode in season five of How I Met Your Mother, called “Hooked,” revolves around people being kept “on the hook,” romantically speaking, by members of the show’s central gang of friends. “I can’t be with you … right now” is the phrase the pals keep using to string these people along, the “right now” leaving the door cracked open just enough that apparently some poor guy is willing to continue to do Robin’s laundry and rub her feet for the vague possibility of a someday relationship.
This does not make the friends look very good, obviously, but keeping track of and keeping in touch with alternative romantic prospects is a common thing for humans to do, even if it is rarely in such an exaggerated, sitcommy way. A recent study published in Computers in Human Behavior dubs these interactions “backburner relationships." A backburner, as defined by the study, is “a person to whom one is not presently committed, and with whom one maintains some degree of communication, in order to keep or establish the possibility of future romantic and/or sexual involvement.”
The Kerner Report confronted a tense nation with data about structural racism throughout the country and made recommendations to solve the problem. But America looked away.
“All of us, as Americans, should be troubled by these shootings, because these are not isolated incidents,” said President Barack Obama following the horrific shootings of Alton Sterling and Philando Castile. “They’re symptomatic of a broader set of racial disparities that exist in our criminal-justice system.” In an American tragedy of the nation’s own making, Obama will end his historic presidency with racial turmoil rocking the nation. The person whose election brought so much hope about the trajectory of race relations in the United States, a country that has perpetually suffered from the original sin of slavery, is spending these days desperately trying to calm the anger over police killings of African Americans and the protests and violence that have ensued.
“Photography is a form of power, and people are loath to give up power, including police officers.”
First of all, they shouldn’t ask.
“As a basic principle, we can’t tell you to stop recording,” says Delroy Burton, chairman of D.C.’s metropolitan police union and a 21-year veteran on the force. “If you’re standing across the street videotaping, and I’m in a public place, carrying out my public functions, [then] I’m subject to recording, and there’s nothing legally the police officer can do to stop you from recording.”
“What you don’t have a right to do is interfere,” he says. “Record from a distance, stay out of the scene, and the officer doesn’t have the right to come over and take your camera, confiscate it.”
Officers do have a right to tell you to stop interfering with their work, Burton told me, but they still aren’t allowed to destroy film.
One veteran officer speaks from the heart, on the intersection of race and policing.
In the hours following the shooting death of five police officers in Dallas during an otherwise peaceful demonstration, opinions blared from social media, televisions, and newspaper front pages. In the din of it all, I reached out to the retired police chief Donald Grady II, who served as chief in Santa Fe, New Mexico, among other cities, and also trained police forces abroad in managing racial and ethnic strife among the ranks and with civilians. His 36 years on the force, as a black American, were marked by some familiar tensions and themes—racial targeting, police brutality, unwarranted hostility, lack of cooperation, and mutual paranoia. In a candid and expansive conversation, Grady unpacked for me some of the complexities of wearing a blue uniform while living in brown skin. An edited version of our conversation follows.
The real problem is the belief that all our social problems can be solved with force.
There is a tendency, when examining police shootings, to focus on tactics at the expense of strategy. One interrogates the actions of the officer in the moment trying to discern their mind-state. We ask ourselves, "Were they justified in shooting?" But, in this time of heightened concern around the policing, a more essential question might be, "Were we justified in sending them?" At some point, Americans decided that the best answer to every social ill lay in the power of the criminal-justice system. Vexing social problems—homelessness, drug use, the inability to support one's children, mental illness—are presently solved by sending in men and women who specialize in inspiring fear and ensuring compliance. Fear and compliance have their place, but it can't be every place.
For those of us who grew up behind the Iron Curtain with dreams of owning real jeans, the U.K.’s vote feels like a personal rejection.
In 1990, my family drove the 125 miles from a newly post-communist Prague to the Czechoslovak border with Austria. Crippling travel restrictions had recently been lifted, and we were going to visit the West on vacation for the very first time. I was 10 years old and, though the line of cars at the border was several miles deep, and though it was sweltering in the back of our yellow Škoda, I spent the trip in a state of awe at our good fortune.
By the time I’d finished fourth grade, I’d heard stories of those who'd been killed while attempting to leave the prison that the Eastern Bloc was; the last to lose his life at the Czechoslovak border had in fact been a child, a boy slightly younger than myself, when his family was trying to escape East Germany. But then, seemingly overnight, the old restrictive system had begun to disintegrate. In 1989, after Hungary allowed a group of East Germans to cross into Austria, which was part of the West, many of their compatriots hoped to follow suit. Suddenly, tens of thousands of East German refugees flooded into Prague, sleeping in makeshift tents in its historic center, right near our home, before they continued on their journey.
How a loss of faith can manifest itself in the mind and body
Curtis Penfold got kicked out of his apartment, fired from his job, and left Brigham Young University all in the same week.
He left BYU—a private university operated by The Church of Latter-day Saints—because he had started to disagree with some of the Church’s views, causing tension between him and school officials. His exit from the school caused him to lose his on-campus job, and he subsequently resigned from the Mormon Church. Resigning from the church resulted in getting kicked out of his religiously-affiliated private housing, and he received angry emails from old friends and phone calls from his disappointed parents who said he “lost the light” and “used to be so good.”
“I felt so hated by this community I used to love,” Penfold said.
The American Dream is alive and well—in Northern Europe.
If the U.S. presidential campaign has made one thing clear, it’s this: The United States is not Finland. Nor is it Norway. This might seem self-evident. But America’s Americanness has had to be reaffirmed ever since Bernie Sanders suggested that Americans could learn something from Nordic countries about reducing income inequality, providing people with universal health care, and guaranteeing them paid family and medical leave.
“I think Bernie Sanders is a good candidate for president … of Sweden,” Marco Rubio scoffed. “We don’t want to be Sweden. We want to be the United States of America.”
“We are not Denmark,” Hillary Clinton clarified. “We are the United States of America. … [W]hen I think about capitalism, I think about all the small businesses that were started because we have the opportunity and the freedom in our country for people to do that and to make a good living for themselves and their families.”
A stock-footage political parody
It takes three words.
Romantic pursuits tend to reflect the economy.
