I would love to hear the TSA's side of this--and see the whole video.
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I would love to hear the TSA's side of this--and see the whole video.
"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 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.
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.”
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 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.
American society increasingly mistakes intelligence for human worth.
As recently as the 1950s, possessing only middling intelligence was not likely to severely limit your life’s trajectory. IQ wasn’t a big factor in whom you married, where you lived, or what others thought of you. The qualifications for a good job, whether on an assembly line or behind a desk, mostly revolved around integrity, work ethic, and a knack for getting along—bosses didn’t routinely expect college degrees, much less ask to see SAT scores. As one account of the era put it, hiring decisions were “based on a candidate having a critical skill or two and on soft factors such as eagerness, appearance, family background, and physical characteristics.”
The 2010s, in contrast, are a terrible time to not be brainy. Those who consider themselves bright openly mock others for being less so. Even in this age of rampant concern over microaggressions and victimization, we maintain open season on the nonsmart. People who’d swerve off a cliff rather than use a pejorative for race, religion, physical appearance, or disability are all too happy to drop the s‑bomb: Indeed, degrading others for being “stupid” has become nearly automatic in all forms of disagreement.
“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.
Amid the civil-rights protests, riots, and unrest of the 1960s, Richard Nixon found his way to the White House. Now Donald Trump is taking a page from his playbook.
A lone white woman walks down an empty city block in the middle of the night clutching her purse. It’s pitch black, and the only sounds that can be heard are the clacking of her sensible heels, the sound of implied danger, and a man’s voice. He delivers terrifying crime statistics and a call to action. This woman, her body, and her livelihood are under threat.
“Crimes of violence in the United States have almost doubled in recent years,” Nixon says. “Today, a violent crime is committed every 60 seconds. A robbery every two-and-a-half minutes. A mugging every six minutes. A murder every 43 minutes … And it will get worse unless we take the offensive. Freedom from fear is a basic right of every American. We must restore it.”
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 Islamic State is no mere collection of psychopaths. It is a religious group with carefully considered beliefs, among them that it is a key agent of the coming apocalypse. Here’s what that means for its strategy—and for how to stop it.
What is the Islamic State?
Where did it come from, and what are its intentions? The simplicity of these questions can be deceiving, and few Western leaders seem to know the answers. In December, The New York Times published confidential comments by Major General Michael K. Nagata, the Special Operations commander for the United States in the Middle East, admitting that he had hardly begun figuring out the Islamic State’s appeal. “We have not defeated the idea,” he said. “We do not even understand the idea.” In the past year, President Obama has referred to the Islamic State, variously, as “not Islamic” and as al-Qaeda’s “jayvee team,” statements that reflected confusion about the group, and may have contributed to significant strategic errors.
A stock-footage political parody
It takes three words.
Romantic pursuits tend to reflect the economy.