The Dish

A reader writes:

Re: your post on bicycle helmets, it’s much worse than you think. See this article, which pretty conclusively proves that helmets don’t do a damn thing for many kinds of head injuries and the government isn’t doing a damn thing to enact better standards. People are being lulled into a sense of safety with helmets that they just don’t have.

Another differs:

I hate when people cite small studies that do not jibe with meta analyses. Here’s one on bike helmets from NIH. I work in public health, so I obviously have a stake in the game. But even further, my daughter fell off a skateboard two years ago and was med-flighted to Boston Children’s Hospital.  The hospital asked us to bring her helmet, which was completely shattered.  Needless to say, she is completely fine now but would not have been without the helmet, according to hospital physicians.

Wear a helmet; don’t wear a helmet.  I don’t care.  But don’t be so arrogant as to tell others not to by hiding behind one small study.

Another:

As someone whose life was saved by his bicycle helmet four years ago, I must object to your post.  The benefits of using a helmet are quite clear, and the study you link to doesn’t change that conclusion. It addresses a narrower question: the benefits of mandatory helmet laws.

Its conclusions are intriguing, but mainly because it sees helmeting laws as introducing factors that nullify the benefits of helmet use, such as discouraging bicycle use, improper use of helmets, or (that handy all-purpose explanation) moral hazard – which I frankly find nonsensical (my head came out OK, but I still had serious leg and neck injuries; why would anyone increase their risk of those just because they’re wearing ahelmet?).

I might add that helmet use doesn’t appear to be associated with riskier behavior – indeed the contrary, since helmeted cyclists tend to engage in prudent cycling practices generally, like obeying traffic laws, using lights at night, etc.  The big problem (certainly it was mine) isn’t risky cyclist behavior so much as risky motorist behavior (after all, they ride around wrapped in a two-ton, full-body helmet).

Finally, as Eric Jaffe points out in The Atlantic, while the Canadian study makes a good point about helmet laws, it doesn’t make any sort of case against actually using a helmet.  Rather, it makes a case that other measures to improve bike safety are more important, because they reduce the likelihood of accidents in the first place.  A post like this that discourages helmet use is actually a disservice to cyclists, including yourself.

Another helmet booster tells his horror story:

I can’t and won’t question the mentality of those who do or do not wear helmets while riding a bicycle, but I will say for those concerned with protecting their noggin, helmets do help. Back in the ’80s I rode bicycles competitively and while out on a training ride one February day in Boulder, Colorado, and started to climb a hill in the Rocky Flats area known as The Wall. It was a chilly day and I had chosen to wear a hardshell helmet instead of the old style leather-bound “hair net” because it provided some level of warmth. I had just gotten up off the saddle and started to crank up this ridiculously steep hill when my front wheel came off, my mistake for not checking the wheels before I set out.

I crashed and was lucky someone saw it happen who then drove home and called 911 and returned and waited. I had a flight-for-life to a local emergency hospital and was out cold for 20 hours. I awoke to learn I had 450 stitches with 7-layer closures on the right side of my face done by a masterful plastic surgeon on duty. The helmet saved my ear, part of my scalp, and more than likely prevented my skull from cracking. If you could have seen the scrapes on the side of that helmet, you’d wear a helmet too.

Update from the first reader, who elaborates on his point:

The three anecdotes after the quip you posted from me entirely miss the point. The article from Bicycling magazine shows that bike helmets do exactly what your other readers say they did for them – keep your skull from splitting open in a catastrophic crash, and maybe reduce some scrapes and bleeding in a minor one. What they don’t do is prevent concussions, because the hard material does transmit force to your skull – it absorbs enough so that it breaks instead of your head but not enough to keep your brain from getting rattled. The government could set standards for safer helmets – the technology is being developed – but it hasn’t, so nobody has an economic incentive to sell a new kind of helmet that it can’t say is government or privately “safety certified.” But those certifications are hardly based on the latest science.

This excerpt of Lizza’s new piece (paywalled) on immigration reform is attracting a lot of attention:

“There are American workers who, for lack of a better term, can’t cut it,” a Rubio aide told me. “There shouldn’t be a presumption that every American worker is a star performer. There are people who just can’t get it, can’t do it, don’t want to do it. And so you can’t obviously discuss that publicly.”

Allahpundit sighs:

Remind me again: Passing the Gang of Eight bill is, theoretically, supposed to increase our chances of winning, right? Is “some of you can’t cut it” a message that sounds like a winner in, say, Ohio or Pennsylvania or any of the other 48 states where middle-class voters are already nervous about competition for jobs turning even fiercer in a high-unemployment economy?

Chait calls the Rubio aide quote “not only a piece of shocking candor, but also the biggest single blunder the pro-reform coalition has committed so far”:

Party elites may nod along when they read it, but there’s a reason nobody in politics ever says anything like this. The quote comes at a precarious moment for immigration reform. Conservatives have formed the most plausible basis for a counterattack against the bill — they are demanding draconian restrictions on the ability of legalized immigrants to obtain any kind of subsidized health insurance, for years to come. If they can successfully frame immigration reform as an expansion, or even a tacit recognition, of the hated Obamacare, they’ll unleash the right-wing fury that has thus far failed to materialize as expected.

Rubio’s defenders are claiming that the aide’s quote has been taken out of context. Lizza has released a partial transcript of the conversation so readers can judge for themselves.

(Photo: Joe Raedle/Getty)

Brad Plumer warns against complacency when interpreting the latest data on global temperature:

We’re still on pace to blow past that 2°C climate target. Intricate arguments about climate sensitivity often bypass a crucial point. Humanity is on pace to do a lot more than simply double the amount of carbon in the atmosphere by the end of the century (compared with pre-industrial levels). Doubling means going up to 560 parts per million. We’re currently at about 400 ppm and rising fast.

Nate Cohn describes how the slowdown in global warming over the last 15 years is improving scientists’ ability to model climate change by forcing them to rethink how heat is stored in oceans, the effects of aerosols, and variations in the sun’s output:

What all of these discoveries hint at is that scientists, at long last, have developed a better understanding of year-to-year climate variations. In a way, you could think of it like the stock market. Watching Wall Street, we see the indices rise and fall, and we know the news that has influenced the swings. Watching annual temperatures, scientists could see the fluctuations but, until recently, knew little about the news–even though they were confident that increased carbon dioxide would ensure a bull market over the longer run. With an updated understanding of deep ocean temperatures and stratospheric aerosols, that has changed. [MIT Professor Susan] Solomon thinks “we’ve learned a lot about interdecadal variability” as a result of the hiatus.

He worries, however, about the political implications of this continuing learning process:

[T]he so-called scientific consensus on global warming doesn’t look like much like consensus when scientists are struggling to explain the intricacies of the earth’s climate system, or uttering the word “uncertainty” with striking regularity. … In the current political climate, debates about things like climate change are carried out in broad-brush assertions. The challenge for scientists is that the more they understand the climate system, the more complex it gets, and the harder it gets to model with precision—not to mention making the kinds of sweeping statements the news cycle requires.

A key part of Julia Ioffe’s profile of Rand Paul:

When Paul launched his political career three years ago, he was viewed in much the same way as his father, or, as Senator John McCain once called him, a “wacko bird.” He was identified with the same marginal issues (drug legalization, neo-isolationism) and the same marginal constituencies (anarchists, goldbugs). But this year, Paul has emerged as a serious candidate. He has started actively campaigning for the nomination earlier than any of the other Republicans mulling a run. Already, he has racked up multiple meet-and-greets, dinners, and coffee gatherings in Iowa, New Hampshire, and South Carolina. While his father may have been an also-ran, national polls show Rand Paul as one of the top contenders for the GOP nomination.

In private, Paul has been meeting with key GOP power brokers, including the Koch brothers, and he has courted techies at Silicon Valley companies like Google, Facebook, and eBay.

“We’re doing something that Ron never did; we’re reaching out to major donors,” says a Paul adviser. “Not everyone is giving us money, but there’s definitely some flirtation going on.” According to this adviser, in the last six months, RAND PAC, Paul’s national political operation, has raised more than a million dollars. “He’s very politically talented,” says a former senior official at the Republican National Committee. “He is absolutely a contender.”

The pandering to Christianists is part of this strategy presumably. So too the support for immigration reform. And the millennial distrust of Obama’s surveillance state could also give him an opening on the liberaltarian side. I wouldn’t under-estimate him at all. Chait chips in two cents:

Paul is far savvier and more pragmatic than his father, shrewdly assessing which rough edges of his ideology need to be sanded off to make himself acceptable to the national party. And yet, Paul retains enough intellectual integrity that he can’t fully let go of his principles. That integrity was why he dodged and weaved for six painful minutes with Rachel Maddow in 2010, not quite embracing his private property opposition to the parts of the 1964 Civil Rights Act that banned segregation in stores, but also refusing to abandon it.

(Photo: U.S. Senator Rand Paul addresses a breakfast meeting of the 2013 Annual Legislative Summit of U.S. Hispanic Chamber of Commerce March 19, 2013 at Capitol Hilton Hotel in Washington, DC. Paul spoke on immigration and he announced his endorsement for a pathway for the 11 million illegal immigrants in the United States to become citizens. By Alex Wong/Getty Images)

A reader writes:

I’m getting a strong feeling of “Germany” looking at this photo. That blue road sign with an arrow closely resembles examples of German road signs I found online. I suppose it could be France or Estonia, but the architecture keeps me leaning towards Germany – as does the graffiti in the lower-right corner of the frame. I have no idea where in Germany, though, so I’m going to guess somewhere outside Hanover.

Another:

My sister had surgery in the Stanford University hospital ten years ago and when I looked at this week’s contest the red tile roofs and adobe colored buildings yelled out to me that this must be somewhere on the Stanford campus. Maybe student housing – lots of small buildings without too many cars. If I wasn’t six hours away I might even go drive around and try to find the exact location, but I’ll leave Google street view for someone who likes computer time more than I do and go back out to my garden.

Another:

I’m just shooting in the dark, but the architecture seems prosperously Eastern European, as does the signage. Lubljana, Slovenia?

Another:

First off, I was on vacation the first time you had a Luxembourg location, in Differdange (or was it Dudelange?), the famous one that nobody was even close to guessing. Since I had driven down the very street where that picture was taken just a day before leaving on that vacation, it was a bit agonizing to find out about missing the contest that week.

Analysis this week: First, Luxembourg is a tricky location because there is no Google street view, for whatever reason. But the geography and the lush, almost temperate-rain-forest vegetation makes this clearly in the Ardennes region. The EU standard street signs are a somewhat helpful confirmation. The architecture, being a mix of Belgian and French styles, both modern (20th century) and traditional, points strongly to southern Luxembourg. The lack of dominating large 20th century apartment blocks rule out northern Lux, which was heavily rebuilt after WWII, and neighboring areas of France and Belgium, where there are enough large public housing projects that you would not get this scene of predominantly small houses in the traditional red-tile roof style. Also, the southern towns in Lux have working-class neighborhoods like this, with relatively few slate roofs, just seen here on public buildings and those, like the French-style house on the right, with a bit of pretension to them.

There are a lot of American students at the University of Miami campus at Differdange, and I suspect this photo comes from one of them. My guess is of Rodange, looking south toward the hill to Titelberg, a Gallo-Roman site built on a bronze age settlement dating to 2000 BC.

Another:

I’m guessing Bucharest, Romania. I have no idea why, the photo sort of screams Eastern European. It could by Riga as well, who knows.  There’s this time sinkhole called “The View from Your Window” and I got to finish my financial household analysis and don’t have time to root round Google Earth. I’m going to be very impressed if this is gotten by someone who has NEVER, EVER visited this area, wherever the hell it is.

Another gets close:

Based on street signs and the cars’ license plates, I think we’re in France. I couldn’t detect other clues (no May fest brochure visible this time), so I have to make a determination on general grounds. The hills and buildings remind me of the Ardennes region. I wouldn’t be surprised if a fortress or castle was lurking just outside the picture. Sedan being one of the major towns in the area, so that’s my guess.

Below is the only reader to nail the right city:

Man, Dish fans sure do find some pretty places to visit. At first I though that this week’s view was in Eastern Europe based on those odd red roofs, so I spent several hours wandering through Transylvania. But the more I looked, the more things started to nag me, like the turreted windows and the color of the buildings’ walls, not to mention the flashes from the opening scene in “Beauty and the Beast” that kept rolling around at the back of my brain. Fast forward 24 hours, and I indeed found myself in a not-so-poor provincial town:

This week’s view comes from picturesque Sarlat-la-Caneda in the Perigord region of southwest France near the famous Lascaux caves. The photo was taken from a bed and breakfast called “Les Trois Jardins” located on the Impasse des Clarisses and looks due west over the southern part of town. For the sake of pseudo-preciseness I’ll guess that it was taken from the Monet bedroom on the second floor, though it might also be the Picasso loft above:

Amusingly, the medieval heart of Sarlat is just out of sight on the right. Were it visible, this would have been a much quicker contest because it’s similar to Mirepoix, a town that was featured in VFYW #136. Attached are pictures of the actual window, a bird’s eye view, and a shot of the ancient architecture in the town’s center:

More details on the town from Wikipedia:

Sarlat is one of the most attractive and alluring towns in southwestern France. It’s a medieval town that developed around a large Benedictine abbey of Carolingian origin. The medieval Sarlat Cathedral is dedicated to Saint Sacerdos. Because modern history has largely passed it by, Sarlat has remained preserved and one of the towns most representative of 14th century France. It owes its current status on France’s Tentative List for future nomination as a UNESCO World Heritage site to the enthusiasm of writer, resistance fighter and politician André Malraux, who, as Minister of Culture (1960–1969), restored the town and many other sites of historic significance throughout France. The centre of the old town consists of impeccably restored stone buildings and is largely car-free.

However, that reader has already won a contest before (and is most likely our all-time best player), so we have to go with proximity this week. The closest town to Sarlat-la-Caneda guessed by a reader is Beynac:

This was even tougher than last week.  I quickly settled on some town in France, but which one?? It probably isn’t Beynac, but there were a number of buildings with similar architecture there that I suspect is somewhere in the western interior of France like the Aquitaine region.  If anyone gets this I’ll be very impressed.

But that reader is also a previous winner, so we have to go with the second closest city:

Beziers, France? In honor of the curves.

Short and sweet, enough for a win. The submitter writes:

I’m thrilled to see my picture as the View From Your Window contest.  So, a little bit about this.  It was taken from the Monet room on the first (US second) floor of Les Trois Jardins, an inn run by a British couple in Sarlat-la-Caneda, in the Dordogne region of France.  You can’t see the gardens that surround the house – it’s slightly set off from the center, though quite close.  My room looked west, immediately over the rue JP Delpeyrat.  The medieval city is to the north.   The avenue du Gal Leclerc, the main street northbound one street over to the west, is under construction, and I’m not sure how much that’s affected the parking area behind.  A few hours later, and there would not have been a parking space in sight, as the crowds descended on Sarlat’s impressive Saturday market, filled with fois gras, mushrooms, local cheeses and nuts, (and local foods more generally) as well as arts and crafts; there’s also the usual stuff – household, clothing, bags: anything you might want.

I can’t wait to see what people make of this, but I wouldn’t ever get close!

(Archive)

“‘Hey, we’re sick of getting caught doing crimes. Could you do us a favor and criminalize catching us?’” – Amanda Hitt of the Government Accountability Project on Big Ag’s legislative efforts to prevent any whistle-blowing by employees on animal cruelty.

The kind of horrifying abuse of pigs we’re talking about is shown in a PETA secret video after the jump. It is one of the most gruesome things I’ve ever seen done to animals who are, one should remember, as intelligent and as feeling as dogs. The idea that these companies are seeking not to end the torture but to cover it up is so callous it boggles the mind:

According to the Urtak survey we ran last week, on a range of questions related to surveillance, it appears millennials do in fact give a damn:

Translated: 44 percent of polled millennial readers are outraged over the NSA program while only 38 percent of older readers are outraged. There are similar results to the question, “Should PRISM be shut down immediately?” – 43 percent of millennials said yes, compared to only 37 percent of non-millennials. Read all of the results here. Our results – obviously not scientific as to millennials as a whole – are nonetheless backed up the latest CNN poll on Obama. The younger generation appears to be among the angriest about the surveillance state and the president has seen his approval drop like a coastal shelf:

Last month, nearly two-thirds of those in the 18-29 age group gave the president a thumbs up. His approval rating among that bracket fell 17 points in Monday’s poll and now stands at 48%.

One outraged millennial writes:

I do give a damn about PRISM. I’m not as concerned with the government tracking my moves. I get ads related to everything I visit on the web – some helpful, some annoying. I have accounts with sites I use for a day, and then move on. I can deal with that.

What I am most worried about is not the actions of the government, but rather, the cloak of secrecy surrounding it. If the government decides it is in our best interests to hack our computers, that’s fine – just tell me. The PATRIOT Act was conceived before I was of voting age. I have never had a chance to truly “vote” on it. It was done without my consent. Yet it is the millennial age that lives our lives online. Now that I can vote, and now that millions of millennials can now vote, we deserve a say. If the people decide that they are willing to be hacked so that attacks can be prevented, I will live with that. But as government becomes even more secretive, even more of the same old ‘just trust us’ then millennials will start to get frustrated.

Let us have a say.

Another says:

I always imagined that personal information was something you compartmentalized among different places. Your doctor had your medical information, your accountant knew something about your finances, and your friends knew your daily adventures. This seems like a pretty common thing: we disperse information about ourselves in a way that a complete picture can’t be drawn, or at least some sensitive information stays hidden.

This is what is so disturbing about this surveillance program..

It combines what we want to be disparate pieces of information into something that you can know about me without me wanting you to know. The Electronic Frontier Foundation pointed out the dangers with metadata being gathered about you. You have reason to worry about the police weaving the threads of your life together.

How does this apply to millennials? Even in the age of Facebook, Twitter, and Foursquare, we still curate what gets shared. We don’t share every thought as a status or upload everything we capture on film. We are still concerned with what people can know about us, even if it’s just to make us seem like the most fun party animal you’ll ever meet.

So it should scare my generation that information that you had the choice to “upload” is no longer under your control. It belongs to our national security. It’s disturbing that the police collect information on me when I do nothing wrong. And it should disturb everyone.

Another:

The accusation typically thrown out is that Millennials have a sense of entitlement. When it comes to web services, we certainly do, because so much IS free. Google lets me store 20,000 mp3 files, have a calendar, email account, office documents, and 15 gigs of storage on any computer I log into, AND on my smartphone. The tradeoff is that they get to read my email.

That’s the social (and legal) contract. When I bought my newest smartphone, I made a conscious decision to get an Android (Google) phone over an iPhone (Apple), based on the services provided and their respective track records of privacy. When I install an application on my phone, I read the permissions it requests. I think carefully about what pictures and posts about life I’m giving Facebook, Twitter, etc (not to mention the data going out to friends and family …).

When it comes to my data (phone, web, etc), however, the differences between Google and the Federal Government are enormous and important:

- I can quit Google. I have no opt-out of federal “monitoring”, even if I’ve done nothing wrong.

- Google is not an executive arm of government. If Google mined my data and decided something was bad, they could only bring a civil suit against me. The government, on the other hand, can bring a criminal case against me. I can go to jail based on what the government decides to do with my data.

- Google has to let me know when they chance their privacy policies. The US Government, on the other hand, has made their interpretation of the Patriot Act secret – I have no idea if data collection policies have changed, or really, if I’m breaking the law in any way.

Andrew, for the first time, I want my money back. I’m disappointed in your view of the NSA situation. I understand that you’ve been “monitored” your whole life, and that government supervision is different in Britain, but you’re missing the big picture. The NSA has built one of the largest data centers in the world in Utah, and they’re building another one in Maryland. It’s likely they’re downloading all of the traffic on the Internet, by installing splitters in primary datacenters. This can include phone traffic, since most phone calls are no longer analog, but digital (VoIP).

Apple, Samsung, and HTC smartphones have all had monitoring software installed by default and without notification to the user. The software recorded keyboard input, but could easily have recorded audio and video without the user knowing.

We are well past the point of living in a surveillance state, and with the militarization of police departments and formation of a “Department of Homeland Security,” we are only a tea bag away from becoming a police state.

Previous thoughts from readers here and here.

That’s the stunning news from the latest Republican lunatic, Michael Burgess. He’s from Texas and he’s looked at male fetuses and is suspicious of what he sees:

“Watch a sonogram of a 15-week baby, and they have movements that are purposeful. They stroke their face. If they’re a male baby, they may have their hand between their legs. If they feel pleasure, why is it so hard to believe that they could feel pain?”

Even better, he’s a former OB/GYN. What strikes me as a Catholic is how this finding affects natural law. How can masturbation be unnatural if even fetuses do it – or try to? But I digress …

Add your two cents to our anonymous poll:

Many more readers are sounding off:

I think bisexuals are not out as much as gay people because we can pass. Somewhere in this NPR segment is some data that most bisexuals eventually marry a person of the opposite gender. Like the previous reader said, my sexual experiences with women are not exactly fodder for Christmas dinner family discussion, and as I’ve not had a relationship with another woman, there’s not much to say. My husband knows I also like women, but I’m not technically out to my family.

Another:

I expect someone’s already pointed you at Lisa Diamond’s longitudinal study, Sexual Fluidity: Understanding Women’s Love and Desire, but I thought I’d note it just in case, as this book and the concept of remaining “unlabeled” was very meaningful to me.

Another quotes the original reader:

I don’t tell anyone because whom I fuck and how is my own business and nobody else’s. I don’t need support. I don’t want to be part of a sexual community. I just want to do what I want to do and not get any shit about it, which is 100% possible if I just keep it to myself.

That’s what all the closeted guys say. At least the kid in Arkansas terrified of his father has a good reason. The reader admits he identifies as straight because it’s more convenient. Those of us who are mostly or exclusively homosexual don’t have that luxury, which is why we come out. And coming out is the moral thing to do because it might help that kid in Arkansas knows he’s not a freak.

That reader sounds like one of the reasons a lot of gay guys don’t date bisexual guys. Many of them don’t want to publicly acknowledge their relationships, since they prefer the privileges that come with heterosexual relationships and heterosexual identity. By the way, does he keep it to himself to the exclusion of the women he dates and might eventually marry?

Another is far less resentful of that reader:

Thanks to your bisexual reader for reminding me that sometimes what is important to you may be virtually meaningless to someone else, a lesson which should be accepted with good grace. I’m a bisexual woman, but unlike your reader, my bisexuality is integral to my identity. Perhaps my family’s rejection of my sexual identity has something to do with this (I come from a very religious background, although I’ve since given up the faith). I’ve also been in serious relationships with both men and women, and while whom I fuck may not be anyone’s business, it is relevant if someone wants to get to know me.

I think what it comes down to is whether you view sexuality as self-defined (in which case your reader wouldn’t be bisexual) or based on sexual behaviour (which would mean your reader is actually in the closet, regardless of what he claims). But however you look at it, this issue creates a tension between bisexuals like me, who are tired of being lumped together (by both straight and queer folks) with people like your reader, with all the stereotypes that entails, and bisexuals like your reader who don’t want to be judged as disingenuous for occasionally straying outside the rigid sexual boundaries set by society.

Another bisexual woman tells her story:

I grew up in a very liberal household. My mother took pride in being one of the few white students in college in Louisiana who befriended the black students when they were admitted to the school. We were a household that welcomed “everybody.” So when I was raised to understand that “bisexuals don’t exist,” I believed it. I believed they were closeted gay people, just like my parents told me.

I was always attracted to men, but later in high school and in my early college years, I started having sex dreams about women occasionally. I talked to one of my boyfriends about this and he once asked me if I was bi. I became unnecessarily defensive. In my mind, of course I wasn’t bi. I just thought Eliza Dushku (Faith from Buffy) was very attractive.

In my late teenage years, I came to accept that bisexuals existed, but distanced myself from that label for early adulthood. I would occasionally kiss or fool around with a female friend when I had been drinking, but often felt like I needed to be a certain level of drunk for this to be acceptable, or excusable, behavior.

It wasn’t until last year, when I was talking to one of my best friends who is gay about his coming out experience that my parents’ words echoed through my head “bi people don’t exist.” At that moment, I finally realized I was, in fact, bisexual. I proceeded to awkwardly tell my husband and a few of my closest friends, but only a few people.

I still feel incredibly awkward about it, and will feel the hesitation when I use the word “bisexual” to identify myself. At the same rate, I’m frustrated that I only figured this out in my late 20s, and I believe I missed out by not having the opportunity to date women, since I’m now happily married.

I try to be vocal about my sexuality, in hopes that by me talking about bisexuals existing I might somehow help other younger versions of myself come to terms with their sexuality. I don’t like considering it a “coming out” process, because the situation is so different than what I know my gay friends have experienced, but it’s important for me to embrace it and be vocal about it.

I do agree with your reader that sexuality is a fluid thing, and most people I’ve told about my sexuality have said something along the same lines. However, I still fear the stigmas. How will people react when I tell them I’m bi? I’m a married woman who has only dated men. People will question me and doubt me and think I’m just trying to get attention. But it’s an important part of my identity, and so I try to talk about it, which is part of why I am sharing my story with you.

Another reader:

I’m fascinated (in a vaguely horrified way) at your reader who commented: ”I have always believed, and almost all of my female friends agree, that women are, by their very nature, “bisexual” (unless they are gay), and that it is the rare woman who is 100% heterosexual.” Really? The “rare woman”? I guess I am one of those “rare women”.

I have had many sexual relationships and many friendships with other females. I have been involved in polygamous relationships (the hinge point of a V, or perhaps a multi-directional W, depending on how you look at it. And I am solidly hetero.

I love my women friends. As friends. As sisters. As who they are. I have even loved the partners of my sexual partners, albeit not in a sexual way. But I have no interest or desire in having sex with another woman. It is not a turn on for me, it is not a sexual attractant for me, and I have chosen to NOT be part of poly relationships where there was a need/want for bisexuality.

I believe that your reader is engaging in the Unicorn Belief System, a system whereby straight men believe that all women are bisexual and want nothing more than to get it on with both men and women for the pleasure of the man involved.

There are woman such as myself who has had an encounter with another woman and found it physically pleasurable and enjoyable for what it was, but recognizes that it’s not what they want/need going forward. That doesn’t make me “bi” any more than a gay man who sleeps with a woman to try to figure out his sexuality and has an orgasm while doing so is “straight”. That makes me a person who was exploring my sexuality before settling into what I found out I wanted and needed.

Last week, advocacy groups Friends of the Earth and GM Freeze released a study that claims to have detected traces of weedkillers in the urine of volunteers throughout Europe. Kara Moses considers the role that such “non-scientific” studies should play in the policy process:

The study was basic, the sample size was small, the report was unpublished. But could it point to an important issue for further investigation? Academics denounced the findings as “not scientific”, saying the results could not be taken seriously and that campaign groups should submit their work to peer-reviewed journals to provide a “genuine contribution to the debate”. Other scientists refused to comment on the study, saying that without it having gone through the review process there was simply no way of commenting on the findings. …

But charities and NGOs often don’t have the resources or expertise to undertake full scientific studies and publish them in journals. Is it even their role to do so? By producing snapshot studies that simply point to an issue, as long they don’t make any grand claims based on their findings, aren’t they simply doing their job of raising awareness of issues that affect society and the environment?

Chris Tackett agrees, distinguishing between the scientific and commercial realms:

It is important for science to maintain standards when it comes to experiment design and statistically significant sample size. But consumers, whether individuals or municipalities, shouldn’t feel the need to wait till there is overwhelming scientific consensus to decide that spraying toxic chemicals all over their lawns or town or crops is not the best idea. Similarly, we didn’t need to wait till there was overwhelming scientific proof to take action on climate change, yet here we are.

The point here is that scientific proof matters in science, but it shouldn’t necessarily be what determines our actions. We can intuit that some things are unwise or dangerous or against our values without needing reams of scientific data to back up our concerns.

Mark Hoofnagle, discussing a study that claimed a link between GMOs and cancer, worries that such thinking leaves environmental groups open to comparisons to climate skeptics:

In his promotion of the underwhelming evidence presented recently against GMO [genetically modified organism] corn and soy, Tom Laskawy wrote against the “GMO-lovers” (uggh it’s just like Warmist) “freaking out” over these results. Umm, no. Freaking out would suggest that a study had been performed that created enough evidence that the extensive literature on safety has in any way been put in doubt. This is not the case. … The study in no way suggests that GM might be harmful to us, because the study doesn’t suggest anything at all. The study authors might make that suggestion, but the results of the study are just as likely to be due to chance as from any effect of GM food. …

That won’t stop us all from being called a “shill” in every comment thread in which we express skepticism of the often outrageous, science-fiction claims of anti-GM advocates like Jeffrey Smith. So what’s this ideology that binds us all together on the ludicrous nature arguments made against GMO, other than a hatred of bullshit? So Laskaway is partially correct, on one side we have groups with a specific and obvious bias with a high probability of ideology clouding their reason on science. On the other side we have the AAAS, the European Commission, the Royal Society, the National Academy of Science Institute of Medicine, and a diverse group of skeptic and science writers from Richard Dawkins to PZ Myers to Dave Gorski and Steve Novella. Feel free any time to take these two weak papers that show nothing, wave them under our nose and call us the ideologues.

On-the-ground readers report:

Why nary a mention of the anti-government protests going on in Brazil? Tens of thousands of people are demonstrating in cities throughout the world’s sixth largest economy – certainly big news and something of this scale not seen in South America since the ’80s. Granted it’s not the Middle East. However, it’s a significant event worthy of some coverage/analysis on the Dish, IMO.

The IMO is admittedly biased. I just returned from marching with protestors along Av. Faria Lima in São Paulo. Things were quite peaceful, one could even say festive, as clowns trounced about, a man on stilts danced around (dusted them off before Carnaval it seems), and groups of drummers played classic samba rhythms. Much of this is simply indicative of Brazilian culture – the whole enjoying life and trying to have a good time part of it.

Nonetheless, the general message of the protests was not festive: “We deserve better from our government.”

I saw all sorts of signs and placards admonishing a corrupt government that heavily taxes its people with little to show in terms of public services (education and healthcare in particular). I believe your last post about Brazil was this in January – “Boom Times For Brazil”. There are two sides to every coin, so Dish readers should know that boom times don’t necessarily mean good times for the citizenry of a country that suffers from tragic and wholly resolvable social inequality. It will be interesting to see if the momentum of these protests continues.

On the cab ride home, the driver told me that he doesn’t think anything will be done by the PT party in response to this. Brazil’s President, Dilma Rousseff, was quoted simply saying, “It is natural for young people to demonstrate.” Whether this response throws more fuel on the fire is yet to be seen. Also, there were more than just young people in the crowd tonight.

Another gets more specific:

Things here in São Paulo are getting contentious and it looks as if it could be Taksim all over again. About two weeks ago, some small protests started on Paulista Ave in downtown São Paulo over a $0.10 increase in the bus fares. Of course, the protest was about more than a hike in fare though; it was about the horrible state of Brazil’s infrastructure, government corruption, high inflation and low growth – basically everything that’s dysfunctional about this place.

Predictably the police didn’t handle things well, so more people came out, fueling more protests. Last Friday police began firing on protestors and beating journalists – it looks like the government has finally woken the slumbering beast here. 230,000+ people are said to have headed out to the streets of São Paulo, with large protests in Rio and other major cities as well. Brazilians are apparently even going to protest in front of their embassies as far as away as Dublin and Berlin.

For videos and documentation of some of the violence from Friday, you’ll have to Google Translate this (check out number 9). Here is a good explanation of what the real issues are (like Taksim wasn’t about just a park, this isn’t just about bus fares). A Facebook event page for protests is here. And here is a list of 33 foreign cities Brazilians will also be protesting in.

Also worth noting is that the FIFA Confederate Cup is starting this week, which is basically like a trial run for next year’s World Cup. Brazil’s infrastructure is failing spectacularly there, with some people waiting up to six hours just to leave the airport. So this is basically the worst timing possible for the government, as the world’s attention is about to be on the country anyway.

I’ll be going down to the protest today. I can continue passing along info as I find it.

That reader follows up:

This video shows some of the protests over the weekend in Rio. The reporters in the video are trying to blame the violence on the protesters and are writing them off as just angry youth with nothing better to do – while the video shows police beating people and shooting tear gas at them. The reporters also are lamenting that this is happening during the Confederate’s Cup, as it’s going to embarrass the country on the international level. It was a HUGE deal for Brazil to land the World Cup and Olympics because it meant tons of money was going to be pumped into the country to build infrastructure. Well, the money came and the infrastructure didn’t. So now you have tens, if not hundreds, of thousands of pissed off people on the streets.

Another passes along this video as a good summary of the protestors’ grievances.

(Photo: Demonstrators clash with riot police during a protest in front of Rio de Janeiro’s Legislative Assembly (ALERJ) building in Rio de Janeiro, on June 17, 2013. Tens of thousands of people took to the streets of major Brazilian cities protesting the billions of dollars spent on the Confederations Cup – and preparations for the upcoming World Cup –  and against the hike in mass transit fares. By Tasso Marcelo/AFP/Getty Images)

Larry Alex Taunton, who has engaged college students for years on matters of faith, delves into the reasons the self-proclaimed atheists among them embrace unbelief. Some aspects of the “composite sketch” he’s gleaned from countless conversations:

They had attended church

Most of our participants had not chosen their worldview from ideologically neutral positions at all, but in reaction to Christianity. Not Islam. Not Buddhism. Christianity. …

They felt their churches offered superficial answers to life’s difficult questions

When our participants were asked what they found unconvincing about the Christian faith, they spoke of evolution vs. creation, sexuality, the reliability of the biblical text, Jesus as the only way, etc. Some had gone to church hoping to find answers to these questions. Others hoped to find answers to questions of personal significance, purpose, and ethics. Serious-minded, they often concluded that church services were largely shallow, harmless, and ultimately irrelevant. As Ben, an engineering major at the University of Texas, so bluntly put it: “I really started to get bored with church.” …

The decision to embrace unbelief was often an emotional one

With few exceptions, students would begin by telling us that they had become atheists for exclusively rational reasons. But as we listened it became clear that, for most, this was a deeply emotional transition as well. This phenomenon was most powerfully exhibited in Meredith. She explained in detail how her study of anthropology had led her to atheism. When the conversation turned to her family, however, she spoke of an emotionally abusive father: ”It was when he died that I became an atheist,” she said.

Dreher nods:

“Shallow, harmless, and ultimately irrelevant” — as a description of what I thought of church during my teenage years, does that ever strike a resonant chord within me.

It was only when I got to college and understood that Christianity was so much more than I had ever imagined — that it could captivate the minds and gain the allegiance of men like Kierkegaard, Thomas Merton, Dostoevsky, the designers of Chartres cathedral, and so on — that I began to take it seriously. Kierkegaard in particular revealed to me why I had no use for Christianity as I understood it till then: I thought being a Christian was a feature of being a good middle-class American, and nothing more. If that’s all it is, then, to borrow a phrase from Flannery O’Connor, to hell with it.

I can understand why a bright college student would find atheism more compelling than Christianity, if that’s the only kind of Christianity he had seen.

Kate Shepard and James West flag a new FEMA report warning of increased flooding due to climate change, as well as its likely strain on the agency’s budget and individual insurance holders:

Like previous government reports, it anticipates that sea levels will rise an average of four feet by the end of the century. But this is what’s new: The portion of the US at risk for flooding, including coastal regions and areas along rivers, will grow between 40 and 45 percent by the end of the century. That shift will hammer the flood insurance program. Premiums paid into the program totaled $3.2 billion in 2009, but that figure could grow to $5.4 billion by 2040 and up to $11.2 billion by the year 2100, the report found.  …

Right now, a number of homeowners who get their flood insurance from the federal government pay subsidized rates. But for the program to stay solvent, the average price of policies would need to increase by as much as 70 percent to offset projected losses, according to the FEMA report. That means individual policyholders who now pay an average rate of $560 per year could have to pay as much as $952 per year by 2100.

Ron Bailey pushes back on the piece:

In its rush to declare a crisis that only benevolent government bureaucrats can solve, [Mother Jones] characteristically overlooks the fact that there should be no National Flood Insurance Program in the first place. If private insurers think it’s too risky for someone to build a house on a plot of land due to the high probability of inundation, then why should taxpayers subsidize their folly? Second, assuming that the U.S. government does not manage to stop modest economic growth for the next 90 years that would mean that today’s per capita GDP of $43,000 growing at 2 percent annually would rise to $255,000 by 2100. It is not unreasonable to think that Americans who would be six times richer in 2100 might be able to afford to pay double for their flood insurance.

Meanwhile, in light of NYC’s recently unveiled $20 billion plan to build flood walls, Dana Milbank thinks Bloomberg is doing a solid job on the climate front:

Obama created an “Interagency Climate Change Adaptation Task Force” in 2009 to examine everything from agriculture to sewer system failures and public-health consequences, but much of the work remains theoretical. Bloomberg’s new plan, with 250 specific recommendations and a hefty price tag, puts climate-change adaptation into a more concrete realm. The businessman-mayor called it “a battle that may well define our future for generations to come” and outlined changes to building standards, telecommunications, transportation and a dozen other areas. … Bloomberg spoke confidently, as if he were a general laying out a military plan. But he was really talking about limiting casualties.

But Marc Tracy encourages the mayor to do much more:

Bloomberg is right about guns and, when he has at other times treated climate change as the political issue it is, he is right about global warming, too. But his emphases are all wrong. While Bloomberg has plenty of actual capital (he is worth some $25 billion and has said he intends to give it all away), he is investing his finite national political capital in a watered-down bill addressing an issue that … is nowhere near as important, by virtually any measure, as climate change is. The scourge of guns, the more than 30,000 American deaths they help cause each year, the gruesome mass shootings they enable: Bloomberg is right to hope they go away. But climate change is an existential threat, to everyone. It is probably not accidental that climate change is the reason Bloomberg gave for endorsing Barack Obama over Mitt Romney.

(Photo: In this aerial view, a farm stands partially submerged in floodwaters from the Elbe river on June 12, 2013 in Fischbeck, Germany. The swollen Elbe is continuing to endanger communities along its northern route in Saxony-Anhalt and Brandenburg states, though the bursting of a dyke near Fischbeck has relieved some pressure from towns farther north. Floods have ravaged portions of southern and eastern Germany in the last week, leaving at least eight people dead and forcing tens of thousands to evacuate their homes. By Sean Gallup/Getty Images)

Derek Thompson considers the implications of Amazon Prime Fresh, which allows members to “order fresh food from their couch from Amazon and expect to pick up groceries at the door in a matter of hours”:

A $300 subscription to Amazon Prime Fresh doesn’t just buy access; it also binds shoppers to Amazon as their overwhelming source of all Internet shopping. “It will help to make Amazon the starting point for online purchases — more than it already was — and give consumers even less of a reason to shop anywhere else,” Morningstar equity analyst R.J. Hottovy said. Being the starting point for online purchases is everything: Google’s biggest source of online advertising comes from searches with a shopping intent. Why look anywhere else when only Amazon will get it to you today?

He compares Amazon’s dominance in cloud and e-retail services to the “quasi-monopolies” enjoyed by cable companies:

Laying cable is hella-expensive for both legal and material reasons (Verizon abandoned its nationwide projects after covering less than 20 percent of the country), cable companies can charge such a mark-up on the communications bundle because they have a massive infrastructure advantage in a high-barrier industry.

Ditto Amazon, which is building a bundle of its own. Fresh Prime offers a unique package of services that takes advantage of the company’s lead in digital and physical infrastructure: infinite books, fast shipping, fresh groceries, free streaming. Who in the world would try to build a competitor to this strange amalgam of hugely expensive and hardly profitable services? No one. And, for [Amazon CEO Jeff] Bezos, that is precisely the point.

Navid Hassanpour believes that Rouhani is willing to cut a deal on Iran’s nuclear program:

Rouhani is no stranger to negotiating with the U.S. and Europe. He is said to have been a member of the Iranian negotiating team during the Iran-Contra affair, and was the Iranian chief nuclear negotiator under Khatami as the secretary of the Iranian Supreme National Security Council. He is also the head of Center for Strategic Research, a policy research organization close to Rafsanjani. Three out of the final six presidential candidates this year have extensive experience—with mixed results—in international negotiations. This is a signal on where the Islamic Republic’s priorities lie at moment. During the past two weeks, Rouhani repeatedly mentioned he prefers to talk to the Europeans’ chief [sic] instead of wasting time squabbling with Europeans themselves. These words, as a window to Rouhani’s understanding of the World, can also be indicative of the nature of his foreign diplomacy in the next four years.

Paul Pillar is adamant that the West take advantage of this opportunity for a reset:

Rouhani’s election presents the United States and its partners with a test—of our intentions and seriousness about reaching an agreement. Failure of the test will confirm suspicions in Tehran that we do not want a deal and instead are stringing along negotiations while waiting for the sanctions to wreak more damage. Passage of the test will require placing on the table a proposal that, in return for the desired restrictions on Iran’s nuclear activities, incorporates significant relief from economic sanctions and at least tacit acceptance of a continued peaceful Iranian nuclear program, to include low-level enrichment of uranium. … Passage of the test also means not making any proposal an ultimatum that is coupled with threats of military force, which only feed Iranian suspicions that for the West the negotiations are a box-checking prelude to war and regime change.

Jonathan Steele agrees, and suggests Syria be the first topic of conversation:

[T]he first thing Obama should do is to drop US objections to letting Iran attend the proposed Geneva conference on Syria. If Washington is ready to negotiate with Iran on nuclear issues, it makes no sense to exclude it from the talks on Syria. The second thing is to accelerate preparations for the conference itself by putting sustained pressure on Syria’s rebel forces to come up with a negotiating strategy and take part. For Washington to change course here would send an important signal, not only that Iran has to be part of any solution in Syria and the region, but also that the anti-Iranian cancer that has affected American policy in the Middle East since the axis-of-evil speech has at last been excised.

Vali Nasr makes a case for new outreach and meaningful concessions:

To take advantage of Rowhani’s victory and break the logjam over nuclear negotiations, Washington has to put on the table incentives it has thus far been unwilling to contemplate. It will have to offer Iran sanctions relief in exchange for agreeing to Western demands. At a minimum, the United States would like Iran to accept IAEA demands for intrusive inspection of its nuclear facilities; cap its uranium enrichment at 5 percent, and ship out of the country its stockpile of uranium enriched to 20 percent. Iran in turn wants a formal recognition of its right to enrich uranium and, more immediately, the lifting of crippling sanctions on its financial institutions and oil exports. Ahmadinejad is faulted in Iran for wrecking the country’s economy. Populism, mismanagement, and international isolation have combined to put Iran’s economy into a downward spiral. Between 2009 and 2013, real GDP growth has fallen from 4 percent to 0.4 percent, unemployment has risen to 17 percent, and inflation has grown to 22 percent — and those are official numbers, which tend to downplay the gravity of the economic crisis. It is estimated that 40 percent of Iranians live below the poverty line. Reformists will grow in strength if they are able to show that they can reverse that trend by at least getting the West for the first time to offer negotiating away specific sanctions.

Jack Straw, who has sat across the negotiating table from Rouhani before, offers his take on the new Iranian president:

There are … two dangers. The first is to assume that nothing has changed – that Rowhani is merely a better-dressed Ahmadinejad. This is the essence of the belligerent comments from Benjamin Netanyahu, the Israeli prime minister, in the wake of Rowhani’s victory. They are unthinking and self-defeating.

The second danger is to assume that everything has changed, and to expect too much too quickly from Rowhani. Our Government should seek to re-open full diplomatic relations with Iran, but he won’t take office until early August. He has to choose a cabinet – and have his ministers endorsed by the parliament (far from a formality). He has to negotiate with the leader, and the powerful Revolutionary Guards, before he can negotiate with the West. While it will be a huge relief to do business with him, he is a Shia and an Iranian, and intensely proud of being both. But show him and his nation patience, respect and understanding, and there’s a possibility that the 10 years of “E3+3” meetings which started in south Tehran in 2003 might, just, have a happy ending.

Adam Alter offers an example of what he calls the “linguistic Heisenberg principle,” whereby naming something changes our perception of it:

People generally prefer not to think more than necessary, and they tend to prefer objects, people, products, and words that are simple to pronounce and understand. In 2006, my colleague Daniel Oppenheimer and I investigated the performance of hundreds of stocks immediately after they were listed on the financial markets between 1990 and 2004. We discovered that companies with simpler names that were easier to pronounce received a greater post-release bump than did companies with complex names. (I also wrote about this phenomenon for the New York Post.)

The effect was strongest during the first few days of trading, when investors had little information about the stock’s fundamentals and were more likely to be swayed by extraneous factors. (We also ran a series of additional analyses to rule out the possibility that the effect was driven by different naming trends across different industries, company sizes, or countries, and the possibility that successful stocks seem to have fluent names merely because they’re mentioned more often in the media.) Even stocks with pronounceable ticker codes (e.g., KAR)—the letter strings that investors use to refer to each stock—outperformed those with unpronounceable ticker codes (e.g., RDO) in the short run. An investor who placed a thousand dollars in the ten most fluently named stocks between 1990 and 2004 would have earned a fifteen-per-cent return after just one day of trading, whereas the same thousand dollars invested in the ten least fluently named stocks would have earned a return of only four percent.

That’s what Rouhani said today about the relationship between Iran and the United States. That old wound, one has to remember, really struck deep in 1953, when the CIA ousted Iran’s first democratically elected government, because it nationalized the Anglo-Persian oil company. Even then, Iran’s desire was to control its own energy supply. We know the rest of the story by now, however tone-deaf so many have become to the role of history in determining that country’s psyche and culture.

No, he did not signal a shift toward direct talks with the US, and offered no opening on the nuclear weaponry potential of the theocracy. But it truly was striking how conciliatory he was to the Sunni Saudi regime:

The priority of my government’s foreign policy will be to have excellent relations with all neighboring countries … We are not only neighbors but also brothers. Every year hundreds of thousands of Iranian pilgrims visit Mecca. We have many common points with Saudi Arabia.

And this is surely encouraging:

First, we are ready to increase transparency and clarify our measures within the international framework. Of course our activities are already transparent, but still we increase it. Second, we will increase the trust between Iran and the world.

Yes, I’m well aware that he is not Moussavi or Karoubi – but they also backed the nuclear program (as does the opposition as a whole). And to immediately knock down any hope for some engagement with Iran seems to me to be insulting the perseverance of ordinary Iranians. The fact of US-Iranian governmental distrust and even hatred is, in the face of that country’s great history and youthful energy, a true tragedy. Jon Snow, who was reporting from Tehran over the weekend, offers a succinct portrait of the country as he now sees it, particularly in relation to the Western stereotypes:

[B]eyond the bugs in hotel rooms, the arrests, and strange people taking photographs wherever you go, there is something continuously absorbing and intriguing about Iran that renders the paranoia it provokes entirely unbearable.

The country is spectacular, the people are approachable, friendly and remain westward-looking. Many are highly educated and skilled, and 6,000 years after the country began, they are still building. In short, they are people the west used to and should still do business with.

For all its faults, Iran remains a haven of peace, surrounded by wars in which the West is deeply involved, and set to become more so after Barack Obama announced his intention last week to arm the Syrian rebels. By midnight on Saturday the Chamran highway that leads to the centre of Tehran was sporting a noisy three-car-wide, five-mile queue of families desperate to join the celebrations.

Meanwhile, Golnaz Esfandiari rounds up a collection of recent statements by the newly-elected Rouhani, including, “Using the Internet, I must say, is one of my hobbies regardless of whether I need it.” Along those lines, there are reports that the video-chat services Skype and Oovoo have now been unblocked for the first time in many months, allowing Iranians in and outside of the country to once again speak more freely with each other.

We should have no illusions that Khamenei is still in charge. But in two consecutive elections, the Iranian people have reached out to the world. We can and should find a way to reach back. In my view, that means a pragmatic path toward seeking more and more transparency in return for a very gradual ratcheting down of sanctions. We may have to go one tiny step after another. But the Iranian people deserve a response that is more than cynical. Look at them these past few days or four years’ ago. How can one be cynical in the face of that?

Previous Dish coverage of the Iranian election here.

(Photo: Iranians supporters of moderate presidential candidate, Hassan Rowhani flash the sign of victory holding a portrait of him as they wait for the final results outside his campaign headquarter in downtown Tehran on June 15, 2013. By Behrouz Mehri/AFP/Getty Images)

Brad Plumer spots new research suggesting that juvenile detention is counterproductive:

[T]o figure this out, Aizer and Doyle took a look at the juvenile court system in Chicago, Illinois. The researchers found that certain judges in the system were more likely to recommend detention than others — even for similar crimes. That is, it’s possible to identify stricter and more lenient judges. And, since youths were assigned to judges at random, this created a randomized trial of sorts.

What the researchers found was striking.

The kids who ended up incarcerated were 13 percentage points less likely to graduate high school and 22 percentage points more likely to end up back in prison as adults than the kids who went to court but were placed under, say, home monitoring instead. (This was after controlling for family background and so forth.) Juvenile detention appeared to be creating criminals, not stopping them.

The authors lay out a couple of reasons why this would be. Going to prison can obviously disrupt school and make it harder to get a job later on. But also, as other researchers have found, many people who end up behind bars end up making friends with other offenders and building “criminal capital.” Prison turns out to be excellent training for a life of crime.

Another troubling new report looks at sexual abuse in the country’s juvenile detention facilities:

Hundreds of teenagers are raped or sexually assaulted during their stays in the country’s juvenile detention facilities, and many of them are victimized repeatedly, according to a U.S. Department of Justice survey. The teens are most often assaulted by staff members working at the facilities, and fully 20 percent of those victimized by the men and women charged with protecting and counseling them said they had been violated on more than 10 occasions. …

The Justice Department survey—covering both secure juvenile detention facilities and group homes, the less restrictive settings into which troubled youngsters are often ordered—involved more than 8,500 boys and girls. In all, 1,720 of those surveyed reported being sexually assaulted. Allen Beck, the author of the report, said that the rates of staff-on-inmate abuse among juveniles are “about three times higher than what we find in the adult arena.”

A reader writes:

The only thing that surprised me about your reader’s letter (though it shouldn’t have) was that it came from a man. I have always believed, and almost all of my female friends agree, that women are, by their very nature, “bisexual” (unless they are gay), and that it is the rare woman who is 100% heterosexual. Women frequently have very intimate relationships with their female friends, and society generally does not think of those relationships as “sexual” ones. Yet, for most women, as studies generally show, intercourse and orgasm are not the most important aspects of sexual satisfaction. Rather, the emotional aspects of a relationship and the cuddling, holding, spooning aspect of physically intimacy with a partner are as important, if not more so. Couple that with the fact that the distance between a friendly hug and a sexual hug is not far, and the former can easily become the later.

To a large extent, I believe that the only reason that most women do not acknowledge their attractions to their girl friends or act on them is that it would be inconsistent with perceived notions of who we should and should not be attracted to, and a pervasive skepticism at the notion that someone can truly be sexually attracted to members of both genders.

Another:

I recently started using OK Cupid and I (as a 30-year-old straight guy) have been really surprised by the number of women who identify as bisexual. I don’t know what they mean by that, exactly, since it seems to mean different things to different people.

Another:

As a straight man with a bi daughter, it is my experience that both gays and straights are menaced politically by bisexuals. To gays, bisexuality is a threat to the absolutely-true-for-gays “born this way” argument which has been so successful in leveraging moves toward equality.

If there are really many bisexuals out there, many people who are born with a choice and ability to be with either sex, there’s a worry that the forces of oppression will use bisexuals’ ability to choose to cudgel gays and lesbians back into “choosing” to be straight. The activist question that gays ask of straights, “When did you choose to be straight?”, is only effective when straights don’t think they had a choice in how they express their sexuality. If lots of people realize they are partly bisexual, they’ll acknowledge increasingly that they DO have a choice, and maybe the fight for equality becomes harder as a result.

To straights, bisexuality is an even greater threat to the Manichean worldview that there are only two kinds of people in the world. The idea that maybe they could swing both ways is so terrifying that they have oppressed GLBT people for centuries to deny it. Yet the suspicion that maybe they ARE bisexual and CAN choose how they express their sexuality is why so many apparent straights have had a tough time buying the “born this way” argument for all its truth.

But if the Kinsey continuum of sexual orientation is an accurate descriptor of most people’s sexuality as I believe it is, leading to a realization that there are perhaps even MORE bisexuals in society than today’s survey indicates, then your need today to insist (while covering yourself with rhetorical caveats) that a lot of closeted gays and lesbians are only *saying* they’re bisexual will ultimately put you on the wrong side of history.

Another:

Like your reader, I’m sexually interested in both men and women. Though I haven’t a romantic relationship with a man, I wouldn’t rule it out. Unlike your reader, I identify as bisexual to friends, family, and partners. And it can be tough, especially in work or casual contexts, to balance the need for honest self-representation (most people assume I’ straight unless I clarify) with maintaining some level of privacy about my personal life.

I’m constantly asking myself: how close am I with these people? Have I become dishonest yet by not working in a declaration of my sexual orientation into the conversation? Does my boss need to know? My partner’s parents? The employees at the farm I volunteer at? And these are, for the most part, academic questions; I’m from an areligious family on the west coast, and the only person my coming out has ever, in my (blessed) experience, been a big deal to was me. I still struggle with these things, though it honestly feels like wasted energy a lot of the time.

Though I identify as bi (or queer if I’m talking to someone more familiar with the nitty gritty of current terminology), I know several men with sexual experiences similar to mine and your other reader who, looking at the sum of their sexual and romantic life, are quite comfortable identifying as straight. (What I haven’t ever encountered was a guy claiming to be bi, but apparently exclusively interested in men.) “Bisexual,” like most labels for human experience, is subject to interpretation. And like any other label, it is imperfect shorthand for the complexity and detail involved in the human experience.

I’m with your other reader: I just want to do who I want, marry who I want, and not get any shit for it. Fortunately, thanks to the struggles of an earlier generation, more of us have the opportunity to do just that.