Month: March 2011

A reader writes:

Look, I am as outraged as anyone by this gang rape, but take a breath. The Times article was not biased against this girl – the word "vicious" is right there in the headline.  The reporter obviously went around town and talked to people, and he got the kind of quotes that are in the story.

The reason why you probably are not hearing from voices defending the girl is not because of reportorial bias but because of the surrounding context of the case that the Times, with praiseworthy motives I'm sure, chose to suppress. Bluntly, the scene of the crime is a mostly black neighborhood; the alleged perpetrators are all black; the victim is a Latina and no longer lives in the school district. 

In other words, I would bet you that you do not have significant Latino population in this town to defend the girl as such.  Otherwise, I would expect the reporter would have quoted some.  But the converse is also true.  Since the town is overwhelmingly black, the alleged perpetrators are all black, and the victim is not black, what we seem to have here is some collective rationalization going on. 

In short, there is a racial dynamic to this case that the Times and everyone else chose to ignore.  I don't want to draw undue attention to it, but it is there, and that probably more than anything else explains why we didn't get more quotes defending the young girl.

Jezebel updates its coverage with a statement from the NYT:

We are very aware of and sensitive to the concerns that arise in reporting about sexual assault. This story is still developing and there is much to be learned about how something so horrific could have occurred. But nothing in our story was in any way intended to imply that the victim was to blame.

Neighbors' comments about the girl, which we reported in the story, seemed to reflect concern about what they saw as a lack of supervision that may have left her at risk. As for residents' references to the accused having to "live with this for the rest of their lives," those are views we found in our reporting. They are not our reporter's reactions, but the reactions of disbelief by townspeople over the news of a mass assault on a defenseless 11-year-old.

Heather Mac Donald reviews the president's lack-luster response to the inhumane treatment of Bradley Manning. Forced nudity as an interrogation method Obama specifically regarded as a form of abuse when done by the Bush administration. So why is he so deferent to the military in this case, and taking their word for what is going on? Next up, he'll be asking Bush era DOJ lawyers to judge their own colleagues' legal reasoning, and leave it at that. Oh, wait …

April Bernard criticizes the practice of rounding up all of a writer's ephemera and passing it off as their art:

If the old biographical fallacy was the use of the life of the artist to interpret the work, the new biographical fallacy results from the impulse to lumber an artist’s work with the detritus, literary and otherwise, of the artist’s life. Correspondence, diaries, jottings, drafts, interviews—the stuff of a life in letters—are piled up for consideration, not just in the relatively circumscribed and well-understood havens of biography or critical study, but in published volumes of what is called the author’s work.

There is a reason a writer decides to publish some things and not others. And it seems to me to disrespect them as writers to ignore this.

"What I love about New Hampshire and what we have in common is our extreme love for liberty. You're the state where the shot was heard around the world in Lexington and Concord. And you put a marker in the ground and paid with the blood of your ancestors the very first price that had to be paid to make this the most magnificent nation that has ever arisen in the annals of man in 5,000 years of recorded history," – Michele Bachmann, mistaking New Hampsire for Massachusetts.

These tea-partiers sure seem to know next to nothing about the country they allegedly love, don't you think? Bachmann has not issued a correction.

Just another night in Paris:

Le Flâneur (music by The XX) from Luke Shepard on Vimeo.

(Hat tip: Devour)

Tom Nealon examines the history of butter:

There is no evidence that the Romans used butter in their cuisine, (no form of butter appears in the ancient Roman cookery book Apicius) preferring olive oil, but used pure butter “medicinally”, including for making the skin “pliable” and in other situations that are too easy to imagine to be described here. … Impure butter was viewed by the Greeks and Romans as a sure sign of barbarism and an invitation to be “civilized.” … It was only after the fall of Rome that it slowly became acceptable to eat butter in polite company. By the Middle Ages, German and French butter fanatics would actually bribe their priests to allow them to eat butter during Lent, until, under pressure from the pro-butter Protestants, the Catholic Church allowed the consumption of butter during Lent during the 16th century.

Mammoth Lakes, California, 8.59 am

Chris Blattman cites two new papers on economic and political stability in Africa concerning sex workers. One studied the implications of the turmoil after the December 2007 presidential election in Kenya:

Income, expenditures, and consumption dramatically declined for a broad segment of the rural population for the duration of the conflict. To make up for the income shortfall, women who supply transactional sex engaged in higher risk sex both during and after the crisis. While this particular crisis was likely too short for these behavioral responses to seriously increase the risk of HIV or other STIs for these women, such responses could have long-term repercussions for health in countries with longer or more frequent crises.

Andrew Gorin likes a new letterpress iPad app and looks to the future:

One of the problems with e-books—and there are many—is that the form has not developed sufficiently into an art for it to allow individualism into its products. (The same was true of photography at its inception, and at one point, also of typography.) This is a fancy way of saying that most e-books and e-reading devices suck. But efforts wasted lamenting the blow these technologies deal to book culture should be directed toward new and awesome ways to reintroduce into digital media what was valuable about print media.

Bruce Bower spots a case study on beat deafness:

Mathieu [a man with beat deafness] flails in a time zone of his own when bouncing up and down to a melody, unlike people who don’t dance particularly well but generally move in sync with a musical beat, according to a team led by psychologists Jessica Phillips-Silver and Isabelle Peretz, both of the University of Montreal. What’s more, Mathieu usually fails to recognize when someone else dances out of sync to a tune, the researchers report in a paper that will appear in Neuropsychologia.

The unembeddable visuals resemble last fall's study on bad and good dancers.