Month: April 2013

by Chris Bodenner

According to a new report from the Center for Investigative Reporting (CIR), “three out of four people found with drugs by the border agency are U.S. citizens.” But you wouldn’t know that by reading the press releases from the Border Patrol:

Of nearly 2,000 press releases from the Border Patrol and its parent agency, Customs and Border Protection, between 2005 and 2011 that mentioned a drug-trafficking suspect, 38 percent noted a Mexican national had been arrested. U.S. citizens, meanwhile, were mentioned roughly 30 percent of the time, even though they represent a much higher percentage of those busted, according to the analysis.

Robert Beckhusen highlights one reason so many Americans get involved in drug running:

The CIR interviewed one former trafficker who said the cartels seek out U.S. citizens — particularly of middle-age — because they’re less likely to draw suspicion.

Jackie Brown fit that bill nicely.

by Chris Bodenner

A reader flags a promising story from across the Pond:

Considering what you’ve done with the Dish in recent months, this is right up your alley: in the Netherlands a new online “newspaper”, De Correspondent, crowd-funded over 1 million euros in a matter of days.

More details:

[Rob Wijnberg] needed 15.000 people to give him €60 a year for something that doesn’t exist yet — he succeeded within 8 days. His idea is called De Correspondent and its goal is to provide news in a different way. While traditional newspapers serve you daily hot news, Wijnberg says De Correspondent will be a new quality online “newspaper” which could be described as “slow journalism”. They’ll cover daily news and mix it with long-form journalism, providing in-depth analysis of news on a custom built platform.

On a much smaller scale and back on the homefront, a Tinypass-supported site called Bklynr recently met its own presubscription goal of $10K and is launching its first issue tomorrow. Every two weeks it will publish three long-form pieces about Brooklyn, for $20 a year (or $2 month). The broader thread on paid content is here. How it relates to the Dish model is here.

Today on the Dish, Andrew expressed his disbelief on the advances of the gay rights movement while readers vented over yesterday’s guest post from Mr. Rick Astley. Ed Kilgore doubted that the GOP’s libertarians will threaten its Christianists, Frum raised his eyebrow at a Hillary victory, and we sized up the new Democratic coalition. Bernstein encouraged one Supreme Court Justice to step downa and Judis spotlighted the problems with America’s trickledown recovery. On the foreign beat, Graeme Wood took a hyperinflation vacation in Iran, Larison rebuked Jackson Diehl on the legacy of Iraq, and David Bosco warned of a new African intervention for the UN.

In assorted coverage, readers kept up the debate on taking husbands’ names, Oppenheimer demanded conservatives stay consistent on the “decline” of marriage, Dylan Matthews measured the exponential rise of Senatorial support for equality. A reader gave a personal account of narcoanalysis, we measured the benefits of early marriage, and found out that Google is against sponsored content (Vice, not so much). Tahir Hemphill pieced together an almanac of rap and Megan Garber paid respects to the word “whom,’ and Jordan Weissman analyzed Amazon’s buyout of Goodreads. We also looked out from a whale’s eyes and checked in on Ware while Mark Graham did a global survey of Wikipedia editors.

Later, we tested the limits of working out of the office, Steve Mann showed us his proto-proto Google Glass, and we tracked how dull food gets tasty. Ian Crouch muted the blaring Inception trailer music and we detected evidence of the class structure in reality TV. We met some of the activists in Uruguay’s marriage equality movement in the Face of the Day,  sat in awe of another beatboxer for the MHB before visiting Tirana, Albania in today’s VFYW contest and Shannon, Ireland in the regular VFYW.

–B.J.

(Photo: Members of the Port Authority Police stand near the windows in the One World Observatory from the 100th floor of One World Trade Center at the Ground Zero site on April 2, 2013. One World Observatory, which is situated more than 1,250 feet over lower Manhattan, will open to the public in 2015 and will include a pre-show theater, multiple spaces that allow for panoramas of the New York City region and numerous dining options. When completed, One World Trade Center will be the tallest building in the Western Hemisphere at 1776 feet. By Spencer Platt/Getty Images)

by Matthew Sitman

Tom Jacobs takes stock of his life thus far and the lessons he’s learned. While making the case for incautious love, he quotes Brian Doyle’s “Joyas Voladoras“:

When young we think there will come one person who will savor and sustain us always; when we are older we know this is the dream of a child, that all hearts finally are bruised and scarred, scored and torn, repaired by time and will, patched by force of character, yet fragile and rickety forevermore, no matter how ferocious the defense and how many bricks you bring to the wall. You can brick up your heart as stout and tight and hard and cold and impregnable as you possibly can and down it comes in an instant, felled by a woman’s second glance, a child’s apple breath, the shatter of glass in the road, the words ‘I have something to tell you,’ a cat with a broken spine dragging itself into the forest to die, the brush of your mother’s papery ancient hand in a thicket of your hair, the memory of your father’s voice early in the morning echoing from the kitchen where he is making pancakes for his children.

by Zoe Pollock

Mark Oppenheimer asks for constancy from marriage equality opponents:

Maybe same-sex marriage is, as they like to say, “the last straw” in this sexual revolution. But rights for the most marginalized people will always be the last straw in social revolutions. The marginal people will always get everything last. If you’re honest and ethical, you have to go after the elites who started the revolution, not the marginalized who later said, “Me too! Please, me too!” And you can’t just pay it lip service, like, “Oh, straight people are culpable, too, since they began divorcing at higher rates in the 1970s…”—you have to actually try to shame straight divorcés more than you are trying to shame gay people for wanting to marry, because the straights started it.

If you aren’t horrified by Rush Limbaugh being married four times—if you didn’t see Ronald Reagan as a less fit leader because of his divorce—then you simply have to shut the hell up about gay people marrying. You can’t ethically go after the marginalized people who try to eat the fruits of a revolution. You have to go after the revolutionaries.