Month: April 2014

Two weeks after Boko Haram militants abducted as many as 234 teenage girls from a government school in northern Nigeria, many of the girls’ fates remain unknown. Several of them escaped, but most were not so lucky:

Pogo Bitrus, leader of a Chibok elders group, told AFP that locals had been tracking the movements of the hostages with the help of “various sources” across the northeast. “From the information we received yesterday from Cameroonian border towns our abducted girls were taken… into Chad and Cameroon,” he said. The girls were then sold as brides to Islamist fighters for 2,000 naira ($12) each, Bitrus added.

Terrence McCoy looks back at other times Boko Haram (whose name translates roughly to “Western education is forbidden”) has targeted schools in the past:

In July 2013, 29 students were burned alive at a school in northern Nigeria. Days later, [Boko Haram leader Abubakar] Shekau said, “Teachers who teach western education? We will kill them! We will kill them in front of their students, and tell students to henceforth study the Qur’an.” Boko Haram massacred 40 more students two months later. In February of this year, 59 boys attending boarding school were shot dead, and their school razed.

Eliza Griswold explains how the collapse of education – and civil society in general – in Nigeria has fueled the rise of the militants:

Paradoxically, many of the young members of Boko Haram are also victims.

They attack the kind of schools that they never had the chance to attend. Boko Haram’s swelling ranks are filled with boys and young men who attended almajiri schools, West African madrassas. An estimated 23 million boys and girls in Nigeria alone are educated in these Islamic schools. Unlike Nigeria’s government schools, which require payment for tuition, almajiri schooling is free, so even the poorest could attend. The northeastern city of Maiduguri, the center of Boko Haram, used to be a seat of some of the finest Islamic education in Africa. The teachers taught students in exchange for the students’ work on their farms.

As a result of the expansion of the Sahara Desert and the extreme flooding and drought linked to climate change, these teachers can no longer sustain those farms in northern Nigeria where whole villages have been overrun by sand dunes. Instead, the teachers and students have been forced to move south to the slums at the edges of large cities, including Abuja, where instead of tending crops for their teachers, the students are reduced to begging on their behalf. … In the slums, many of these boys sleep with their begging bowls under their heads for safekeeping.  To make money, corrupt teachers rent out their students to commit acts of violence. In this way, many have become foot soldiers for Boko Haram.

Nate Blakeslee reports on members of the US Border Patrol using deadly force against rock-throwers, suggesting that part of the problem lies with the structure of the agency itself:

Policymakers and senior officials at the agency seem torn about whether the Border Patrol is an army or an enormous police force. The seeds of this identity confusion were planted shortly after 9/11, when the Border Patrol was subsumed under the newly created Department of Homeland Security and recast as one of many regiments in the nation’s war on terrorism.

The Border Patrol’s new mission was said to be aligned with that of the Army or the Navy or the NSA: to protect us from foreign invaders bent on our destruction. But while having 21,000 agents on or near the border no doubt has dissuaded some foreign elements from entering the country overland, fighting terror is not principally what those agents do. The Border Patrol arrested 364,000 people in 2012. Not a single one was an international terrorist. The vast majority were migrants in search of jobs. An agent spends most of his or her time chasing would-be nannies, construction workers, and landscapers. Even the drug mules, los mochileros, are not generally armed or dangerous.

The difference between a soldier and a police officer is more than a semantic one, and the Border Patrol’s identity crisis has genuine consequences. War and police work are fundamentally dissimilar, explains Christopher Wilson, a border-security expert at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, a Washington, D.C., think tank. “When you’re told your mission is national security, and the people you’re interacting with are not citizens – meaning they’re not the people you’re accountable to in a democratic structure – that does replicate to a certain extent the situation the military faces,” he said. “Nonetheless, they are law enforcement. And what that means is you use the minimal force needed to do your job.”

Details on the boy featured in the above newscast:

An autopsy report indicates a Mexican teen who apparently was shot to death by a U.S. Border Patrol agent in October was struck by at least eight bullets, all but one hitting him in the back. The report, provided to The Associated Press on Thursday by an attorney for the 16-year-old boy’s family, was conducted by medical examiners in Mexico and describes several other wounds, but it’s unclear if they account for additional bullets, graze wounds or shrapnel. The attorney, Luis Parra, said he believes the report bolsters his contention that the Border Patrol used excessive force in gunning down Jose Antonio Elena Rodriguez. …

The Border Patrol has said several agents responded the night of Oct. 10 to reports of suspected drug smugglers along the border fence in Nogales, Ariz. The agents watched two people abandon a load of narcotics, then run back to Mexico, according to the agency. The agents were then pelted by rocks thrown from across the border. The Border Patrol said the people ignored orders to stop, and an agent opened fire. Rodriguez’s body was found on a sidewalk in Mexico not far from the fence.

Border Patrol agents generally are allowed to use lethal force against rock throwers, as the agency considers stones deadly weapons. It’s common all along the border for agents to be hit with rocks, often to distract them from making arrests.

A reader writes:

The bisexual guys I’ve dealt with were completely capable of giving and receiving emotional support in addition to blowjobs. They could be caring, nurturing, and empathic just as capably (or incapably, as it were) with me as with the women in their lives. They just didn’t want to do so publicly. The problem gay guys often have with “bisexual” guys is not that these guys are incapable of being emotionally “available” in a guy-guy relationship; it’s that they are merely unwilling.

Sometimes that unwillingness is mostly justifiable: Having biological children is truly something only women can offer a man. But more often the “emotional incompatibility” is not between one man who can love another and one who cannot; it’s an internal incompatibility between a man’s romantic desires and his fear of social judgment.

Another:

I’m a self-identified bisexual man who has exactly the opposite desires to those mentioned in your post. I’ve never, at any point in my adult life, had any romantic interest in any women. I also don’t generally get into them on an aesthetic basis. But I’ve certainly had sex with quite a few and enjoyed every minute of it.

By contrast, I’ve been sleeping with other guys since I was in my mid-teens, find guys to be sexually and aesthetically interesting, and have only ever fallen in love with other males. So does this make me bi, gay, or just, as one of my friends likes to say, simply horny? To me, I’m bi. But I understand that others might disagree.

Another:

How about the reverse: Loving Bros, Banging Ladies? I’m a straight woman, married to a (seemingly) straight man and this post has crystallized for me what’s been missing from my marriage all these years that I’ve never been able to identify before.

That is, my husband is sexually very attracted to women but emotionally and intellectually attracted to other men. In our relationship, this issue has always presented itself as a problem of time: that my husband has many social, male-oriented hobbies that he spends a lot of time on and gets a lot of pleasure from. An ideal version of our marriage for him would be having a lot of sex with me and spending a lot of his time on his hobbies and with his friends. As a woman who is very sexually, emotionally, and intellectually attracted to men, I experience this arrangement as a deficit in our relationship because I don’t get similar levels of satisfaction and connection by spending time with my female friends. I enjoy it, but it doesn’t make me feel loved in the way I think it does for him.

I have no idea what this means for our relationship. I imagine you have caused a lot of women to have similar aha moments.

That sounds more like a case of bromance than romance with bros.

John Oliver’s interview with General Keith Alexander, from Last Week Tonight‘s debut episode:

James Poniewozik feels that the first episode “hewed so closely to the fake-news format and Oliver’s past work on TDS that it might well have been called The Weekly Show With John Oliver–an extra, weekend-magazine-length version of what fans have enjoyed on Comedy Central for years”:

That is, of course, not a bad thing at all. The first installment of Last Week Tonight was very much a one-man show, the bulk of it taken up with an extended news-desk segment—like Stewart’s, but with room for more segments and more time to build momentum. (It was such a familiar setup that as it went on something felt strange, and I realized I was unconsciously waiting for, phantom-limb-like, the Comedy Central commercial break.)

Esther Breger wishes the show took more risks:

I feel a bit peevish criticizing a show that is both hilarious and thoughtful this early in its run—and yet I can’t help feeling disappointed by this new series’ lack of ambition.

Unlike “The Daily Show,” “The Colbert Report,” and “Late Night,” Oliver’s show airs only once a week—Sunday night at 11 p.m. The schedule puts “Last Week Tonight” at risk of rehashing its competitors’ material—last week’s news, literally—but it’s also an opportunity. Last Thursday, Oliver stopped by “The Daily Show” to boast about the luxuries of HBO. “Oh my god, are you kidding me? Paid cable is amazing,” he told Stewart. “No advertisers—you can do whatever you want.” But with all these resources and freedom, Oliver delivered more of the same. At times, last night’s episode felt like playing a “spot the difference” puzzle. A white, uber-minimalist logo adorned a set that otherwise could have been imported directly from Comedy Central. Oliver can now curse without basic-cable censors bleeping him out. (“Who gives a shit?” was his exasperated comment on 2016 election coverage.) And the most obvious difference: no commercial breaks, letting the show run 30 minutes.

David Hagland sees potential:

And Danny Vinik appreciates that Oliver shamed the American media for failing to cover the Indian elections:

Oliver provided short biographies of the two leading candidates in the Indian elections, Rahul Gandhi and Narendra Modi. He mocked the uproar over Chris Christie’s Bridgegate scandal in comparison to Modi’s own scandal: that, as Chief Minister of Gujarat, he failed to stop the 2002 anti-Muslim violence that killed more than 1,000 people in his state.

“Is that enough of a scandal for you?” Oliver said. “Because bear in mind how much time we spent in this country covering a story about a bridge-based traffic jam in which the worst that happened to any Muslims involved is that they were slightly delayed.

“We should care about this story. If polls are to be believed, we may be throwing state dinners for this guy in the near future.”

The full first episode can be viewed here.

“The best response to Forcing the Spring is to refuse to take the bait. To paraphrase Eleanor Roosevelt, Jo Becker cannot punk the LGBT world without their consent. The power of this book lies only in its ability to provoke. As history and journalism, Forcing the Spring would be a spectacular embarrassment,” – Tobias Barrington Wolff, in a review that calls Jo Becker “the Sacha Baron Cohen of journalism.”

The book’s Amazon responses are fascinating. It currently has 15 one-star reviews and eleven five-star reviews. A typical gay review:

I am flabbergasted by its complete annihilation of actual history.

A typical straight review:

A phenomenal book and easily the best historical nonfiction book I’ve read in 2014!

In those two quotes you begin to see the sheer audacity of this travesty … and its likely success.

Popova recently excerpted Dinah Fried’s new book Fictitious Dishes, which features still life photography of 50 culinary scenes found in literature. How Fried thinks of the connection between reading and eating:

Reading and eating are natural companions, and they’ve got a lot in common. Reading is consumption. Eating is consumption. Both are comforting, nourishing, restorative, relaxing, and mostly enjoyable. They can energize you or put you to sleep. Heavy books and heavy meals both require a period of intense digestion. Just as reading great novels can transport you to another time and place, meals — good and bad ones alike — can conjure scenes very far away from your kitchen table. Some of my favorite meals convey stories of origin and tradition; as a voracious reader, I devour my favorite books.

Reviewing the book, Laura Miller explains the project’s charm:

The foods a character consumes often convey something about his or her identity and station in life, whether it’s Oliver Twist’s gruel or the dainty lemon cakes loved by the unworldly Lady Sansa Stark in “A Game of Thrones.” But I suspect that for me literary meals speak most eloquently to that old, buried childish desire that the story I’m reading be “really real,” that the people and events in it not be just the arbitrary products of some writer’s imagination. If the characters demand to be fed before going on to do whatever it is the author has lined up for them, then they seem to have some sort of independent existence.

In an interview, Fried discussed the challenges of one shoot in particular – the apple pie and ice cream from Jack Kerouac’s On the Road:

I had to create it quite quickly because the ice cream would melt. I think I probably went through a few plates. But I wanted this photograph, naturally, to feel very American, as is the novel and apple pie and ice cream itself. So I went for a red diner place mat and wanted it to feel really classic and simple.

Once I had those elements in place, then it was about baking this pie, which was my first apple pie that I’d ever baked. I’ve never really been a baker. I’m more of an improvisational cook, and usually that doesn’t work so well for baking. So I baked the pie, and I set it all up. Like I said, the ice cream was quick to melt. I think it’s just the right amount melty in the photo. The pie was delicious.

Helen Rosner notes Fried’s caption for the photo featured below, drawn from John Kennedy Toole’s A Confederacy of Dunces:

In A Confederacy of Dunces, a hot dog sets the protagonist’s heart aflutter. “It’s sort of a disgusting scene,” says Fried of the photograph’s inspiration. “The protagonist, Ignatius J. Reilly, is a grotesque character, a slovenly guy who lives with his mother. In this particular scene, he follows his nose to the hot dog, inspired by the scent of it on the air. The book takes place in the late 1970’s, so the prop styling was a challenge: I wanted a Coke can that didn’t have the pop-tab that we have now, which could have been quite a search. But my husband has a lot of stuff that used to be in his grandfather’s basement, and we happened to find in a cabinet a Coke can that was from this precise era. I kept stumbling upon things that felt just right. I’d find myself collecting different types of paper napkins wherever I went, and among them were the perfect napkins. I want the props to feel time- and place-appropriate. My favorite thing about this whole project was fixating, being obsessed with finding something, and then discovering exactly what I was looking for.”

Previous Dish on Fried’s work here. Buy her new book here.

(Photos courtesy of Dinah Fried. Caption for the top one: “Setting up the Gulliver’s Travels photo.” For more, check out her tumblr.)