Category: The Dish

Where Are These Kids’ Parents? Ask The Cops

by Elizabeth Nolan Brown

Due process? Too good for children! That seems to be the attitude at police stations across the country. New research shows juvenile suspects are routinely interrogated about serious crimes without parents or a lawyer present.

The research, presented at the American Psychological Association’s annual convention last week, relied on 57 11698954185_02367aba3e_zvideotaped juvenile interrogations from 17 police stations around the country. In these interviews – 93 percent of which pertained to serious or violent offenses – less than a third of the 13- to 17-year-old suspects had a lawyer present during the interrogation. And only 21 percent had parents present.

“From a due process perspective, this was very troubling to see,” Hayley Cleary, lead researcher and developmental psychology professor at Virginia Commonwealth University, said in a statement.

Yes, these teens had waived their Miranda rights. However, “laboratory-based studies have shown that adolescents may not fully understand their right to decline police questioning when not in custody,” said Cleary. Teens may also “not be developmentally able to assert themselves when asked to consent to questioning and those vulnerabilities can continue into the interrogation room.”

Cleary believes (or at least tactfully says) that “we need more research examining why juveniles in particular are waiving their constitutional rights so frequently and confessing to crimes before they’ve obtained advice from an attorney.” But it doesn’t seem like much of a mystery. The reasons she previously mentioned – lack of understanding of their rights, fear or acquiescence in the face of authority – are perfectly sufficient to explain why a 14-year-old might answer cops’ questions in loco parentis or an attorney.

There seems to have been an interesting criminal justice bent to this year’s APA convention, including a symposium called “Stand Your Ground Law – Psychology’s Contribution to the National Conversation”. It was co-led by Stanford University professor Jennifer Eberhardt, whose below comments to APA members came the day before unarmed black teen Michael Brown was shot by white police officers in a suburb of St. Louis. From the APA conference blog:

Eberhardt discussed some of the research that has implications for “stand your ground” laws. For example, although research finds that most white people think that they treat other groups fairly and that discrimination is a thing of the past, her research tells a dramatically different story. In a series of studies, she has found that “race influences what we see, where we look and how we respond.” Understanding the psychological consequences of these laws is critical, she said. “People of color are finding themselves in a vulnerable position in public spaces,” said Eberhardt. “Children of color are growing up situations where they feel  that the state is not protecting them, that the state does not recognize their pain. As children, they are already feeling invisible.”

A few days earlier, the APA’s governing council approved a resolution recommending that all interrogations of felony suspects be videotaped from start to finish. Surveilling the police, said the psychologists, could help end coercive police tactics and “the problem of false confessions and wrongful convictions.”

(Photo of an interrogation room by Kris Arnold)

Trend Anticipation

by Phoebe Maltz Bovy

Rachel Hodin at Into The Gloss declares delicate jewelry so last season:

As someone who’s skilled in the art of falling (and then breaking those falls with her hands), a change from the popular dainty ring scenario feels in order. However, it wasn’t until I stumbled on Erin Wasson’s Instagram (“stumbled” being an exalted term for my stalking habits these days) that I could finally visualize it: thick gold rings. Paired with nothing more than plain pants and a basic white tee, Erin’s ring game looks fresh in comparison to ‘gram upon ‘gram of dainty finger stacks (though it’s probably mostly vintage).

This is a real shame, because the dainty rings Hodin finds insufficiently “fresh” are much prettier than the clunky ones that barely manage to work on Erin Wasson, the model-about-town wearing them. While I’m not super into rings myself, and only wear the ones that may cause others to question my feminist principles, for other jewelry, or jewelry on other people, I suppose I’m Team Dainty. But that is not our principle concern.

So, back to Hodin: The ‘grams in question refer not (just) to the weight of a really tiny ring, but to Instagram. As every last Dish reader surely knows, for some time now, all the fashion-blogger-types were posting pictures of themselves with dainty rings, sometimes stacked, often worn in addition to wedding and engagement rings. Sometimes worn, bafflingly, at the knuckle. (How do those stay on? Answer, from the infinitely stylish Garance Doré: They don’t.) This was the look of 2013, which explains why, in 2014, the NYT style pages have announced that dainty is so very now. As has Forbes.

A cynic would consider the possibility that someone trying to sell clunky rings has PR’d said jewelry onto Wasson, hoping that enough shots of this edgy-gorgeous woman glaring, smoking, and giving the finger in a certain sort of ring would convince us plebs to go out and buy the same kind of ring. (Learned the hard way: Just because a look works on Alexa Chung, it may not work on you. Presumably this principle carries over to models and it-girls more generally.) But of course something along those lines must have been what brought us delicate rings as a thing. Still, that something is being marketed to us doesn’t mean it’s not appealing in its own right.

What was so brilliant about this ITG post was its timing. “Delicate” has been the thing for quite some time, which explains why the notoriously late-to-the-game NYT style pates only just now took notice. The NYT pieces suggest a knuckle-ringed finger to the pulse, but for whatever reason (a stodgy editorial process?), they’ve arrived once the moment’s over. That, or their arrival means that the moment’s over.

All of which gets us to the secret formula of trend anticipation. It involves identifying current trends once they’ve reached their peak and declaring the opposite look the hot new thing. Has the NYT discovered skinny jeans? Mom jeans are the thing. They just feel fresh.

While trend anticipation skills probably do have some financial use I have yet to harness, they don’t by any means need to determine our own sartorial choices. I will leave mom jeans and enormous gold rings to those at the cutting edge, and will stick with daintier denim and accessory options for my own trips to such glamorous places as the Wegmans parking lot.

Painless Meat?

by Dish Staff

Rhys Southan suggests it’s possible to raise and slaughter animals “without causing them any more suffering than what we might expect a well-off human to experience”:

The first premise might seem hard to accept, given the brutal realities of modern animal farming. Most farm animals are raised on intensive factory farms where they suffer for the majority of their short lives. Even small, high-welfare farms tend to subject their animals to at least some painful procedures like castration without anesthetic, dehorning or the separation of mothers and their newborn children.

Yet ultra-high-welfare animal products are a possibility, not a fantasy. Consider the highest level of the “5-Step” animal-welfare rating program at Whole Foods Market. For beef, this prohibits branding, castration, ear notching, separating mothers from calves for early weaning and long trips to the slaughterhouse. For pigs, this ensures they are never separated from their littermates, which is important because of how social pigs are. For chickens, it means they have plenty of space and don’t have to endure physical alterations like debeaking.

Almost no farms meet these standards, but if more of us were willing to compromise on the price, taste, quantity and texture of the meat we eat, more farms like this could exist and thrive.

Butch Is Beautiful

by Dish Staff

Kingsporch

And Vanessa Vitiello Urquhart wants the world to know it:

Sometimes a rude question is also a sincere one. Take, for example, an inquiry I hear quite often: Do lesbians really find butch women attractive? As a butch woman, it is impossible to ignore the implication that, for certain people, women like me are the least attractive creatures on the planet. Umbrage-taking aside, however, the question raises the issue of whose standards of beauty apply in a queer female context. And sorry, hetero guys, but they’re not yours.

In fact, butch lesbians often do quite well when it comes to attracting female attention… I myself have felt a strong attraction to some of my fellow butch dykes. There’s a uniquely butch self-confidence, an insouciant swagger that draws my eye when I see butches out in public. This distinctive attitude and its charms may be due, in part, to the fact that every butch knows full well that she doesn’t look the way most people expect women to look, and yet she’s found the confidence to persevere in spite of the side-eyes and the disapproving thin-lipped faces of people marching past, eyes averted.

Previous Dish on butch lesbians here and here.

(Image of the Boston drag troupe All The Kings Men via Wikimedia Commons)

Your Coffee Is Being Cut

by Dish Staff

John Metcalfe shares the grim news:

No doubt about it: there is trouble in coffee land. Drought and the spread of “leaf rust,” a plant disease, has left growers suffering in Brazil, the source of roughly a third of the world’s coffee supply. This one-two punch to the java industry has kicked prices up to their highest point in years and fanned fears of a global shortage (though those worries seem to have been premature). With the future uncertain, some unscrupulous folks in the supply chain have decided to get sneaky. They’re increasing profits by padding ground coffee with filler ingredients, say researchers. These adulterants range from relatively harmless things like chicory and brown sugar to more eyebrow-raising stuff like acai berries, soybeans, and peanuts, which could be problematic for those with allergies. …

Coffee fillers have become visible enough that they’ve attracted the attention of scientists at Brazil’s Universidade Estadual de Londrina, who [Monday] announced they’ve developed a new test to detect non-coffee ingredients. Standard methods now involve peeking at grounds under a microscope or simply tasting the brew; this updated technique, however, uses liquid chromatography and statistical analysis. The researchers believe this way provides a comprehensive view of the coffee’s chemical makeup, while removing any potential biases held by human taste-testers.

It’s OK Not To Feel Anything When A Celebrity Dies, Ctd

by Dish Staff

A reader writes:

Thanks to Elizabeth Nolan Brown for her eloquent essay on Robin Williams.  This reminds me of when Princess Diana died. I found out when I walked to the corner store to buy the newspaper. I read the headline and thought “Shit, that’s too bad” and didn’t give it another thought. Then the worldwide hysteria erupted and it was all Diana, all the time.  I just didn’t understand what the big deal was.  My wife, friends and family thought I was incredibly callous to have almost no reaction to Diana’s death.

Same thing with Robin Williams. I liked him and more than once busted a gut listening to him, but he was an entertainer with no connection to me.  Why should I grieve? It sucks that his demons took him down and I understand why some people are sad, but I just can’t muster it.

A like-minded reader adds:

It is as if Facebook and Twitter reactions to celebrity deaths and tragedies have supplanted going to church as the cultural litmus test for letting the greater community know you are a good person and people are compelled against all reason to participate.

But another relates to Robin:

“If you’re that depressed, reach out to someone. And remember: Suicide is a permanent solution to temporary problems,” – Robin Williams, World’s Greatest Dad (2009)

I was diagnosed with postpartum depression not that long ago.

I reached out, got help, and feel a million time better already. But it took along time. Depression makes you believe that you can’t dig yourself out of the hole you find yourself in. It makes it feel like if you reach out and talk to you someone, they’ll think you’re crazy. One of the main reasons I didn’t talk about my PPD was because I thought my doctor or husband would try to take away my son for fear that I’d hurt him. And that’s where depression twists the knife that is guilt. I felt guilty because I’m a mother! I should love this period of my life! I should be thrilled to have this amazing, perfect, healthy human being that looks at me with such love. But it’s a chemical imbalance. It’s not something I could control.

Mr Williams suicide is the second I’ve heard of in less then two weeks, the first being a former acquittance. We really do need to work on having a more open and honest dialogue about depression in this country.

Another gets honest:

If someone were to die at the age of 63 after a lifelong battle with MS or Sickle Cell, we’d all say they were a “fighter” or an “inspiration.” But when someone dies after a lifelong battle with severe mental illness and drug addiction, we say it was a tragedy and tell everyone “don’t be like him, please seek help.” That’s bullshit. Robin Williams sought help his entire life. He saw a psychiatrist. He quit drinking. He went to rehab. He did this for decades. That’s HOW he made it to 63. For some people, 63 is a fucking miracle. I know several people who didn’t make it past 23 and I’d do anything to have 40 more years with them.

Another gets open:

With regards to the death by apparent suicide of Robin Williams, I want to draw a clear line between Feeling and Mourning in this particular situation. I agree completely with the sort of Yeah, No Duh thesis of your post, and I found myself in the Facebook poster’s camp when, say, that guy from The Fast and the Furious movies died in a fiery car crash. It was tragic and ironic and awful, and I “felt” for his fans and family, I suppose; but I didn’t mourn.

I am deeply mourning the loss of Robin Williams.

I was born in 1969, so I grew up with Mr. Williams on my teevee machine. I obsessed over Dead Poets Society in my early 20s, around the time I realized I would suffer the rest of my life with depression. Aladdin and Mrs. Doubtfire helped me through the miserably dark early ’90s, when my diagnosis shifted to Bipolar Disorder, and I laughed and cried at the tail end of that rotten decade with Good Will Hunting and The Birdcage, both of which I sat up all night last night watching.

And somewhere in there, between Williams as a fat blue cartoon genie and a gay Miami nightclub owner, I laid down in my grungy apartment’s bathtub and made a pitiful, half-assed and obviously unsuccessful attempt at opening my wrists. I didn’t want it enough, so I failed. I still bear the small, pale scars of that day as reminders of what the end might look like. But I made it over. That time.

I am deeply mourning the loss of Robin Williams, because he felt like a friend and fellow-sufferer. He was the classic Crying-on-the-Inside Clown; a man who had everything and an almost universal acclimation as one of the greatest living comics. And yet he didn’t make it over. With all his fame and celebrity and the deep respect of his peers and fans, Robin Williams couldn’t make it over. I mourn for him; I mourn for that inescapable pain that not even his wife and children could help him overcome. I was inconsolable last night not because I’d never see another Robin Williams stand-up act or another in a long line of his mediocre late-career comedies, but because if he couldn’t make it over, what chance do I have?

Yes, it’s fine to feel nothing about this. Be my guest; the last thing the world needs is more faux-sentimentality and rootless hero-worship Because Celebrity. But when you’ve loved a performer since you were 9 years old, and suffered with him and laughed with him and watched him grow and rise and fall and fail and get back up and start all over again, all the while laughing most loudly at himself, you owe yourself a moment of true mourning.

Go here for all our coverage of Robin Williams’ death.

When Bellow Went Green

by Dish Staff

dish_melvilleberkshires

Saul Bellow’s classic novel, Herzog, turns fifty this year. Revisiting the book, Andrew Furman notices an aspect of the plot that had escaped him before – Bellow’s “sensitive evocations of place, particularly green places both within and without the city,” an unexpected turn for a Jewish writer associated with the urban landscapes of Chicago:

The novel opens with Herzog at his dilapidated Berkshires property at the peak of summer, contemplating all that has recently befallen him, primarily the collapse of his second marriage and his academic career. Bellow takes pains during this opening section, and throughout, to dramatize Herzog’s receptivity to the natural world. He sleeps outside many nights, surrounded by “tall bearded grass and locust and maple seedlings.” And “when he opened his eyes in the night, the stars were near like spiritual bodies. Fires, of course; gases—minerals, heat, atoms, but eloquent at five in the morning to a man lying in a hammock, wrapped in his overcoat.”

Critics have generally paid short shrift to such moments of heightened perception, moments that don’t directly involve the people in Herzog’s life, or his big ideas.

But now it seems wrong to separate Herzog’s receptivity to the external world from his insights about his impoverished upbringing, his failures as a father, husband, and son, and his scholarly views. It seems worthwhile, instead, to examine whether he finds, through nature, the exalted state of human perception envisioned by another Massachusetts resident, Ralph Waldo Emerson.

Bellow at least holds out the possibility that Herzog, like Emerson’s scholar or poet, might tap into his highest intuitive powers and realize true insight through his close observations of the animals, plants, and nighttime sky in the New England countryside. “Nature (itself) and I are alone together, in the Berkshires,” Herzog muses late in the novel, “and this is my chance to understand.”

(Photo of Herman Melville’s studio in the Berkshires, where he wrote Moby Dick, via Pablo Sanchez)

Why Intervene In Iraq And Not Syria? Ctd

by Dish Staff

Frederic Hof slams Obama for not arming the Syrian rebels back in 2012:

No doubt the president is sensitive to the charge that his rejection of the 2012 recommendation by his national security team to arm and equip nationalist Syrian rebels robustly has contributed significantly, if inadvertently, to ISIL’s growth in both Syria and Iraq. His comments to Friedman implicitly dismiss the 2012 recommendation itself as a fantasy, but as Secretary Clinton’s Syria adviser I was a member of the administration at that time. The recommendation, in one form or another, was offered not only by Clinton, but by Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta, CIA Director David Petraeus and Chairman of the Joint Chiefs Gen. Martin Dempsey. Yet the president, ignoring decades of universal conscription and mandatory military service in Syria, persists in characterizing the Assad regime’s armed opponents as a hopeless collection of former butchers, bakers and candlestick makers.

What is truly curious, however, is the request to Congress for $500 million to finance what the president deems a fantasy. Indeed, if press reports are true that the United States is already involved in some low-level arming, equipping and training of Syrian rebels, one wonders how many taxpayer dollars have already been spent on something the commander-in-chief deems illusory.

In a post we noted earlier, Marc Lynch explains why arming was a dodgy idea, and remains so today. Larison piles on, starting with a reminder that the exact same outcome that anti-interventionists feared in Syria (jihadists taking control of American weapons intended for “moderate” allies) has come to pass in Iraq. And another thing:

It should also be obvious that groups such as ISIS benefit from collapsing state authority, so it is not clear why an even more activist Syria policy aimed at collapsing the Syrian government would have been bad for that group or one like it.

The bigger problem with the hawkish revisionism on this question points to the inherent absurdity of what they were demanding from the U.S. (and what the administration has more recently agreed to do). Syria hawks wanted the U.S. to arm anti-regime forces for the purpose of overthrowing the government, but they emphasized their desire to arm only the “right” kind of insurgents to distract from the small problem that their overall goal of regime change would inevitably empower jihadist groups. Syria hawks wanted to arm the opposition in the hopes that it would start a process that would bring the Syrian government down, and if that had happened that would have created an even worse chaotic landscape in which jihadist groups would have thrived even more than they already do. Instead of jihadists controlling just part of Syria, it is entirely possible that even more of Syria would have ended up under their control had the administration done exactly what Syria hawks wanted and if things had worked according to plan.

Max Fisher and Amanda Taub list some other reasons why Obama’s choice not to intervene in Syria doesn’t contradict his choice to intervene (reluctantly) in Iraq. Among these reasons is that there’s a difference between intervening to preserve the status quo and intervening to change it:

Obama ordered air strikes against ISIS in Iraq focused on the narrow goal of defending Iraq’s semi-autonomous Kurdish region. Kurdistan had been mostly secure until ISIS began pushing into the territory about a week ago; it’s got a stable, pro-American, oil-producing government. Obama’s strikes are meant to help Kurdistan defend itself, and to preserve the status quo of a secure Kurdistan. The strikes are very clearly not about trying to change the larger ISIS war in Iraq, or to help Iraq retake the vast ISIS-held swathes of territory. In Syria, there is no “good” status quo to defend. Any strikes against ISIS there would be about pushing the group back from Syrian territory it already controls, so that more moderate Syrian rebels could seize it. In other words, the air strikes would be about changing the facts on the ground in Syria, rather than preserving them.

Obama seems willing to use force when he can protect something good — a stable, secure Iraqi Kurdistan — but not to try to fix something bad. He doesn’t want to “own” the outcome, get dragged into a potentially long engagement that could easily escalate, or risk sending the conflict spinning in an unpredictable new direction. So the US approach to Syria and Iraq is consistent in this respect.

Even Allahpundit sees how these criticisms of Obama’s reticence to intervene ignore reality:

It’s easy to say in hindsight “we should have hit ISIS harder before they had time to establish themselves”; in reality, had Obama made that case at the time, he would have been scoffed at by war-weary lefties and righties. And with good reason: There’s simply never been compelling evidence, the way there is with an America-friendly battle-tested force like the peshmerga in Kurdistan, that an FSA armed by Uncle Sam would have been equal to the task of stopping the jihadis, let alone Assad.

Previous Dish on intervention in Iraq vs. Syria here and here.

Face Of The Day

by Dish Staff

UKRAINE-RUSSIA-CRISIS-POLITICS

A woman reacts after shelling in the town of Yasynuvata near the rebel stronghold of Donetsk on August 12, 2014. Shelling on a town just north of Donetsk in eastern Ukraine on Tuesday ripped through blocks of flats and set its central market on fire, killing several in an attack that local residents blamed on Ukrainian forces. By Dimitar Dilkoff/AFP/Getty Images.