Category: The Dish

While the p.r. juggernaut behind the deceptions and distortions of Ted Olson, David Boies, Jo Becker and Chad Griffin grinds relentlessly forward to mainstream applause, there’s been an extraordinarily gratifying pushback from countless people who actually know something about the subject. We had Mark Joseph Stern weighing in at Slate. Alyssa Rosenberg filets the Becker and Olson books in the Washington Post here. Jamie Kirchick takes a good whack in the Wall Street Journal here. Hank Stuever got the true measure of the documentary here.

Alyssa’s review is particularly strong and I recommend it if you haven’t read enough about this controversy. She rightly sees this egregious p.r. campaign as turning the actual story of this remarkable civil rights struggle into something “less true and less interesting.” And she has a good eye for the motives of Boies and Olson:

Much is made of the fact that Olson and Boies opposed each other in Bush v. Gore, but little of the alternative legacy each man might want to build for himself, Boies as a winner rather than a loser, Olson as a man above politics rather than a partisan operative.

It goes to show that there is, in the end, a riposte to public relations. It’s called journalism. And the rumors of its death – at the hands of Jo Becker – are mercifully exaggerated.

Jeff Shesol spots a fascinating detail in Bruce Allen Murphy’s new biography, Scalia: A Court of One – his obsession with dictionaries, especially those from the 18th and 19th centuries. Scalia’s penchant for parsing the meaning of words “is apparent—often ostentatiously so—in nearly every opinion that Scalia has put on paper over the past three decades”:

Sometimes, this has yielded a comical result, as in Scalia’s dissent in Edwards v. Aguillard, a 1987 decision overturning a pretty plainly labelled Louisiana law called the Balanced Treatment for Creation-Science and Evolution-Science Act on the grounds that it advanced a particular religious belief.  Scalia, having considered very carefully the phrase in question, insisted, presumably with a straight face, that the term “creation science” had no religious meaning whatsoever. “The Act’s reference to ‘creation,’” he wrote, “is not convincing evidence of religious purpose…. We have no basis on the record to conclude that creation science need be anything other than a collection of scientific data supporting the theory that life abruptly appeared on earth.”

In other instances, Scalia’s word games have had profound, societal implications, leading to—in at least one case—a dramatic shift in constitutional law.

In District of Columbia v. Heller, which Scalia considers his greatest achievement, he relied not on one but on three eighteenth-century dictionaries to “clarify” the Second Amendment, which reads, “A well regulated militia being necessary to the security of a free state, the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed.” By the time that Scalia had finished his exegesis, the “prefatory clause” about a militia had been clarified into irrelevance, and “bear arms” had been so scrutinized and squinted at and worked over that Americans awoke to find that they had a new, individual right to carry a handgun—a right that cannot be found in the language, plain or otherwise, of the Constitution. Michael Waldman, who has just published a book on the Second Amendment, observes that Scalia, in his opinion, “has the feel of an ambitious Scrabble player trying too hard to prove that triple word score really does exist.”

(Photo: Supreme Court Associate Justice Antonin Scalia testifies before the House Judiciary Committee’s Commercial and Administrative Law Subcommittee on Capitol Hill May 20, 2010 in Washington, DC, by Stephen Masker via Wikimedia Commons)

In a lengthy report, Emily Badger explores what the rise of Uber and Lyft means for taxi medallions, whose value has risen astronomically in recent years:

In New York, taxi medallions have topped $1 million. In Boston, $700,000. In Philadelphia, $400,000. In Miami, $300,000. Where medallions exist, they have outperformed even the Standard & Poor’s 500-stock index. In Chicago, their value has doubled since 2009.

Now, however, a market built on restricted supply is showing cracks with the arrival of start-ups that turn anyone with a car into a driver for hire. In Chicago, those cracks have triggered fears that medallion values are tottering. They have given rise to a high-stakes lawsuit, tentative new regulation and a glimpse of how this same clash between old power and new technology could play out in other cities. Throw open the market — to amateurs, part-timers and the underemployed (and whatever they drive) — and medallions lose their exclusivity. Without which, they lose their value, too. …

That, Uber says, is precisely the point. The five-year-old San Francisco tech company — and the envy of Silicon Valley — has rapidly and strategically infiltrated taxi strongholds by enabling consumers to hail rides electronically from their smartphones. Uber and companies like it argue that regulations intended for taxis don’t apply to a service no one could have envisioned when the laws were written. And consumers don’t seem to care what those laws say. They are piling in and leaving cities to chase after a fast-expanding business.

Meanwhile, Eric Goldwyn considers the conflict between traditionally trained drivers and disruptive tech:

Startups like Uber argue that technology can transform the casual driver into a professional. With G.P.S., anyone can navigate efficiently. Real-time passenger feedback means that drivers who consistently receive low ratings can be dropped from the service. “Tech tools have changed the whole environment,” Josh Mohrer, the general manager of Uber’s New York office, told me. The upstarts can provide a range of ride options at different price points, improve driver efficiency by matching drivers with rides more quickly, and weed out bad drivers. …

There is now talk within the taxi community of developing mobile applications to compete with the T.N.C.s. [transportation network companies like Uber]. [Taxi union leader Bhairavi] Desai sees this as a viable strategy, one that could stitch together the obvious benefits of technology and professionalism. “In cities where ride-share has grown, it’s because professional taxi drivers have switched to the other side,” Desai explained. “The Uber model isn’t sustainable without professional drivers.”

Previous Dish on Uber here and here.

Jeremy Bentham’s utopian prison design appears to have been a big mistake – and its consequences are still being felt after more than two centuries:

Though many scholars focusing on penitentiaries suspect that staff-prisoner relations are molded by institutional architecture, little empirical work has been completed on the topic. Now, a new study led by [researcher Karin] Beijersbergen and published in Crime & Delinquency has concluded that building styles, floor plans, and other design features do indeed have a significant impact on the way Dutch prisoners perceive their relationships with prison staff. …

After controlling for age, ethnicity, intimate relationships at the time of arrest, education level, personality traits, criminal histories, and officer-to-inmate ratios, the authors discovered that their hunch was correct. If the prisoners were housed in leaky dungeon-like panopticons, they tended to feel more estranged from guards. But if they were enjoying campus-style living arrangements or apartment-style high-rises, they perceived the relationships as more supportive.

On a similar note, architect Raphael Sperry – who is working to get the American Institute of Architects’ to change its code to “prohibit the design of spaces that inherently violate human rights” – discusses the business of designing prisons:

A lot of large firms have a unit that designs prisons. Sometimes that expertise overlaps with other high-security business types – military facilities and some other government facilities – but prisons are pretty specialized. The group within a large firm might be five percent of their business, in some cases maybe 15 percent. There are some firms that specialize in prisons and those ones that I’ve encountered really try to be progressive. They are the most forward-thinking, and [are] using evidence-based best practices. …

We are not advocating that we put the firms that do prisons out of business; we would just like if they would foreground human rights in the work that they do, and I think it’s better if they do that collectively. That’s what the code is about. If one or two companies say, ‘We are not going to design prisons that violate human rights,’ those guys are going to go out of business and the product will still be built. It’s important to take a collective stance.

(Photo by Paolo Trabattoni)