United Against Solitary

Approximately 30,000 prisoners have entered the third day of what might be the largest hunger strike in California’s history. The strike, which has spread to Washington state, has already left ten prisoners under medical observation. Abby Ohlheiser provides context:

While the California prison system has a less than stellar reputation on a handful of issues–many of which trace back to its astonishing overcrowding–the striking prisoners are focusing their message on improving conditions for those locked in solitary confinement. Last October, Mother Jones published a must-read on solitary in California, written by Shane Bauer, one of the three hikers kept in an Iranian solitary confinement cell for 26 months. Spoiler: Bauer thought California’s conditions were worse.

Julianne Hing adds:

The United Nations has found that just 15 days in solitary confinement violates human rights standards and can do irreperable psychological harm to a person, according to a lawsuit filed by the Center for Constitutional Rights. Yet hundreds of California inmates have been in indefinite isolation for more than a decade, according to Amnesty International.

Lauren Kirchner reports that some prisoners have expressed solidarity with GTMO detainees. In the midst of the ongoing force-feeding controversy, Robin Abcarian notes:

In California, according to hunger strike protocols released by the Department of Corrections, no prisoner will be forced to eat at any time if he makes it clear in advance that that is his wish. In California, a prisoner has the right to starve himself to death. It shouldn’t have to come to that.

Way Behind The Scenes

[youtube http://youtu.be/L88YCw0bCyk]

Kate Dries spotlights Wadjda, Saudi Arabia’s first feature film directed by a woman:

It’s the story of a 10-year-old girl named, yes, Wadjda, living in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia. She’s described as “sarcastic, funny and streetwise,” all reasons that she decides to compete in a Koran memorization competition at her school to win money to buy a bicycle. To make the movie, the filmmaker Haifaa Al-Mansour dealt with the kind of obstacles that would make an entertaining movie itself: because men and women are not allowed to interact in public in Saudi Arabia, she says “It was a major obstacle to go out in the street and talk to my actors.”

How she adjusted:

[Mansour] spent much of her time directing from the back of a van. “I could only go outside with my film crew when we had permission, so it was difficult,” she says. She frequently had to rely on walkie-talkies and watching scenes unfold on a monitor to direct her actors. “It made me realize the need to rehearse and to develop an understanding for each scene before we shot it.”

Dries notes:

Recall that it was only a few months ago that riding a bicycle was even allowed for women in Saudi Arabia.

The Work Of The World’s Poor

The International Labor Organization (ILO) found that Pakistan’s unemployment rate is 5.2 percent and India’s is 4.2 percent. But Kenny argues that developing countries’ low unemployment rates are misleading:

The majority of Pakistan’s and India’s populations work in small-scale farming or are “self employed” in informal microenterprises. That’s true across much of the developing world. The National Bureau of Economic Research’s Rafael La Porta and Andrei Shleifer suggest that, in the poorest countries, more than two-thirds of the labor force is working on the family farm or is in the informal sector.

Farms managed by the world’s poorest people tend to be small and inefficient—demanding a lot of labor for little output. That’s why families farming them make up the bulk of the world’s population living on less than $1.25 a day. The majority of enterprises run by the world’s poorest are shops and kiosks making a few sales a day—general stores, tailor shops, telephone booths, or fruit or vegetable businesses. In India, data collated by MIT’s Abhijit Banerjee and Esther Duflo suggest the average shop run by people living in poverty makes a profit of just $133 a year. That low productivity helps to explain why, even though only around 200 million people in the world are considered unemployed by the ILO, 1.3 billion workers lived in families below the $2-a-day poverty line.

The Church And Obamacare

The Catholic Health Association now fully backs the new law’s provisions:

In June of last year, CHA strongly criticized–as did the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops–the way the Department of Health and Human Services had attempted to accommodate the concerns of religious employers who objected to the mandate. The USCCB is still not (and may never be) happy with the rule. But CHA now believes HHS has addressed their concerns.

“It was important for our members to achieve resolution of this issue in time for them to negotiate their insurance renewals and with the assurance they would not have to contract, provide, pay or refer for contraceptive coverage,” Sr. Carol Keehan, president of CHA, told me. “We are pleased that that has been achieved with this accommodation.”

When Is A Kid Truly Transgender?

Transgender Child In Washington, DC

The blogger Gendermom shares her story:

When I tell people that my [five-year-old] son is now my daughter, the responses are remarkably predictable. Faces cloud with confusion. People seem to wonder if they’ve heard me correctly. Or they suggest that it’s probably a phase, or that my son is just gay. They tell me that their little boy used to try on his big sister’s dresses, too, but not to worry–it all worked out okay in the end.

They are generally very kind and curious. But I can tell that the idea of my child is entering their consciousness like a visitor from an alien galaxy. They walk away from our conversations with stunned and thoughtful looks on their faces, as if they’re thinking, “Did she really just say that?” The problem I encounter most often is not one of prejudice, but of incredulity.

Earlier this year, Beth Schwartzapfel investigated the issue at length, centering on the controversial Canadian psychologist Kenneth Zucker, who would likely clash with Gendermom:

It’s now widely accepted that no amount of therapy can change a person’s sexual orientation, and Zucker says he would not try to do so. But gender identity and sexual orientation are not the same thing.

Sexual orientation is a matter of whom you are sexually attracted to. Gender identity is more elemental: It’s who you feel in your bones that you are. Zucker’s critics say that most transgender children know precisely who they are. “These kids come out very early and say, ‘Mommy, I’m in the wrong body,’” Schreier says.

Sure, Zucker says, but that doesn’t make it a fait accompli. Children’s gender identity is plastic and malleable, he says, shaped and formed by the world around them, by the feedback they receive, by the emotional resonance of the things they do, by their personal relationships, even by the clothes they wear. If this is true, then it should be possible for these kids to change.

Zucker is quick to point out that his clinic has referred more than 60 kids for the medical interventions required to begin their transitions; a paper he wrote on the subject was, in fact, the first such study published in North America. By age 11 or 12, he concedes, trans kids are typically “locked in” to their gender identity, and for them, “I very much support that pathway, because I think that is going to help them have a better quality of life.”

But it’s different, he says, for younger kids. “If a child can grow up and feel comfortable in his or her own skin that matches their birth sex,” Zucker argues, “then you avoid the complexity of fairly serious surgical treatments. Penectomy and castration are not the same thing as having mild and minor cosmetic surgery. Lifelong hormonal therapy. It’s serious.”

Previous Dish on transgender kids here, here, here, and here.

(Photo: Five-year-old Tyler, known until last fall as Kathryn, gets a haircut from his dad at their suburban Washington, D.C., home on March 12, 2012. Tyler’s insistence on being a boy started at the early age of 2. By Nikki Kahn/The Washington Post via Getty Images)

Immigration Reform Flatlines?

Brian Beutler can’t find a pulse:

[Republicans] could drag this out for months before settling on terms of eventual citizenship. Democrats could fold on “triggering” the citizenship guarantee — or come to terms with the GOP on something that could be sold as both a “trigger” and a guarantee. Boehner could step up, break the Hastert rule, probably lose his job. But these are all pretty implausible scenarios. Particularly given how averse House Republicans and movement folks have become even to highly conservative legislation that they recognize as a potential vehicle for compromise.

Josh Marshall agrees that “Comprehensive Immigration Reform does, increasingly, look dead.” He wants those who are killing the bill called out:

Too often, whether it’s on taxes or immigration reform or anything else certain parties have a strong interest in fuzzing up what’s actually happening – most often the party that feels like it’s on the wrong side of public opinion. And that leaves bills to just die because in some very fuzzy broad brush way ‘the House’ or ‘the Senate’ couldn’t get it passed.

But there’s no House or Senate. For these purposes, these are simply helpful fictions. Or in this case unhelpful fictions. People only really know what’s going on when you get down to the nitty gritty and say, it didn’t happen because these seven people – naming names – decided to vote against it or decided it wouldn’t get a vote.

Experiments In Power

Brian Resnick observed power’s influence in the laboratory:

Power lends the power holder many benefits. Powerful people are more likely to take decisive action. In one simple experiment, it was shown that people made to feel powerful were more likely to turn off an annoying fan humming in the room. Power reduces awareness of constraints and causes people act more quickly. Powerful people also tend to think more abstractly, favoring the bigger picture over smaller consequences. Powerful people are less likely to remember the constraints to a goal. They downplay risks, and enjoy higher levels of testosterone (a dominance hormone), and lower levels of cortisol (a stress hormone).

The upshot:

“People who are given more power in the lab, they see more choice,” Magee says. “They see beyond what is objectively there, the amount of choice they have. More directions for what actions they can take. What it means to have power is to be free of the punishment that one could exert upon you for the thing you did.” Which paves the way for another hallmark of the powerful–hypocrisy. Our guts are right about this one. On a survey, powerful study participants indicated that they were less tolerant of cheating than the less powerful. But then when given the opportunity to cheat and take more compensation for the experiment, the powerful caved in.

Why The Rent Is So Damn High

The average rent in NYC has risen to $3,017 a month. Barro lists eight reasons why rent in the city is so pricey. Rent control is one factor:

[A]verage advertised rents were about three times higher than average rents as measured by the Census Bureau. And when you look at data from the Furman Center at New York University, it’s not hard to see why. In Manhattan below 96th Street, 35% of rent regulated apartments are occupied by a tenant who has lived there for more than 20 years. Less than 3% of market-rate tenants have been around that long. Many of those rent regulated tenants would have moved if they had to pay market rent, whether within the city or to Florida; when they hold onto their great deals, they reduce supply available to new renters, and that drives up prices for everybody else.

Mike Dang flags a WNYC article on Bloomberg’s affordable housing policies. Dang notes:

The affordable housing we do have is great—there’s just not enough of it to house families who are increasingly being priced out their neighborhoods. In one attractive eight-story building constructed as part of the mayor’s affordable housing program, 5,000 families applied to live in one of the 124 apartments. To live there, families with two kids could not earn more than $52,000 a year.

(Video: Joe My God passes along this “animated rendering of how midtown Manhattan grew skyward from the 1850s onward.”)

Smarter Search Engines

Jessica Love considers the consequences of retooling search engines so they understand complete sentences rather than simply keywords:

Search users (and the advertisers who hope to lure them) won’t be the only ones who benefit from search engines capable of parsing speechlike queries. The science behind search may change how linguists view natural language. For one, linguists may move away from modeling language using formal grammars, Chomskyan or otherwise. “What you end up finding is that the things that people do with language very rarely fit into the formal grammar that you carved out from the outset,” says Mailhot. “The data are what they are and people do what they do and the best strategy is to make inferences based on what people do rather than carve something out ahead of time and shoehorn the data into it.”