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Amy Zimmerman appreciates the latest episode of Louie, which ends with a scene (above) lamenting the unfairness of how overweight women are often treated:

The question of “appropriate” show biz pairings is a natural extension of the horribly skewed, superficial world we live in. Schlubby “every man” types are all the rage in film comedies (see any Seth Rogen movie, ever), and always manage to score the hottest girls. The unfairness here isn’t just that chubby men are allowed to get with beautiful women, while we don’t tolerate the reverse; it’s the implication that no one in their right mind would even consider casting a “normal” woman to play a leading role in one of these stoner comedies.

Willa Paskin’s take is more complicated:

The first time I watched the episode, I read Vanessa’s entire speech about the difficulty of being a fat girl as a female cri de coeur.  The second time I watched it, after interviewing [Sarah] Baker [the actress who plays Vanessa] and learning that she had nothing to do with the script, it seemed more like a male mea culpa.

Louis C.K.’s insights into why a man might not want to be seen with a woman like Vanessa are unimpeachable:

his concern about double standards and casual male cruelty seem deeply felt. But his characterization of Vanessa is less unerring. A woman as confident and comfortable as Vanessa would not, I don’t think, imagine herself as the victim of her weight and blame guys like Louie as entirely as her speech suggests. As a guilt trip, her speech is perfect; as a character exploration, it’s a little bit too much of a guilt trip.

Vanessa’s teachable moment, and the episode more largely, is as scathing to Louie as possible. But it’s also condescending to Vanessa: I mean, if all Vanessa wanted in life was to hold hands with a nice guy, a girl as cool as she is could do just that. Wonder if we’ll ever see a fat girl on TV who demands more.

Jillian Mapes has mixed feelings:

I’m torn because it takes a privileged man to give fat women a voice, to start a conversation that no one wants to have besides fat women themselves. And some fat women don’t want to talk about it either, just as they’d prefer never having to acknowledge their own size. Instead they do this dance with potential suitors that, to me, back before I was comfortable freely using the word “fat” to describe myself, felt like a staring contest of sorts: who’s going to point out the elephant in the room first?

That’s the difference between a character like Vanessa and a fat woman whose worst fear is a conversation about her pants size: the former is not afraid of acknowledging her size, which has come to define her in the eyes of others. The right words don’t make the wrong body any smaller, but they do take the power out of language itself. In doing so, you minimize the effects of those who call you fat and don’t mean it as a neutral descriptor, akin to “tall” or “short” or “skinny.”

Still, she declares that “it’s a beautiful thing to see the intimate passages of your mind play out on your TV screen for the very first time.” Melissa McEwan, on the other hand, hated the scene because it “pretends that there aren’t already loads of men who love fat women”:

Men who are specifically attracted to fat women, or men who fell in love with individual women who happen to be fat. Men who, in either case, didn’t need an education on how fat women are human beings, many of whom are desirous of and deserving of romantic love. Men who don’t expect to be “rewarded” in some way for loving and being attracted to fat women.

On its face, that might not seem particularly important, but it is—because the routine disappearing of these men underwrites the narratives which pathologize attraction to fat women. Which, suffice it to say, doesn’t do any favors for fat women.

It would be significantly more radical, and more progressive, for Louis CK to simply have had his character be attracted to and date and fuck a fat woman without any commentary about her weight at all. Like lots of men already do.

After North Carolina Republicans repealed the state’s Racial Justice Act last year, the state Supreme Court is considering whether to send back to death row four inmates whose death sentences were reduced to life without parole thanks t0 the law. Last month, Barry Scheck explained the case:

The four prisoners in the case have uncovered a mountain of evidence of discrimination in their cases and county, including a prosecutor’s handwritten notes in one of their cases. In it, he described prospective jurors differently by race. The white “country boy” who “drank” was “ok,” in contrast to the “black wino” who was excluded. Another African-American juror was “ok” because she was from “a respectable black family.”

The evidence also contained an unprecedented study of race and jury selection in North Carolina. Researchers found across the state, in counties large and small, urban and rural, rampant racial discrimination against African-American jurors by the prosecution was the norm.

Lane Florsheim adds more context:

Jury selection based on race is illegal.

A 1986 Supreme Court decision (Batson v. Kentucky) ruled that prosecutors cannot rely on race to dismiss jurors. In reality, though, this can be difficult to enforce, as prosecutors can eliminate jurors without expressing a reason—a prerogative known as peremptory challenge. In some states, according to the NAACP brief, “cheat sheets” have been distributed during prosecutorial conferences. These sheets instruct prosecutors on how “to hide the fact that you’re really eliminating this person because he or she happens to be black,” says Neil Vidmar, a law professor at Duke and a member of the team who prepared the brief. “The cheat sheet gives [prosecutors] a list of reasons that courts have approved as neutral explanations,” says James Coleman, also a law professor at Duke, “It gives them the answer that will give them a passing grade.”

In an interview, Walter Kirn – whose latest book, Blood Will Out, chronicles his relationship with the con man masquerading as “Clark Rockefeller” – discusses the peculiar appeal of swindlers:

Rumpus: Why are stories about impostors—The Talented Mr. Ripley, Six Degrees of Separation, Blood Will Out—so compelling? And beyond that, why are they of particular interest to you?

Kirn: We’re all impostors to ourselves. By that I mean that we know instinctively, intimately, the difference between whom we are inside and who we appear to be to others. Most of the time—when we aren’t flat lying about something or playing a particularly stylized role in some heightened dramatic situation—this difference between the internal and the external is modest and manageable. But there are moments when it frightens us, threatening to expose us as inauthentic. Well, the big-time impostors we read about in literature run this risk constantly, flirting with destruction, not just humiliation or embarrassment. It’s a spectacle that we can’t help but find compelling, and it involves a certain level of courage that we sneakily admire, perhaps.

I’ve always defined a truly alluring story as a journey we’re not equipped to take ourselves with a person we’re tempted but afraid to emulate. Impostor narratives are exactly that. When they end in disaster, as Clark’s did, or as Gatsby’s did, we can congratulate ourselves for our own wisdom. We can also experience, safely, at no cost, the terrible thrill of radical self-invention, of trading who we are for who we might be.

Rumpus: To what extent do you think Clark believed his own lies, and to what degree was he aware of all that he was doing?

Kirn: People who know Clark’s story superficially tend to find a strange comfort in the notion that he fell for his own lies. They imagine that he was delusional, confused—not unremittingly shrewd and calculating. They’re wrong, though. They’re projecting their own humanity onto a sociopathic, alien mind, a mind that couldn’t afford for even an instant to lose track of its own schemes. You or I would have trouble targeting different people with an array of specialized deceptions tailored to their respective personalities; we’d crack under the stress, the mental strain. But for someone like Clark, such pressure is a pleasure. I imagine that he woke up each morning wondering whom he could deceive that day. It made him happy, misleading people. It was his craft, not merely his compulsion.

Previous Dish on Kirn and Blood Will Out here.

After reading Nicholas Parsons’s Meth Mania: A History of Methamphetamine, Sullum believes so:

Although NSDUH data cited by Parsons indicate that monthly meth users never accounted for more than 0.3 percent of the population between 2002 and 2011, the drug in its latest incarnation loomed large in the public imagination. Meth did become the next crack in the sense that it was portrayed as the scariest drug ever, turning its users into hideous, homicidal, zombie-like subhumans who made speed freaks seem attractive and tame by comparison. Popular portrayals of meth’s effects, which Parsons describes in detail with a keen eye for exaggeration and unjustified assumptions, were grossly misleading on two major counts: They presented extreme cases as typical, and they blamed every harm suffered or inflicted by meth addicts, ranging from tooth decay to murderous rampages, on the drug itself.

This sort of pharmacological reductionism is belied by the history of methamphetamine, which shows that the effects attributed to the drug are powerfully shaped by context.

Phillip Smith praises the book for addressing how these myths are made and by whom. He writes that “Parsons is especially interesting in his discussion of law enforcement as a claims maker when it comes to drugs”:

[L]aw enforcement has its own interests to protect. Parsons notes one particularly brazen example of self-interested panic purveying, the “ice” scare of the late 1980s. The DEA jumped all over that — until its annual budget was secured, then not so much.

This leads me to something Parsons didn’t discuss, but which I have long wondered: Why, exactly, are police considered experts on drugs? Because they arrest drug users? Police arrest domestic violence suspects, too, but that doesn’t make them experts on domestic bliss, as their own divorce and domestic assault rates indicate.

Last week, the Justice and Education Departments issued new guidelines reminding public schools that they are required by law to accept all students regardless of their or their parents’ immigration status:

The guidelines come in response to a number of reports that schools are denying undocumented immigrants entrance on questionable grounds. Undocumented parents living in Butler County, New Jersey were unable to enroll their kindergarten-age children in school because the Butler Public School District had a policy requiring parents to provide state- or county-issued photo identification, a document that requires a social security number and valid immigration status, leading the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) to file a lawsuit in March. The ACLU also found that 138 New Jersey school districts asked for documents that indicated immigration status.

Dara Lind looks at some of the ways public schools have evaded that obligation:

When Alabama passed an anti-unauthorized-immigrant bill in 2011, one provision required public school teachers to record the immigration status of their students, and submit it to the state once a year for a “report.”

The Alabama bill didn’t say that anything bad would happen to students who reported that they or their parents were unauthorized. But it didn’t have to. Hundreds of students across the state stayed home from school the day the law went into effect, as families were scared that the results of the “report” would be sent to law enforcement or federal immigration agents.

Michael White examines our still limited understanding of it:

How strong is the genetic basis for autism, anyway? Could it be that researchers are searching for genetic causes that don’t exist? Actually, no. That there is a substantial genetic contribution to autism is well-established, but it has been difficult to pin down just how large it is. Previous studies have estimated the heritability of autism to be as high as 90 percent, or as low as 38 percent. A large study published this week in the Journal of the American Medical Association by researchers at the Karolinska Instutet in Sweden have come up with the most precise estimate yet for the heritability of autism: 54 percent.

The scientists looked at autism diagnoses in a population of more than two million Swedish children born between 1982 and 2006. By looking at rates of autism diagnosis among relatives—specifically identical twins, fraternal twins, full siblings, half siblings, and cousins—the researchers determined that, at least among Swedish families, “genetic and nongenetic influences on the risk for [autism spectrum disorders] and autistic disorder were similarly important.” Strikingly, they found that shared family environmental influences “have only a negligible effect on [autism spectrum disorder] etiology”; only non-shared, individual-specific environmental influences were significant. Just what those influences are remains unknown.

Commenting on Romney’s and Santorum’s recent endorsements of a higher minimum wage, Douthat wishes moderate Republicans would fight for more economically sound conservative ways to help low-wage workers:

In fairness to the pro-minimum wage Republicans, there are various nuances here — indexing the wage to inflation, as Rick Santorum has proposed, is better than just having periodic, politically-motivated hikes, and the state-based minimum wage increases favored by some Republican politicians would have fewer perverse effects than a federal increase. And of course the minimum wage is a winning issue in the polls, and you can’t win every policy battle …

… but the case for tactical surrender would be a lot stronger if more Republican politicians, and Republican moderates especially, would first actually try to make the argument for an alternative, right-of-center suite of policies on jobs and wages. That could mean payroll tax cuts, it could mean an expanded Earned Income Tax credit or (as Marco Rubio has proposed) a wage subsidy as a replacement for the EITC, it could mean some of the American Enterprise Institute’s Michael Strain’s proposals to help the unemployed … there’s a whole range of potential policies, and policy combinations, that might deliver some of the minimum wage increase’s benefits with fewer downside risks.

Reihan is on the same page but sees why it won’t happen:

The irony is that the conservatives who might be amenable to something like Strain’s approach — let’s not risk excluding workers from the formal labor market by raising the statutory minimum wage, but let’s spend intelligently to get people back to work — are the ones who are embracing a minimum wage increase as (essentially) a proxy for some better mix of policies, or as a way of signaling that they care about the well-being of American workers and that they’re willing to use the power of government to improve their well-being. And most of the conservatives opposed to a minimum wage increase are also disinclined toward active labor market policies of the kind Strain has in mind, including an expansion of federal wage subsidies, on the grounds that such policies represent big government overreach, or that they involve spending money we don’t have. It’s no wonder that low- and middle-income voters are skeptical as to whether conservatives are doing enough to defend their interests.

Gabriel Arana, the only member of an ethnic minority on the staff of The American Prospect, examines why the newsrooms of progressive publications’ are so monochromatic and how that undercuts their social mission:

Nearly 40 percent of the country is non-white and/or Hispanic, but the number of minorities at the outlets included in this article’s tally—most of them self-identified as liberal or progressive—hovers around 10 percent. The Washington Monthly can boast 20 percent, but that’s because it only has nine staffers in total, two of whom belong to minority groups. Dissent, like the Prospect, has one.

Given the broad commitment to diversity in our corner of the publishing world, why is the track record so poor? …

[T]he primary reason magazine staffs are so white is structural. “We practice fairly specialized form of journalism and the pool of people who do it isn’t terribly large to begin with, and then you look at the group of people who are practicing at a higher level and it’s just not a diverse pool,” [The New Republic editor Franklin] Foer says.

The road that ends with a spot on staff at places like The New Republic, The Atlantic, or the Prospect is paved with privilege. It starts with unpaid internships, which serve both as training grounds and feeders to staff positions. “Most of our staff comes through our intern program,” says Harper’s editor Ellen Rosenbush. “Do we get as many applicants of color as we’d like? Probably not, but we do get them and we have hired them.” There’s a straightforward reason for the dearth of intern applications: Those who can afford to rely on mom and dad for a summer or a semester tend to be well-off and white.

Alyssa responds:

Relying on your network is a way to speed up the hiring process. You can discard résumés that do not come backed by personal recommendations, or skip reading résumés altogether and just start talking with candidates who have been identified for you.

If organizations could remove time pressure from the hiring process, that network would become less necessary. Hiring managers and editors could take the time to read résumés, cover letters and clips from a much larger pool of applicants. If someone promising does not come in during the initial wave of applications, the publication can repost or revise the job ad and reach out to more potential sources of candidates.

An interactive look at India's massive shift to the opposition party: http://t.co/s4qDlPd4o0 pic.twitter.com/ze0rc5j5ki

— Bloomberg News (@BloombergNews) May 13, 2014

Exit polls from the last phase of India’s national election predict a major victory for the opposition Bharatiya Janata Party:

A poll by C-Voter, a research group, indicated the BJP and its allies could win 289 seats in Lok Sabha, India’s lower house of Parliament, giving the coalition the majority needed to oust the incumbent Congress Party and form the nation’s next government. A poll by ABP-Nielsen predicted the BJP-led coalition would secure 281 seats, according to Reuters. If the exit polls prove to be correct — which is no guarantee — they would put BJP leader Narendra Modi in pole position to become the next Prime Minister of India.

But Heather Timmons cautions that Indian exit polls are notoriously unreliable, and the final results could look very different when they come out on Friday:

Opinion and exit polls have been so inaccurate so often in the past that not only are they not taken seriously by analysts, but many in the general population believe they are wrong on purpose in an attempt to curry favor with politicians. Election opinion polls are viewed in India as “covert instruments used by media houses in collusion with political parties for falsely predicting their fortunes with the aim of influencing the electorate in India,” said Praveen Rai, a political analyst with New Delhi’s Centre for the Study of Developing Societies.

In the last national election in 2009, for example, television network NDTV, Hindi channel Aaj Tak, and media house Zee News predicted based on opinion and exit polls that the BJP and its allies could get between 230 and 250 seats, and Congress and its allies between 176 and 205. The actual number for the BJP group was 189, and Congress and its allies got 222.

Nonetheless, the commentariat is already talking about what a Modi premiership might look like. Harsh Pant explains why the BJP chief is such a big deal:

Modi’s rise has shaken the foundations of the Indian polity. You may not like his politics, but you cannot deny his impact. He has broken old norms, challenging the Gandhis openly, talking about them disparagingly, embellishing his record, sidelining the old guard within his own party, leading a tech-savvy campaign, reaching out directly to the people, and making a strong pitch for national leadership without inhibitions. He wants to be India’s next prime minister, he is telling his countrymen and women, and he is not ashamed to ask for their support. Modi’s ambition is his greatest asset in an increasingly ambitious India.

And it’s precisely because of this that Modi’s rise matters. The liberal intelligentsia continues to sound alarm bells, some even threatening to leave the country if Modi is elected. But they fail to comprehend how radically India has changed. Modi is a product of a contemporary India where the fault-lines of religion and caste, while important, are no longer the be all and end all of politics. An absence of leadership over the last decade has led to a craving for decisive leadership. Modi fills that vacuum.

Milan Vaishnav wonders if he can meet the public’s extremely high expectations, especially regarding the economy:

Yes, signs suggest the struggling Indian economy may be bottoming out. The International Monetary Fund recently announced that it expects India’s growth rate to recover from 4.4 percent in 2013 to 5.4 percent in 2014 and 6.4 percent in 2015. Consumer price inflation has come down from 11 percent in 2013 to 8 percent this March. The rupee, which experienced a free fall last summer after the Federal Reserve’s tapering talk, has since stabilized. Thus, with or without Modi, India may be able to muddle through.

But voter expectations are far greater; surveys suggest that they are flocking toward the BJP in the hopes that Modi can generate millions of new jobs, plug India’s infrastructure gap and attract the kinds of foreign money he has lured to Gujarat. Beyond voters, Modi is also moving stock markets: On the basis of pre-election polls projecting a BJP victory, India’s Sensex has risen more than 15 percent over the past six months. In meeting these expectations, Modi faces obstacles ranging from the difficult to the impossible.

William Inboden considers how the US should deal with Modi, who has been banned from visiting the US since 2005 over his role in a massacre of Muslims in Gujarat three years earlier:

Modi may not be the leader we want for India, but he will likely be the leader we get. Additionally, on the issue of religious toleration itself, the visa ban has outlived its effectiveness. Twelve years after the Gujarat massacres, there is little evidence that Modi’s continued blacklisting will do much to protect religious freedom in India.

But lifting the visa ban alone would be insufficient. The Obama administration should couple this with a series of other specific measures that show America’s willingness to work with Modi does not diminish our concern for religious freedom. While Modi has moderated some of his rhetoric, regrettably he seems to still embrace some of the more intolerant and toxic strains of Hindu nationalism. Many of India’s Muslims and Christians in particular fear that a Modi government could bring them increased discrimination and even persecution. The Obama administration should start communicating to India now its support for religious toleration, and should start developing specific policy initiatives to support religious freedom in India.

Previous Dish on Modi here and India’s elections here.