Denis Hamill writes in the Daily News: For all the criticism the cops are taking these days for the out of control stop-and-frisks, for the questionable shooting of Ramarley Graham in the Bronx, let’s take a deep breath and not lose track of the vital, life-risking work these guys do every day in this big…
Read more
There are a lot of these “what people think I do” versus “what I do” gags going around. Some are pretty funny. Here’s one on policing. The intellectual in me thinks of the Rashomon Effect. The kid in me just giggles at seeing Lou Costello in a police uniform. [thanks to Stef the Greek] [Hey…
Read more
Well the bastards burnt down my favorite movie theater in Athens. Perhaps in the big picture of cultural destruction, it doesn’t rank up there with the destruction of the Buddhas of Bamiyan, but man, those red seats were comfy. Supposedly the theater will be rebuilt. (And supposedly a train will once again connect Athens and…
Read more
Not me. But my father. And he died in 2008. Linda Hirshman seems to have a bone or two to pick. She writes in Salon.com: If any evidence of this [“warfare is the business of heterosexual men, the penetrators”] agenda were needed, the same person who created and defended the dreaded “don’t ask, don’t tell”…
Read more
Who left the hospital today after being shot in the head. He too, was just doing his job.
An officer, who heard over his radio that a drug suspect was armed with a gun, kicks down the door of his apartment, finds the suspect hiding in the bathroom (probably trying to flush weed down the toilet), thinks the suspect is going for his gun, and shoots and kills the suspect. The problem is…
Read more
This isn’t about policing in the old days. It’s about me. Or more specifically, my old high-school newspaper, the Evanstonian, in the late 1980s. I was just cleaning house (which, admittedly, is a rare activity) and stumbled across my old bound collection of Evanstonians. Sara Agahi (nee Rubin), my former student editor (before I became…
Read more
And not just reports. Monica Davey writes an interesting story in the New York Times.
A quick shout-out to Ethical Imperialism: Institutional Review Boards and the Social Sciences, 1965-2009. It’s exactly what it says it is. And it does it well. It’s a book about the IRB. If you don’t know what an IRB is, it’s not your fault, it just means you haven’t done research at a university. (Trust…
Read more
So after an email correspondence with an editor at The New Yorker, they responded at length and denied pretty much everything: “The particular facts and comparisons you cite…don’t seem specific to your work.” Really? I beg to differ. But what can I do? I still think Adam Gopnik needed to cite me in the magazine.…
Read more