Racial oppression
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On driving.
If you know you’re safe from the police, why not zip along? Get where you’re going faster! But these small choices feed injustice.
america’s original sin, Bill of Rights, Black Lives Matter, Car Wars, City of Los Angeles v. Lyons, Civil forfeiture, constitutional law, cops, David Harris, Douglas Husak, driving, ESPN First Take, First Amendment, Fourth Amendment, Fourth Amendment’s Death on the Highway, illegal stops, impeding traffic, Indiana Prisoners’ Writing Workshop, injustice, institutional racism, jim wallis, Justice Marshall, Justice Sotomayor, marijuana, Mark Schlereth, mass incarceration, Michelle Alexander, Midwest Pages to Prisoners Project, minority rights, overcriminalization, Pages to Prisoners, paraphernalia, police, policing, quintet of hate machines, racial injustice, racism, Rikers, Second Amendment, segregation, solitary confinement, speed limits, Stephen A. Smith, Strieff dissent, Supreme Court, The Bail Trap, The New Jim Crow, transporting alcohol, Tyrone Tomlin, unreasonable search and seizure, Utah v. Strieff, war on cops, War on Drugs, white privilege, Whren v. United States
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On preventing future crime.
Mass incarceration hurts all of us, even if we don’t know anyone locked away. It may have cost my mother-in-law her life.
A Visit from an Outsider, C. J. Chivers, Cathy O’Neil, jail, James Trent, Jason Chambers, judicial discretion, Leviathan, Lori Milks, mass incarceration, Michael Mueller-Smith, New Yorker, prison, prosecutorial discretion, PTSD, randomized study, recidivism, rehabilitation, Sam Siatta, Selma, sentencing reform, state violence, The Fighter, Thomas Hobbes, Weapons of Math Destruction
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On wasted ingenuity.
Everyone strives, but we force some to waste their efforts reinventing the wheel – or the water heater, or the piano, or…
Albany, Attica, automation, Blood in the Water, capitalism, childhood trauma, criminal justice, Deirdre N McCloskey, Demetrius Cunningham, economics, Growth Not Forced Equality Saves the Poor, Heather Anne Thompson, imprisonment, injustice, jail, Learning to Hear on a Cardboard Piano, Lori Milks, New Yorker, one sheet per day, poverty, prison, prison writing, punishment, punitive justice
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On human uniqueness and invasive species.
On evolutionary timescales, we are a slow-moving meaty wrecking ball. And our spread, apparently, resembles that of any other invasive species.
Adolph Lyons, animal cognition, animal teaching, Black Lives Matter, brain size, cooked food, excessive force, Homo erectus, Homo sapiens, homogenizing brains, human evolution, human extinctions, human migration, human migratory patterns, invasive species, Lyons v. Los Angeles, McCleskey v. Kemp, Neanderthal, neural circuitry, number of neurons in human brain, origin of knowledge, overcrowding, overpopulation, police chokeholds, quintet of hate machines, r-type population growth, racial injustice, sexual dimorphism, Stanford Graduate School of Education, starfish evolution, starvation, supreme court nomination, Suzana Herculano-Houzel, the plow brings misogyny, Trump supreme court appointment, u.s. supreme court
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On Charles Foster’s ‘Being a Beast’ and battling the empathy gap.
If Charles Foster can learn, & care, what it’s like to be a badger, all citizens should be able to empathize with the experience of Homo sapiens from other ethnic backgrounds.
agricultural revolution, all lives matter, Being a Beast, Black Lives Matter, brains, Charles Foster, civil forfieture, common ancestors, Donald Trump, empathy, empathy gap, evolution, family first, faulty roadside drug tests, Hungary, incarceration crisis, injustice, Jeneen Interlandi, jeremy betham, John Oliver, living as a badger, natural selection, Neil Gaiman, neurological basis of empathy, Peter Singer, power racing, psychology, reading fiction develops empathy, river otters, Roma, swift, The View from the Cheap Seats, tofu, utilitarianism, vegan, vegetarian
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On Colson Whitehead’s ‘The Underground Railroad.’
In Colson Whitehead’s new speculative fiction, he condenses a century of racial injustice into a single fugitive’s journey. I hope readers realize the reality was even worse, that some of these crimes spanned the century and reverberate still.
alternate history, animal welfare, Blood at the Root, Carol Anderson, Colson Whitehead, curses, Douglas Blackmon, emancipation, evil, Forsyth County, fugitive slave act, graduate school, Harriet Washington, incarceration crisis, Lewis Hyde, Medical Apartheid, Michelle Alexander, oppression, Patrick Phillips, police brutality, review of The Underground Railroad, science fiction, slavery, Slavery By Another Name, speculative fiction, Stanford, The Gift, The New Jim Crow, The Underground Railroad, Thirteenth Amendment, trust, Tuskegee Syphilis Study, vegan, vegetarian, whose pain matters, witchcraft
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On inadvertent racism.
Just because you didn’t realize your actions were unkind doesn’t excuse you from blame. I’m still teaching my 2 year old this, but the Supreme Court should know better.
america’s original sin, arrest records misstate criminality, bad initial data perpetuates bad outcomes, bad supreme court rulings, elizabeth hinton, fewer pokestops in minority neighborhoods, flip phones, from the war on poverty to the war on crime, jim wallis, mobiles, niantic, pokemon go, race, racial injustice, social jutice, u.s. supreme court, war on poverty to the war on the poor, white privilege
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On attending a Black Lives Matter rally with dreadlocks.
I’m sorry if my appearance caused pain… but *not* attending would’ve caused even more harm.
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On killer cops and killer prosecutors.
At Bloomington’s Black Lives Matter rally (organized by high school students!), I walked by an older man holding a Sharpied sign with “START PROSECUTING KILLER COPS.” I nodded at him and smiled. My daughter, riding on my chest in a giraffe-patterned carrier, craned her neck to see what I was smiling about, then tucked her…
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On the shifting sands of family, specifically: whose counts?
*These* heroin users have families? How is that any different from the addicts who came before?
addiction, children, developmental biology, drug trade, drug users have families too, family, Francis Slay, Gangster Warlords, graduate school, heroin, incarceration crisis, Ioan Grillo, Lean In, life without law enforcement, mass incarceration, mouse lemur, opiates, painkillers, racism, rehab instead of prison, treatment instead of prison, unethical hiring practices, violence in St. Louis, War on Drugs, working mothers
Frank Brown Cloud 