Furtive Movement.
For your Sunday entertainment – a brief look through the wonderful land of racial profiling in the liberal stronghold that is New York City; courtesy of the fantasically horrible Twitter feed Stop and Frisk. 01/07/11: Police stop a 17-year-old in Queens, citing "casing a victim or location." No weapon is found. — Stop and Frisk [...]
Atheist Misogyny.
It’s a dreary week through and through here in New York City. The sun hasn’t come out since May. My favorite baseball team, the Mets, are about two losses away from having the words ‘professional sports club’ stricken from their company letterhead. And since Thursday, I’ve been nursing a charred right (and writing) hand as [...]
Fat Chance.
Oh, the internet. How immensely useful at exposing people’s bigotries and idiocies you’ve become. The speed of gratification that comes with pressing an ‘enter’ key mixed with the option of anonymity makes for an alluring and dangerous draw. Even if you’re not anonymous at all! Even if you’re actually an associate professor at the University [...]
A Brick Wall.
Cowardly doesn’t quite cover it. Last week a colleague of mine, Boston journalist Doug Mesner, reported on Examiner.com breaking information that the Castlewood Treatment Center, an eating disorder clinic recently accused of malpractice, had let go of two of its founders, Mark Schwartz and Lori Galperin. News that I covered myself just a day earlier. [...]
Loose Ends: The Castlewood Cases Take an Unexpected Turn.
As originally posted on Dysgenics, an online blog focused on pseudoscientific claims made in the mental health profession. Every day the search results trickle in. No more than a few at a time, but there they are, staring at me from the bone white screen of the control panel. ‘Mark Schwartz’ ‘Lori Galperin’ ‘Castlewood’ Last [...]
FIRE Alarm.
Meant to get to this earlier last week but had a stumble of writer’s block. If there’s one utterly important thing to learn from your four-ish years of college, it’s this: Bitches Be Crazy. Least that’s the takeaway from a recent satire – and I use that word as loosely as the last leaf on [...]
Reading The Comments.
For anyone tuning into the (U.S.) skeptical world lately, the big event this weekend was the second annual Women In Secularism conference held in Washington D.C. From discussions of race and gender in the secular community to talks on how to criticize religions like Islam without lending yourself to bigotry, it’s fair to say the [...]
Stopped.
Do you know what you call it when you look at a room or social gathering and notice the one young Hispanic man there? Personally, I call it Monday. Or Tuesday. Or Wednesda– you get the point. In no simpler terms, I’m the token. In high school, in college, in my relationships, and in nearly [...]
Oddly Dressed.
Apparently this is ‘Shamelessly Exploitative Journalism’ week. That right there was the original April 29th headline of Ohio paper,The Plain Dealer, describing the likely murder of a 20-year-old transgendered woman named Cemia Dove in Olmsted Township. Not that you’d be able to guess that, seeing as the writer, John Caniglia, originally stopped every other sentence [...]
Pagan Pervert
Oh, the New York Post. The NYC equivalent of the Daily Mail, the Wall St. Journal’s trashy cousin, and least preferred wrapping paper of salmon everywhere. For a sample of their journalistic standards, you’ll want to turn to just two weeks ago, when they occupied themselves by getting nearly everything wrong about the Boston bombings, [...]