It’s one thing for Aaron Sorkin to alter probably the most important American novel ever written so he could put on a play of woke tropes that would have made Harper Lee cry if it didn’t kill her. But he’s now putting his not-insignificant skill at manipulating the unwary toward undermining the First Amendment in the name of his “truth.”

By the gimmick of a faux open letter to Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg, published in the New York Times, Sorkin spins a curiously hypocritical yarn.

It was hard not to feel the irony while I was reading excerpts from your recent speech at Georgetown University, in which you defended — on free speech grounds — Facebook’s practice of posting demonstrably false ads from political candidates. I admire your deep belief in free speech. I get a lot of use out of the First Amendment. Most important, it’s a bedrock of our democracy and it needs to be kept strong.

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You remember Emma Sulkowicz, right? Right? RIGHT?!? After her performance art of mattress carrying, using false accusations against Paul Nungesser to carry herself to fame and momentary importance, she flailed around with bad porn and odd naked subway pics, but aside from giggling and ridicule, realized she peaked at college and might spend the rest of her life looking back at her glory days of walking around with a mattress.

Her time as icon of the victimhood in her past, and her efforts to establish herself as something other than an uninteresting pseudo-artist, she needed to reinvent herself. And so she did.

Five years ago, while a student at Columbia, Sulkowicz lugged a dorm-issue, extra-long twin mattress around campus for as long as she had to attend school with her alleged rapist. This was Mattress Performance (Carry That Weight), a globally viral art piece that made visible the weight of campus sexual assault. It transformed Sulkowicz into an icon. Since then, her artworks have regularly roused the internet: a video of her reenacting her assault, a bondage performance at the Whitney that doubled as institutional critique. This past spring, she tweeted an image that was perhaps even more provocative: a photo of her grinning alongside two of her libertarian critics — not performance art, she insists, but a byproduct of her new curiosity about other views.

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There is little doubt that Harvard Law professor Jeannie Suk Gersen has the chops. Not only is she a renowned scholar, but she’s written extensively and boldly about the failures of Title IX due process. And the case is before the First Circuit Court of Appeals, Boston’s federal appellate court, where she’s right at home. To be blunt, Gersen is a brilliant choice of representation for the appellee in Doe v. Boston College, scheduled for oral argument in less than a week.

Why then did Judge David Barron unceremoniously toss her from the case?

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At the outset, when Mary Anne Franks was first trying to establish revenge porn as a crime and denying to anyone who would listen that it didn’t violate the First Amendment, there was one hurdle even she couldn’t ignore. Mind you, she was too petty a person to admit she was wrong, but she quietly changed course to include a carve out for newsworthiness, as she was told and vehemently denied, from Day 1, was a fundamental flaw with her cries.

First term congresswoman Katie Hill, 32, resigned following the publication of photographs of, among other things, her engaging in a sexual relations with a 24-year-old staffer. What these say about her,and her decision to resign, is for others to worry about. But the cry immediately rose across the internet that Hill was a victim of revenge porn.

From the usual coterie of crazies, Jessica Valenti somehow managed to blame it on Harvey Weinstein. Continue reading →

In a scathing op-ed, professor emeritus at the University of Kent, Frank Furedi, ripped the decision by the Oxford student union to replace applause with “jazz hands.”

A new nadir was reached last week with reports that Oxford University Students Union is to replace clapping with ‘jazz hands’, where participants signal approval by silently waving both hands at the sides of their bodies, palms facing outwards.

The purported justification for this is to avoid offending those who are upset by loud noise.

In the words of the student union’s welfare and equal opportunities officer: ‘The policy was proposed to encourage the use of British Sign Language clapping to make events more accessible and inclusive for all, including people who suffer from anxiety.’

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It’s all there for the finding. All we have to do is look. It seems so obvious to so many, particularly those with an abiding faith in the power of algorithms to accomplish the task of sifting through millions of exchanges online for key words that could save lives, unearth crimes, help people. Who doesn’t want to help people?

Dozens of female high school students gathered at Maxar Technologies on Friday for an event to encourage them to further their interests and capabilities in STEM. The keynote speaker at the American Heart Association’s “Bring Stem To Life” event was 18-year-old Sherya Nallapati, a science, technology, engineering and math student who is working on a technology that scans social media profiles for potential mass shooting threats.

Getting girls interested in STEM is a goal on its own.  It’s an oddity, since the majority of college students are female, they can major in science or math if they so choose and to the extent the rationalization is that guys in STEM are unwelcoming to them (as if being made to feel special and welcome is the primary criterion for what one studies for their future career), they could seize control of STEM majors by their sheer numbers and leave the nasty male geeks in the dust. But anything involving women in STEM gets extra attention. Continue reading →

An op-ed in the New York Times has caught fire because it’s, well, completely nuts. Two 17-year-old boys of Indian descent are alleged to have engaged in some truly awful conduct toward four black middle school girls, including urinating on one of them. What this indicates, beyond two kids engaged in bad behavior, is unclear to any rational person. But Nell Irvin Painter isn’t such a person, so naturally she was given real estate in the Times.

While it’s tempting to see the reported ethnicity of the boys suspected in the assault as complicating the story and raising questions about whether the assault should be thought of as racist, I look at it through a different lens. Instead of asking what the boys’ reported racial identity tells us about the nature of the attack, we should see the boys as enacting American whiteness through anti-black assault in a very traditional way. In doing so, the assailants are demonstrating how race is a social construct that people make through their actions.

Don’t try. You’ll just hurt yourself. Nothing about this paragraph makes any logical sense, and Painter’s position as a professor at Princeton suggests that you might want to send your children elsewhere if they’re into history. Continue reading →

It probably seemed like a foolproof idea in 1955, and it worked exceptionally well for most of Mark Hernandez Chacon’s 64 years. Except that may not be his name, and he has no idea how old he is because the great idea in 1955 turned out not to be so great in 2017.

All because Eva Hernandez Chacon, who raised him as her son, gave him the birth certificate of her child who died at just 8 days old. When authorities discovered that fact more than 60 years later, it wasn’t long before they came knocking — loudly and early in the morning — at his door.

By comparing databases of death certificates with social security, since technology exists today that was unthinkable back then, it became clear that his Chacon’s “mother” made him her child and gave him the birth certificate of a child who died to use for all purposes. Whoever he was before, he was now Mark Hernandez Chacon. Except Mark Hernandez Chacon died eight days after he was born. Except Mark Hernandez Chacon lived a full life too. Continue reading →

When I decided to put a Becker Europa AM/FM cassette radio in the Healey, I realized I was compromising. It was a 1980s radio going into a 1960s car. Most people wouldn’t realize that it was inauthentic, but I did. For someone who went to great pains to restore the car to its original condition, it was a very hard choice.

But I wanted to be able to listen to music, to play the great many cassette tapes I recorded back in college when music was still good, and the radios from the 60s, AM only, were not going to cut it. So I closed my eyes, held my breath, and compromised by getting a Becker Europa 599.

The problem with buying an old radio is that it might not function as it did when new, so I sent mine off to Becker AutoSound in New Jersey for a clean and lube when it arrived in 2003. And, having no particular memory of anything concerning, it came back and worked fine. Into the Healey it went, and old songs came out of it. Continue reading →

To its credit, the New York Times published an op-ed by Indiana University law prof Steve Sanders. The subtitle should have sufficed, as the content was so uncontroversial as to require nothing more to be said.

Those College Students Who Used the N-Word Shouldn’t Have Been Arrested

They were guilty of vulgarity and ignorance, but “ridicule” is not a crime.

Nevertheless, more had to be written or it wouldn’t have made the cut as an op-ed, so Sanders explained. Continue reading →