In Matt Bird’s book, The Secrets of Story: Innovative Tools for Perfecting Your Fiction and Captivating Readers, there is a part called “The Poisonous Cindarella Story.”* It’s sad, pathetic and illuminating.

Up until that week, I was still clinging to my personal version of the Cinderella story: I was convinced I could go to a top MFA program, impress my professors, get whisked into a job in the industry, start at the top by selling a show to HBO, and begin a life of fame, fortune, and acclaim. So far, everything had seemed to work out (CAA liked the new intros, after all), but I began to feel a sense of dread: This was all an illusion. I didn’t really “have it” yet.

Looking back, this was the time I began to see that Columbia had been run like a fantasy camp. We were encouraged to dabble in everything and specialize in nothing, to follow our muse wherever it led us, content in the knowledge that we were in a “safe space.” We got tons of praise and very little criticism. Continue reading →

Ed. Note: I offered my friend and commenter Jake the opportunity to speak his mind and write a post. He took me up on it. Here it is.

Recently, our host opined the 2017 Women’s March was cool, but then wondered: Why? However, as I will demonstrate, the content of his post fails to address the question of why by ignoring the obvious answer, substituting the opinions of individuals for the purpose of the march, and changing the question. The net effect of all this pretense leaves me thinking: Cool story bro, but why?

As for why the 2017 Women’s March took place, a simple trip to their website reveals a clear and concise mission statement.

The mission of Women’s March is to harness the political power of diverse women and their communities to create transformative social change. Women’s March is a women-led movement providing intersectional education on a diverse range of issues and creating entry points for new grassroots activists & organizers to engage in their local communities through trainings, outreach programs and events. Women’s March is committed to dismantling systems of oppression through nonviolent resistance and building inclusive structures guided by self-determination, dignity and respect.

Continue reading →

The most common “solution” to improper police practices is better training. And, indeed, better training, such as de-escalation rather than resorting to force, would certainly be a positive step. But what’s rarely noted is that there’s training, and there’s “training,” where the wizened old cop teaches the rookie how it’s “really” done.

A Louisville Metro Police recruit received some impromptu training from then-assistant police chief of Prospect, Todd Shaw.

Shaw served with LMPD for more than 20 years before joining the Prospect department in 2012. In one of the Facebook messages, the LMPD recruit asked Shaw what to do in a scenario in which he catches three juveniles smoking marijuana.

The question was part of a paper the recruit was writing about “the right thing to do,” according to O’Connell’s letter. Continue reading →

The simpleton’s retort is that the crazies on the right, the creationists, believe Genesis is a history book. Fossils? God planted them there to test us. And if you believe in evolution, you failed, sucker! This is the cover for their counterparts on the left, who love science, and aren’t at all blinded by religious ferver, but only so long as it confirms their bias as well.

One thing that makes the Left less appealing than it used to be is its overt resistance to scientific findings that supposedly go against the liberal narrative. For example, any suggestion that there might be evolutionary differences between human ethnic groups, or between men and women, is not only denied, but has become so taboo that merely to bring up these subjects risks opprobrium from the Left. Evolutionary psychology and studies of “race” have been demonized by many to the extent that these endeavors are sometimes deemed worthless.

Likewise, the Left obdurately resists any notion that there are evolved differences between the behavior, abilities, or preferences of men and women. Cordelia Fine, for example, has made this her goal, and while her two books on the subject are good in parts, they’re also deeply flawed in some of their critiques. For instance, males are larger and stronger than females, and it’s hard to explain this without invoking sexual selection. And if sexual selection on the human body caused dimorphism in morphology, isn’t it reasonable to expect it to have caused differences in behavior and brains— just the kind of differences that produce behaviors we see in human society?

Continue reading →

A year ago, pussy hats were all the rage. They have since become iconic, and so the New York Times asked women where  they are now.

Nicole Cesare of Philadelphia stashes hers in a “go bag” along with pens, a notebook and snacks in case she needs to rush to a protest. Whitney Logan of Fairway, Kan., puts hers on when she makes phone calls to her senators and representatives: “It gives me courage,” she said. Emily Kilbourn, in Bethlehem, Connecticut, wears hers when she’s going somewhere she knows she’ll run into conservatives: “Amazing what a smile, wave, and a tip of the pussy hat will do!”

Amazing, indeed. What will it do? She doesn’t say. But yesterday, women marched again. It was glorious, if the faces of marchers are any reflection. Continue reading →

Algorithms were going to save us, make our system more fair, more precise, more . . . real. Even bad algorithms were better than no algorithms, leaving it up to biased, if minimally competent, judges to make decisions they were incapable of making. Algorithms. Yeah, that’s the ticket.

There were, of course, some Luddites who didn’t appreciate the power of numbers, complained that algorithms would never be capable of taking into account the particulars of every defendant’s world. They would homogenize decision-making, reduce people to caricatures and, ultimately, end up replacing human bias with machine bias. We would feel more science-y about the law, but it would do nothing more than provide algorithmic cover for the same shallow bias it replaced.

For example, when ProPublica examined computer-generated risk scores in Broward County, Fla., in 2016, it found that black defendants were substantially more likely than whites to be rated a high risk of committing a violent crime if released. Even among defendants who ultimately were not re-arrested, blacks were more likely than whites to be deemed risky. These results elicited a visceral sense of injustice and prompted a chorus of warnings about the dangers of artificial intelligence.

Continue reading →

Try it. Screw the old lawyers who harp on things like law and ethics to keep young lawyers down. It’s a new world, and the only thing that matters is your passion. So Ian James Christensen decided to follow his dreams.

[I]n 2013, less than three months after being admitted to The Florida Bar, Respondent founded IJC Law Group, P.A., and began offering legal services and advice to clients. At the time, Respondent had no training in the area of medical marijuana. Six months later, Respondent formed Health Law Services (HLS), and five months after that, incorporated Cannabinoid Therapy Institute (CTI). Respondent listed IJC Law Group, P.A., as CTI’s registered agent and nonlawyer Christopher Ralph—a self-professed expert in the medical marijuana industry—  represented himself as CTI’s director. Ralph was also the “Legal Administrator and Consultant” for HLS.

Weed lawyer. Create a medical marijuana ecosystem, from medical necessity to “Official Legal Certification,” so his client could show any police officer that he wasn’t just a pothead, but a certified medical marijuana user. Cutting edge stuff, and all the gurus said young lawyers should seize the world and make it their own. Christensen was owning it. Continue reading →

In the early 1990s, AOL disks were ubiquitous. They had two huge virtues. They were free and they were the internet. AOL owned it. Its competitors, Compuserve, Prodigy and Netscape, couldn’t touch it. The reason was simple. AOL was where the people were.

To get online, one opened the AOL desktop program by typing aol.exe at the C:/ prompt (yes, it was DOS-based back then, before Windows 95 ruined everything) and dialed it in, listening to the painful tones of modems connecting in the hope that you would find an access line that wasn’t overwhelmed. And if so, boom, you were part of the internet.

Last night, just after 9 p.m., my AOL desktop died. About a month ago, a popup announced it would be end-of-lifed, but it didn’t hit home until last night, when a message announced that the AOL desktop was no longer supported, and automatically signed off. Forever. Continue reading →

Word spread of a letter from mommy to her darling baby boy, written by Liz Corsini.

Dear Son,

You are coming of age during an exciting era; gender norms redefined, the proud
expression of pro-nouns, marriage equality, and the visible ongoing fight for racial
equality. There is no shortage of injustice and the #MeToo movement is now leading
the charge against arguably the most pressing public health crisis of our time, gender
violence. #MeToo is raising the voices of empowered survivors of sexual harassment
and violence. These voices are speaking directly to you my son. Continue reading →

The blind squirrel is alive and well in Florida, as the Bar Association gets one right.

A well-meaning attempt to strengthen protections against bullying in the legal profession may have gone too far, at least according to the Board of Governors.

This fall, the Rules Committee voted 7-0 to add guidance that subdivision (d)’s prohibition applies to “bullying and intimidating other lawyers,” in the comment to the Misconduct Rule (4-8.4). The proposal grew out of a recommendation by the Florida Bar Special Committee on Gender Bias.

Of course they have a special committee on gender bias, and what would you expect such a special committee to do? The rule they sought to change is 4-8.4(d), which makes it misconduct to: Continue reading →