The CEO of American Airlines, Doug Parker, said “this type of behavior has to stop.” And he’s not wrong, caveats of what happened and why notwithstanding. The allegation is that a first class passenger on a flight from JFK Airport to Santa Ana punched a flight attendant twice in the face.

Why this happened is unclear. Maybe it was that the flight attendant bumped him (and apologized), or maybe she said “let’s go, Brandon.” Maybe it was something else entirely. Whatever it was, it provides no excuse for his assault, even though punching people with whom you have a difference of opinion has become all the rage. Continue reading →

The problems with the supply chain are big and serious. And petty as well.

There’s the pop culture homage — Marilyn Monroe, Tony Soprano, The Matrix.

Then there are the festive ways to embody the zeitgeist, a socially acceptable method for donning an outfit that says “look at me, I am clever” — a meme costume, an obscure reference or a Netflix phenomenon nobody saw coming (looking at you, “Tiger King” and “Squid Game”). Continue reading →

One of the opportunities that make academic scholarship and expertise rewarding is to be in a position to testify as to the subject you spent your career studying. When a case involving voting rights as a result of a law passed in Florida, signed by Governor DeSantis, needed experts on behalf of those challenging the law, the plaintiffs turned to three professors at University of Florida.

Cool, right? Not as it turned out for either UF or the three profs. Continue reading →

How serious are we about addressing climate change? On the one hand, world leaders, save China and Russia, are meeting in Glasgow to make promises for the future they are unable to keep. On the other hand, a climate scientist was disinvited from speaking at MIT, not because he didn’t have great scholarly value on this matter of grave world importance, but because of his views on diversity and inclusion.

What are those views that have made him such a pariah, so hated, such a threat of harm to marginalized people that he could not possibly be tolerated? University of Chicago professor Dorian Abbot explains. Continue reading →

Prefatory note: Someone apparently had a rotten couple of weeks at the National School Board Association. My hacker contact “BlueDragon72” passed along this copy of a draft apology letter the NSBA planned to send to parents. After reading it you’ll see why they changed things.—CLS

Dear Parents:

By now you’ve probably heard about a troubling letter sent to Attorney General Merrick Garland by someone from our offices equating parents attending school board meetings with domestic terrorists. This letter also said “hate crimes” were being perpetrated by parents attending school board meetings. Continue reading →

It’s a slog to read because of its tediously pretentious language, but Dahlia Lithwick’s latest effort at Slate is to argue that giving “racists,” by which she means those people that everybody she knows believes are racists so no reason to belabor the point, a fair trial proves that the legal system exists to protect white supremacy.

Each of these three trials rests on the knife’s edge of an existential, real-time American conversation about race and violence—one that touches on ongoing debates about policing, guns, hate crimes, and vigilantism. But as each of the three cases progress to trial, each also reveals how every legal decision—indeed every twist and turn of legal language itself—rests on ideas about neutrality, due process, and fairness, and how these ideas always seem to buckle when confronted by real questions about race. We are asking the justice system to solve intractable racial justice problems that no other institution—not politics, not the media, and not academia—can resolve. No wonder these choices being made in courtrooms about language and law and competing claims of victimhood are going so poorly.

Continue reading →

When the push for transgender inclusion was about bathrooms, the discussion that ensued was about bathrooms, as if that was the start and end of the issue. Even then, there were other issues at play, locker rooms, showers, dorm and hotel rooms, that didn’t catch the level of interest of bathrooms. That meant people talked about stalls where people did their business, and what was the big deal, really?

The problem was never bathrooms, even if locker rooms, showers and dorms didn’t fit as nicely into the “no biggie” paradigm. Some women raised the issue of privacy, of a safe space for women, and for young girls, to clean and dress without seeing a penis, and without someone with a penis seeing them naked. The “social construct” argument was created in part to overcome the cognitive dissonance of this situation. It was a fight about nothing, about something society invented that didn’t really exist. Continue reading →

Outrage struck again, which would ordinarily make this a day like any other, but this time it was over rulings in limine by Kenosha County Circuit Court Judge Bruce Schroeder in advance of the trial of Kyle Rittenhouse.

The motion asks that the defense “be prohibited from referring to Joseph Rosenbaum, Anthony Huber or Gaige Grosskreutz* as ‘rioters,’ ‘looters,’ ‘arsonists’ or any other pejorative term. Much like this court prohibits the state from referring to anyone as a “victim,’ these terms prejudice the status of these individuals.”

The motion also asks that all parties in the case refer to Rittenhouse, the witnesses and the men shot “formally by their last names.” Throughout the case, supporters of Rittenhouse have typically referred to him as Kyle, emphasizing his youth.

Continue reading →

Zuck owns Facebook. Jack owns Twitter. Biden is president. At Reason, Robby Soave argues that the war over Section 230, reining in disinformation, hate speech, harassment and whatever other ills come at you through the ether, is really about the big question: Who should be in charge of the web?

Note as well that bowing to the Vietnamese government’s demand for greater censorship is being treated as a bad thing by some of the same outlets that are shaming Facebook for not bowing to the U.S. government’s request for greater censorship. The site’s failure to take down extremism, hate speech, and misinformation related to U.S. presidential elections and the COVID-19 pandemic is considered a grave moral failing. U.S. senators scream at Facebook for doing the bidding of other governments while engaged in the very act of trying to compel Facebook to do the bidding of the U.S. Senate. Continue reading →

There is nothing wrong with acknowledging that the land beneath our feet, upon which our homes stand and where our children play once belonged to others. Whether that’s the horror of colonization or the normal trend of humanity as reflected in how peoples have rise and fall is a different matter. Were the people from whom the last colonizers took the land the rightful “owners,” or did their ancestors take it from their predecessors? Does it matter? It does if you work at the Toronto Zoo. Continue reading →