Much as the meaning of the word “rape” has been so diluted as to reduce many accusations into excuses, that doesn’t mean rape doesn’t happen. And when it does, and it does, it is a heinous offense that compels investigation and prosecution. But what if a prosecutor refuses to pursue it? If you’re in Kansas, there is an alternative.

For three years, the local prosecutor has resolutely refused to make [Madison Smith’s] case: that what began as consensual sex in a college dorm room became a rape, and that she was unable to say “stop” because her classmate was strangling her.

It’s not that the local prosecutor ultimately did nothing. He eventually pursued a charge of felony aggravated battery and the defendant was convicted. But that wasn’t enough. That wasn’t rape. Continue reading →

Is it because the Paper of Record, The Gray Lady, The New York Times, doesn’t think what’s happening with Israel and the Palestinians is newsworthy? That can’t be, since that’s at the top of the front page, prime real estate for the paper whose slogan is “all the news that fits we print.”

How then is it possible that there was no mention of what happened in Los Angeles?

An attack on diners outside a sushi restaurant by people shouting slogans against Israel is being investigated by Los Angeles police as an antisemitic hate crime.

Continue reading →

She has no doctoral degree. She has no scholarship. She has no pedagogical experience to speak of. What she does have is a Pulitzer Prize and a MacArthur Genius grant, which is a pretty big deal, but not particularly relevant to academia. So why was the “creater” of the 1619 Project at the New York Times, Nikole Hannah-Jones, not given tenure by the University of North Carolina?

This raised some serious questions.

Nearly 40 faculty members from the journalism school signed an online statement on Wednesday calling for the decision to be reversed, saying the failure to grant tenure to Ms. Hannah-Jones “unfairly moves the goal posts and violates longstanding norms and established processes.” The statement added, “This failure is especially disheartening because it occurred despite the support for Hannah-Jones’s appointment as a full professor with tenure by the Hussman dean, Hussman faculty and university.”

Continue reading →

It can’t be easy to be an openly gay cop. As much as it has become so ordinary otherwise that being gay is only slightly more unusual than having red hair, and usually far less noticeable, cop culture tends to run a decade or five behind the rest of society, even if they’re otherwise entirely tolerant when the uniform comes off. Cops will no doubt tell me this is totally false and they’re just like anyone else.

New York has had a spectacular Gay Pride parade for decades now. It’s a lot like the St. Patrick’s Day parade, except without bagpipes, fewer empty Guinness cans in the gutter and better looking marchers. It started after the Stonewall Riots of 1969, when being gay wasn’t merely considered sick and disgusting, but criminal. Continue reading →

The next battle in the culture war has broken out. It’s not about race or gender, but it does involve two phobias. The first is fear of COVID, which drives some to take personal precautions because that’s their choice.

Whenever Joe Glickman heads out for groceries, he places an N95 mask over his face and tugs a cloth mask on top of it. He then pulls on a pair of goggles.

He has used this safety protocol for the past 14 months. It did not change after he contracted the coronavirus last November. It didn’t budge when, earlier this month, he became fully vaccinated. And even though President Biden said on Thursday that fully vaccinated people do not have to wear a mask, Mr. Glickman said he planned to stay the course. Continue reading →

When I first learned that Louisiana and Oregon allowed juries to return non-unanimous verdicts of guilty, I was shocked. It seemed inconceivable. After all, what was the point of a jury of twelve good men and true if not to reach agreement? It was simply so ingrained in my head that the alternative, a verdict of 11 and one or ten and two seemed ridiculous. Obviously not.

The Sixth Amendment to the United States Constitution states that a defendant is entitled to an impartial jury. We refer to it as a jury of one’s peers, although that language appears nowhere in the amendment. Nor does it say that the verdict of that impartial jury must be unanimous. But the federal government required jury unanimity. These, however, were states, and states are entitled to make their own rules of criminal procedure unless the Supreme Court holds that the constraints of the federal Constitution applies to them as well. Continue reading →

They encircled him, dressed in their former Jeopardy! contestants’ robes. They pointed their index finger at him and began to chant: Sinner, sinner, sinner.

They possessed a breadth of knowledge, state capitals and mountain ranges, song lyrics and literary references. And they believed with all their heart and soul that they were the good ones, which made their cause not merely just, but beyond reproach. Continue reading →

Some very smart people, and Harvard prawf Cass Sunstein, offer a counterpoint to our current obsession with bias, and tacitly with adoration of empiricism. They call it “noise.”

Society has devoted a lot of attention to the problem of bias — and rightly so. But when it comes to mistaken judgments and unfortunate decisions, there is another type of error that attracts far less attention: noise.

To see the difference between bias and noise, consider your bathroom scale. If on average the readings it gives are too high (or too low), the scale is biased. If it shows different readings when you step on it several times in quick succession, the scale is noisy. (Cheap scales are likely to be both biased and noisy.) While bias is the average of errors, noise is their variability.

Continue reading →

You’re probably a big fan of Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company, right? What, the name isn’t familiar? But its microchips are, without which a great many of your devices would cease to function. Sure, we have Intel, but TSMC makes smaller, more complex microchips, and far more of them. Maybe you’ve never heard of the name, but you can’t live without them.

The supply chain for cutting-edge chips like those made by Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company is no better. Producing the newest five- or seven-nanometer chip requires billions of dollars in investment in specialized factories and a highly skilled labor force. As a result, there are relatively few facilities that make them. If one of these factories goes offline, as the Samsung operation in Austin, Texas, did for weeks after the Texas grid failure, there might be no other factory able to step in.

Continue reading →

It was soon after my son graduated from college and moved out west to work in a start-up where the second round before Y Combinator was mere months away, and they weren’t ready with a working prototype. It was exciting and heady to be involved in a start up, even if I thought the idea they were working on was dumb. After all, a lot of dumb ideas seemed to succeed, even if only for the purpose of being bought out later and killed.

Millions were being thrown at kids with dreams and no life or management skills. and my son was going to be Employee 1 at a start up run by and a tech-smart narcissistic child who was simultaneously unpleasant and irresponsible. But my son was excited at the prospect of creating something that never existed, and why not? That was when I read Antonio (@antoniogm) García Martínez’s book Chaos Monkeys. Continue reading →