The jury returned its verdict, guilty on five of six counts including sex trafficking. Ghislaine Maxwell no longer wears the presumption of innocence. But her conviction was fairly unusual. It wasn’t, mostly, about what she did for herself, but what she did for Jeffrey Epstein. She was his proxy to the public. To the jury, the only person before them was Maxwell, and they presumably did their job in good faith.

The allegations against Maxwell were unusual as well. Most are not wealthy, have houses around the world and fly to them in private jets. Most do not hobnob with the rich, famous and Dersh. Most do not have a socialite facilitating a stream of young women for sexual pleasure. Does that make the Maxwell conviction a one-off case, or will she become the face of enablers everywhere who, like Maxwell, can be blamed? Continue reading →

Basic compensation theory is that an employer must pay the wage necessary to get the staff needed to competently perform the work required. In other words, if you have a job and not enough qualified people are willing to take it, you’re not paying enough. Easy.

But there is another consideration having nothing to do with this theory. Are the wages sufficient for an employee to live? Most employers want their employees to be satisfied, if not happy, and to be able to enjoy at least the basic accoutrements of life. Whether happy employees are better or more productive is an open question. Continue reading →

No one suggests that the death, by a bullet fired by an LA police officer at 24-year-old Daniel Elena Lopez that missed, was anything other than a tragedy. Valentina Orellana-Peralta, a 14-year-old with her mother in a dressing room on the other side of the wall, was struck by the cop’s bullet. A child died while trying on quinceañera dresses with her mother. A tragedy.

When the story broke, there was significant criticism for the passive voice headlines used to describe this tragedy, but as much as the exonerative tense typically buried in the phrase “police-involved shooting” manages to conceal rather than reveal, the question here wasn’t bad journalistic practices, but that another cop shot and killed another innocent person. Continue reading →

Whether this is true is unknown, but it would come as no surprise that Senator Joe Manchin will have enough Bowmore 18 in his chambers to cover scotch o’clock for at least another term, courtesy of his fellow Democrats. Joe’s doing the dirty work, because he can as the voters of West Virginia will not hold it against him, that needs to be done and they can’t do without electoral issues, if not disaster.

The other senators aren’t stupid, but know something their constituents don’t. The contents of the peculiarly-named Build Back Better bill, which apparently consists of a few glorious bullet points about wonderful things that no one could possibly be against. Except Manchin, the “50th” Democrat, which now makes him a racist. Continue reading →

Holistic Harvard sounds nice, provided holistic means something good and Harvard isn’t just a legacy institution free-riding on its history of producing our future leaders. But what to make of its decision to make standardized testing optional?

“Test optional” was a fine policy for the topsy-turvy world of the pandemic, when there were lots of idiosyncratic reasons a student might not submit a score, from canceled tests to an immunocompromised parent or sibling. But as things return to normal, it’s unlikely that many kids with top scores will resist the Hobbesian competitive pressures to submit them. There will of course be exceptions — free spirits with ideological qualms about the tests and first-generation applicants who didn’t know to take them. But for many applicants, omitting test scores will be a strategic decision, presumably to play downscores significantly lower than the school’s average.

Continue reading →

An SJ tradition. Merry Christmas and thank you all for the gift of your time and attention.

When the kids are little, we know them. We wipe them, top and bottom, and hold them when they hurt. But they grow up and grow away. We know it. We try to know them as they know themselves, but it’s not really possible to stop seeing them through our parent eyes, hard as we try. Still we try, and too often, fall short. Perhaps the most concrete measure of our inability to see them as they see themselves are the gifts we get them.

These gifts lay embarrassingly bare the dissonance between the giver’s outdated or delusional perception of you and the regrettable reality of you. They make you feel resentful, and ashamed of feeling resentful. You’re afflicted with a terrible pity for these unwanted objects and end up either keeping them in a closet or drawer for decades, or else guiltily returning or regifting them, like leaving a newborn on a doorstep. Continue reading →

Jesse Custer was never one to celebrate Christmas. This year, however, Tulip made a convincing case The Grassy Knoll Pub should be decorated in a festive manner to attract “holiday traffic.”

So one December morning, Christmas lights replaced the yarn on the conspiracy theory boards. At one end of the bar sat a plastic replica of Charlie Brown’s Christmas tree. A Santa hat adorned the alien head on one wall. Continue reading →

We were “clicking” through Netflix and happened on a “comedy” special by some guy named “Bo.” My son stopped and said, “let’s watch this.” Done mostly in song, it started funny, if dark, and then spiraled from there into misery, mental illness and hopelessness.

We talked afterward. What, I asked, was this obsessive embrace of misery? We batted around some theories, from macro misery to micro, but ultimately decided that while most young people don’t want to be miserable, it’s the only guaranteed way not to offend, be vulnerable to destruction and receive some validation that they aren’t worthless failures in a world where everything is “literally” horrible. How can one be happy and hopeful in this kind of world? Continue reading →

The sentence, pretty notorious now, was long enough to shock a lot of people out of complacency. 110 years. Not life. Not four lifetimes. 110 years. That was the sentence imposed upon Rogel Aguilera-Mederos, a truck driver who drove far too fast until he came upon traffic stopped in front of him, whereupon his brakes failed. He could have driven off the highway but made the wrong call. It ended in a fiery crash and four entirely innocent people dead.

For this, the defendant was sentenced to 110 years, with even the judge stating that it was not the sentence he would want to impose. But given the charges, given that he went to trial and was convicted, given the mandatory nature of the sentencing law, both in terms of years and that the sentences be consecutive rather than concurrent, there was no other option, Continue reading →