When you stick a needle in your eye, the immediate need is to stop the blood and eyeball goo from gushing out.* But once you’ve stopped the bleeding, you need to give some thought to not sticking a needle in your eye anymore. The problem isn’t that needles are sharp, or needles can pierce eyes, or eyes are filled with goo. The problem is that you stuck a needle in your eye.

Rikers Island is an eyeball after the needle’s been stuck in it. Former New York Chief Judge Jonathan Lippman recounts the goo. Continue reading →

Most of us drive on roads and over bridges, regardless of whether we’re right, left or somewhere in between. We ride on subways and trains. We fly on airplanes. We purchase products manufactured elsewhere that magically turn up at our local store or at our door. Most of us, regardless of our race, gender, religion or ethnicity, need functional infrastructure for our world to happen, and a huge piece of that infrastructure involves transportation.

So what does our Secretary of Transportation have to say about it? Continue reading →

If anything is a sign of the times, it’s that the announcement by Pano Kanelos, the putative founding president, of a new university was made on Bari Weiss’ substack.

So much is broken in America. But higher education might be the most fractured institution of all.

There is a gaping chasm between the promise and the reality of higher education. Yale’s motto is Lux et Veritas, light and truth. Harvard proclaims: Veritas. Young men and women of Stanford are told Die Luft der Freiheit weht: The wind of freedom blows. Continue reading →

Tasers are one of those weapons with the perpetually unhelpful good news/bad news outcome. Sure, the officer didn’t draw his handgun and put a bullet into the guy’s center mass, which is never good news. But cops often treat Tasers, because they won’t necessarily kill, so casually that they are used when force isn’t justified, often for convenience rather than necessity. And then there’s the problem that sometimes they do kill, even as Axon, formerly known as Taser International until they had to change their name to shed the taint of early Taser abuse, blames it on contrived causes that aren’t its fault.

Two Wilson, Oklahoma, officers were convicted of second degree murder for tasering a guy to death. His crime was resisting their commands to let them arrest him after running around naked in the street. Continue reading →

It’s not just the hubris of believing that because you’re a cop, whatever you do is acceptable no matter how unlawful, vicious or downright stupid, but that the non-cop world ought to somehow know that you’re a cop and just take it.

But as the “Good Guy Curve” makes clear, if some random criminal fires a round at Jaleel Stallings, and Jaleel Stallings, being a good guy, defends himself by returning fire, it’s not a crime. Even if it turns out that the initial shooter in an unmarked van has a shield in his pocket. Even if he’s a cop. It was five days after George Floyd was killed, and an unmarked white van of cops were told to go out and “fuck ’em up.” So they did. Continue reading →

The American Academy of Pediatrics has declared a national mental health emergency.

This worsening crisis in child and adolescent mental health is inextricably tied to the stress brought on by COVID-19 and the ongoing struggle for racial justice and represents an acceleration of trends observed prior to 2020. Rates of childhood mental health concerns and suicide rose steadily between 2010 and 2020 and by 2018 suicide was the second leading cause of death for youth ages 10-24.

Continue reading →

There were five propositions on the back of the ballot in New York. If you didn’t know about them, you might not have turned the ballot over and voted. Apparently 11% of voters didn’t, although it’s unclear whether they didn’t know or chose not to vote. Two of the propositions related to issues that have generated extreme outrage elsewhere, in the red sort of states where some focus their cries of voter suppression, like Georgia and Florida. As New York is safely blue (except when it isn’t, as was learned in Nassau County), few seemed to take notice.

For months Democrats have been arguing that it’s too hard to get a ballot in America, so Congress must step in to keep the electorate from being suppressed. New Yorkers apparently don’t agree, since they soundly rejected two big ideas that Democrats want to impose on the whole nation via their other voting bill, H.R.1. The first is same-day voter registration. New York’s constitution says updates to the voter rolls “shall be completed at least ten days before each election.” A ballot measure to delete that provision failed, as of the latest numbers, 58% to 42%.

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My old pal Carolyn Elefant is the guru of solo practice. She wrote an excellent book on the issue, Solo by Choice, and has been a stalwart of the blawgosphere at My Shingle. A decade ago, after law imploded following the 2007-08 recession that turned law school into death valley, and simultaneously gave us a bunch of lawyers, academics and marketeers who sought to take advantage of this “new” thing, the internet, to reinvent the practice of law, Carolyn found her niche arguing that life didn’t end when biglaw didn’t make a job offer, but that there was a future, a good future, in starting one’s own practice and hanging out a shingle. Get it? Continue reading →

Much as I appreciate Columbia University professor turned New York Times columnist John McWhorter’s insights on culture war issues, he remains a linguist by profession. Years ago, he contended that ebonics, given the more formal title of African American Vernacular English, was a legitimate language.

As sexy as this issue was to a linguist, it was unpersuasive bordering on counterproductive to regular folk, including black folk, who still thought students, including black students, would do better learning boring, old standard English. The question wasn’t whether slang existed or people used it. Obviously, it did and they did. The question was whether that was sufficient for linguists to declare it “official,” turning street talk into the stuff of textbooks. Continue reading →

After much wailing and gnashing of teeth Tuesday, when progressive and leftist campaigns suffered losses in election races around the country, top Democratic strategists met Wednesday and Thursday to discuss how the party would regroup for the 2022 midterms.

“I don’t understand why we didn’t handily win Virginia,” one strategist sulked. “We did everything right! We told the concerned parents they were crazy racists who bought into conspiracy theories Sean Hannity and Tucker Carlson peddle nightly!” Continue reading →