Group items matching

in title, tags, annotations or url

Kim Potter, the former Brooklyn Center, Minn., police officer who shot Daunte Wright, has been charged with second-degree manslaughter, according to Minnesota authorities.

"Certain occupations carry an immense responsibility and none more so than a sworn police officer," said Imran Ali, an assistant county attorney and head of the county's major crimes unit. "We will vigorously prosecute this case and intend to prove that Officer Potter abrogated her responsibility to protect the public when she used her firearm rather than her Taser."

Potter shot Wright, a 20-year-old Black man, during a traffic stop Sunday while officers were attempting arrest after discovering an outstanding warrant. In body camera footage, Wright can be seen pulling his hands free and ducking back into the car; Potter yells, "I'll tase you! Taser! Taser! Taser!" then fires her handgun. Wright died on the scene. Police officials have characterized the shooting as an accident, saying Potter mistook her handgun for her Taser.

Which makes the thrill of becoming a magical initiate in the Potterverse remarkably similar to the thrill of being chosen by the modern meritocracy, plucked from the ordinary ranks of life and ushered into gothic halls and exclusive classrooms, where you will be sorted — though not by a magic hat, admittedly — according to your talents and your just deserts.

blogger Spotted Toad, who wrote a fine post discussing how much the Potter novels and movies trade upon the powerful loyalty that their readers feel, or feel that they should feel, toward their teachers and their schools. But not just any school — not some suburban John Hughes-style high school or generic Podunk U. No, it’s loyalty to a selective school, with an antique pedigree but a modern claim to excellence, an exclusive admissions process but a pleasingly multicultural student body. A school where everybody knows that they belong, because they can do the necessary magic and ordinary Muggles can’t.

Thus the Potterverse, as Toad writes, is about “the legitimacy of authority that comes from schools” — Ivy League schools, elite schools, U.S. News & World Report top 100 schools.

Mr Mankiw begins with a thought experiment: "Imagine a society with perfect economic equality...Then, one day, this egalitarian utopia is disturbed by an entrepreneur with an idea for a new product. Think of the entrepreneur as Steve Jobs as he develops the iPod, J.K. Rowling as she writes her Harry Potter books, or Steven Spielberg as he directs his blockbuster movies." Everyone wants to buy the entrepreneur's product, which results in a hugely unequal distribution of income. Should the government shift to a progressive tax system to reduce the inequality?Obviously Mr Mankiw discovers that the answer is "no", because that's the answer he has built his analogy to produce.

Mr Mankiw's analogy sneaks in his conclusion by implying that greater inequality is the price we pay for more invention and creativity. But his own choices of hero-entrepreneurs make it clear that there's no evidence to support this claim.

Of the three Mr Mankiw proposes, only Steve Jobs plausibly had an irreducible, unique effect on material culture and the structure of an industry. Mr Spielberg and Ms Rowling are acclaimed artists, but their startling wealth and prominence are entirely due to the increasing power of network effects in mass culture over the past several decades. Mr Spielberg happened to be directing his first movies just as Hollywood was beginning to stage coordinated marketing blitzes that created round-the-block lines for top-grossing films. Ms Rowling hit the bookshelves just as a similar superstar phenomenon was taking over publishing, with sales increasingly concentrated on individual mega-bestsellers rather than spread across a few dozen authors and titles. Mr Jobs is an unusual figure in that his ability to combine engineering, aesthetics, and a vision of how users might interact with the digital universe has created a kind of integrated multi-product entity that might not otherwise have existed; it's not clear that BlackBerry, Nokia or Samsung would have been up to the task. But even in Mr Jobs's case, much of the power that accrued to Apple was due to the gradual sorting of the consumer information-technology world into integrated ecosystems

Tensions between Iran and Saudi Arabia have been escalating on many fronts — over wars in Syria and Yemen, the Saudis’ execution of a dissident Shiite cleric and the Iran nuclear deal. The dispute runs so deep that the regional rivals — one a Shiite theocracy, the other a Sunni monarchy — even clash over the name of the body of water that separates them.

Iran insists that it be called the Persian Gulf, and has banned publications that fail to use that name. Yet this riles Arab nations, which have succeeded in pushing various parties to use their preferred term — Arabian Gulf.

his may be among the most minor of the disputes, but it speaks to the level of hostility and competition between the two, and is taken quite seriously by many with an interest in the region — including the United States Navy, which, for fear of alienating its regional allies, uses the term Arabian Gulf.

In a broader sense, having widely understood cultural references and conversational touchstones can be deeply important when it comes to building a sense of community

At the moment, Americans seem to have few truly shared texts, and their number seems to shrink dail

most Americans would be more likely to recognize a Harry Potter reference than a biblical one

Many writers also found a new audience in children, giving rise to work such as Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and generating later classics such as Kenneth Grahame’s The Wind in the Willows, Beatrix Potter’s Peter Rabbit stories, A.A. Milne’s Winnie-the-Pooh, J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Hobbit, and even, it can be argued, the late 20th-century work of J.K. Rowling.

The similarities between the 2015 case in Tulsa and the shooting death of a 20-year-old Black man, Daunte Wright, in Minnesota on Sunday are striking. Six years later, amid a fraught national conversation around race and policing, Mr. Wright’s death has once again provoked intense interest in how the legal system should treat such deadly use of force.

Captured on body camera video, Ms. Potter’s actions are an almost identical replay of what happened in Tulsa in 2015. While another officer struggles with Mr. Wright as he sits in the driver’s seat of his car, Officer Potter aims her weapon, the video shows, shouting, “Taser! Taser! Taser!”

“The case was premised on the idea that an ordinary person, exercising caution and care, should have known what weapon they had in their hand,” Mr. Gray recalled. “We charged what we saw and what the evidence supported, not what might have been popular.”

Nearly a year after the police killing of George Floyd, pressure is mounting on President Joe Biden and members of Congress to show they are committed to holding police officers accountable for misconduct, excessive force and negligence

Brooklyn Center’s former police chief suggested that the shooting was accidental, and Potter made her first court appearance Thursday after being charged with second degree manslaughter.

Biden exhibited caution this week when addressing the death of another Black man and backed away from his campaign promise to create a police reform commission

A July 25 call between President Trump and the president of Ukraine is the basis for an impeachment inquiry into whether Mr. Trump withheld American military aid until Ukrainian officials investigated former Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. and his son, Hunter.

“Many countries are rivals of ours and of our democratic system,” Mr. Potter said. He listed as two chief examples China and Russia, countries that Mr. Trump has publicly suggested could help him achieve his political aims. “In some cases, they’re going to want policies that help them and therefore hurt us. In other cases, though, they just want us to fail.”

Are protections against this kind of thing in place? Yes. The ability of a foreign nation to gain access and influence over America’s democratic process has been a concern since the early days of the republic.

The call by President Trump on Saturday to Georgia’s secretary of state raised the prospect that Mr. Trump may have violated laws that prohibit interference in federal or state elections, but lawyers said on Sunday that it would be difficult to pursue such a charge.

“You know what they did and you’re not reporting it,” the president said during the call, referring to his baseless assertions of widespread election fraud. “You know, that’s a criminal — that’s a criminal offense. And you know, you can’t let that happen. That’s a big risk to you and to Ryan, your lawyer. That’s a big risk.”

clearly violates Georgia statutes

her photographs capture both the isolation and the beauty of the rural South: the dirt roads without a soul in sight, the creeks and rivers that curve away into even greater isolation, the trees choked by moss and vines, the gravestones and makeshift memorials barely visible through the trees.

The landscapes in these photographs are not so much threatening as bereft of protection. Entering such beautiful spaces is always a risk for a woman alone — not because of anything inherently dangerous about a mist-drenched stream or a bamboo-clotted riverbank or even a rocky waterfall, but because bucolic settings aren’t always as empty as they seem. And nobody would hear you scream if danger has followed you into the woods — or if danger is already there, just waiting for you to arrive.

Our deep woods are lovely, our still waters restful, but the Southern landscape has never been a safe place for a woman alone. It has never been a safe place for a Black man alone. It has never been a safe place for L.G.B.T.Q. people of any race or gender. To enter an isolated place alone has always been to take a risk, and we have known that all our lives.

Since President Lyndon Johnson declared a “war on poverty,” the United States has spent some $16 trillion or more on means-tested programs. Yet the proportion of Americans living beneath the poverty line, 15 percent, is higher than in the late 1960s in the Johnson administration.

What accounts for the cycles of poverty that leave so many people mired in the margins, and how can we break these cycles? Some depressing clues emerge from a new book, “Giving Our Children a Fighting Chance,” by Susan Neuman and Donna Celano.

there’s a difference in parenting strategies, the writers say. Upper-middle-class parents in America increasingly engage in competitive child-rearing. Parents send preschoolers to art classes and violin lessons and read “Harry Potter” books to bewildered children who don’t yet know what a wizard is.

The top 1 percent, for instance, has gone from capturing about 8 percent of the national income to 18 percent. But there's no obvious skills differential between workers in the top 1 percent and the workers directly beneath them

In a winner-take all economy, however, small differences in skills can mean large differences in returns and we have moved towards a winner take-all economy because technology has increased the size of the market that can be served by a single person or firm.

Rowling has the leverage of the book but also the movie, the video game, and the toy.  And globalization, both economic and cultural, means that Rowling's words, images, and products are translated, transmitted and transported everywhere - this is the real magic of Ha-li Bo-te.

President Donald Trump offered a preview of his re-election campaign playbook last year when he visited the building site of a multi-billion-dollar cracking unit in western Pennsylvania, hailed as one of the largest construction projects in the country.

To Trump, it was a pitch-perfect example of a booming economy.

The tension between wanting to keep workers safe from infection and trying to get back to business as soon as possible illustrates the fine line Trump must walk as he floats the idea of reopening the U.S. economy in defiance of the advice of public health experts.

he tragic effects of our battle with the novel coronavirus are seemingly endless. But arguably the most mind-blowing is this: the very pandemic that threatens to infect and kill millions is simultaneously causing many to also lose their health coverage at their gravest time of need.

Here’s how: the virus has caused a public health crisis so severe that people have been forced to stay home, causing businesses to shutter and lay off workers. And with roughly half of Americans getting their health insurance from their employer, these layoffs mean not only losing their income but also their medical coverage

In other words, just as our need for medical care skyrockets in the face of a global pandemic, fewer will have health insurance or be able to afford it.

President Donald Trump and top aides are responding to the uproar over his failure to guarantee a peaceful transfer of power by intensifying their efforts to create election chaos

And raising new concerns that the administration is leveraging executive power to bolster the President's political goals, the Justice Department said it was probing "potential issues with mail-in ballots" in Pennsylvania following the discovery of nine discarded ballots.

"If there's a court challenge to the election, it will be decided in court. And the loser of the challenge will accept the results," Graham said.

he Vox writer currently is under fire for signing a letter critical of “cancel culture.” For criticizing cancel culture, Yglesias might very well end up being canceled.

It begins, as these things do, with a tiny little voice squeaking about being made unsafe by the expression of contrary opinions. Emily (formerly Todd) VanDerWerff, a critic at Vox, is incensed that Yglesias would sign his name alongside that of such great monsters of our time as Harry Potter author J. K. Rowling and other “prominent anti-trans voices,” a letter that allegedly contains “many dog whistles towards anti-trans positions.” Such an outrage, VanDerWerff wrote, “makes me feel less safe at Vox.” What else? “I don’t want Matt to be reprimanded or fired” — Mr. Chekhov gently lays down his revolver — but “I do want to make clear that those beliefs cost him nothing.”

VanDerWerff no more felt threatened by Yglesias’s name on a letter than Amy Cooper felt threatened by that Ivy League bird-watcher in Central Park. This is simply the weaponization of victim status by vindictive, sophomoric busybodies who cannot bear the fact that someone else sees the world in a different way.

The bank experience showed how you could be oppressed by hierarchy, working in an environment where you were neither free nor equal. But this implied that freedom and equality were bound together in some way beyond the basic state of being unenslaved, which was an unorthodox notion. Much social thought is rooted in the idea of a conflict between the two.

If individuals exercise freedoms, conservatives like to say, some inequalities will naturally result. Those on the left basically agree—and thus allow constraints on personal freedom in order to reduce inequality. The philosopher Isaiah Berlin called the opposition between equality and freedom an “intrinsic, irremovable element in human life.” It is our fate as a society, he believed, to haggle toward a balance between them.

What if they weren’t opposed, Anderson wondered, but, like the sugar-phosphate chains in DNA, interlaced in a structure that we might not yet understand?

he inflicted on us a presidency which was ignorant, cruel, reckless, lawless, divisive, and disloyal.

Mendacity and bigotry became the mode of communication between America’s president and his party’s base.

Not only did he worsen a deadly pandemic—by immersing an angry and alienated minority in his alternate reality, he is sickening our future.

Some historians and psychologists have marveled at how many of the most significant figures in history lost a parent at an early age, either to death or abandonment — from George Washington and Thomas Jefferson to Bill Clinton and Barack Obama. These are what one psychologist termed “eminent orphans.”

It’s easy to put Elon Musk into that category

In the midst of that bleak childhood, Musk dived into science fiction, computer games and comics, and in some sense never left. In that world, Musk seems to have been gripped by a story just as fervently as a religious person is gripped by a holy book.