The vast databases maintained by federal, state, and local law enforcement agencies would be pretty creepy even if cops strictly used them the way they were intended. If only that were the case!
An officer with the Denver Police Department allegedly used the National Crime Information Center, a database of personal information used in criminal investigations, to help his friend harass the supposed new lover of his ex-wife. The Huffington Post pulled the allegation from an internal report on the Denver PD’s performance in 2015. From the report:
Shortly thereafter, the ex-husband began driving by the man’s house and threatening him. The ex-husband also found and contacted the man’s wife to tell her that the man was having an affair. The ex-husband told the wife that he knew their home address, showed her a picture of the man’s car, and asked her questions about the man to find out what gym he worked out at, what shift he worked, and where he spent his leisure time.
This is not the only time this type of thing has happened. The report also documents an officer who used the database to hit on a woman he met on the job. And as HuffPo notes, New York’s infamous “cannibal cop” was accused of using police databases to investigate potential victims.
The Denver cop who aided the stalker only received a formal written reprimand for his behavior, and the desperate romantic officer was fined two days pay. The report, which was authored by an independent monitor of the department, advocated for harsher punishment for abusing the database. That sounds right.
Just like everyone else, cops can’t help taking personal advantage of every last perk their jobs afford them. The difference is that when you or I do it, the only victims are our coworkers who show up to work the next day and find there are no more fruit snacks in the office kitchen, because we’ve stuffed them all into our briefcases. For these cops, an enormous trove of personal information about law-abiding people is just another workplace amenity to be abused.
A statement released by the family of former Toronto mayor Rob Ford reports that Ford is currently in the hospital battling cancer. Ford’s family sent out the release shortly after a false rumor circulated on Reddit that Ford was dead.
Ford has been undergoing chemotherapy to treat tumors on his bladder for some time. The 46-year-old, currently a Toronto councillor, was initially diagnosed with diagnosed with a kind of cancer that grows in fat cells called liposarcoma, and announced last October that he had a growth on his bladder.
Ford’s bizarre and storied career in Canadian business and politics involved a crack-smoking scandal, drunken wandering through his city’s streets, and dancing gleefully through a city council meeting. If this isn’t a good way to leave your legacy, then I don’t know what is.
Police are not going to punish a journalist for doing his job at a Donald Trump rally, it turns out.
Last week, CBS News journalist Sopan Deb was arrested while filming the chaotic scene outside the Republican presidential frontrunner’s cancelled rally in Chicago last Friday. Deb’s camera kept rolling as a police officer pulled him down to the ground, allegedly holding his boot to Deb’s neck though he identified himself as press.
Deb was originally charged with resisting arrest. But The Washington Post reported Thursday that the Chicago Police Department has dropped the charges. Anthony Guglielmi, spokesman for the Chicago police, told the Post in an email:
“While this incident was very dynamic and troopers and officers were forced to make split-second decisions in the interest of public safety of demonstrators and police officers, we have collectively decided to drop the administrative charges in this case. This decision was made after a methodical review of the physical evidence including video and interviewing both troopers and police officers involved in the incident.”
Though that problem is now behind him, Deb is back on the campaign trail this week, reliving the fresh hells that the Trump campaign delivers to reporters on the daily.
In September 2014, a female student at Thornton Fractional North High School near Chicago was sexually assaulted in the boys’ locker room. Although the principal and his supervisors learned of the assault, the girl and the alleged perpetrator were kept in the same class and went on the same field trips. The school didn’t think it was a problem because another assault was never reported. They finally expelled the boy when he threatened to shoot her in the head weeks later.
A lengthy article by Tyler Kingkade at the Huffington Post explores this case and many, many others like it: One special needs girl, who has the mental capacity of a 12-year-old, according to her mother, was raped outside a school dance; the police couldn’t locate the perpetrator, and the school never tried to. Another girl was expelled after she reported that a boy had forced her to perform oral sex for engaging in “sexual misconduct” and impeding a school investigation—the boy, who claimed it was consensual and showed a short video of the sex act, was suspended and eventually allowed to graduate.
The piece demonstrates the startlingly widespread negligence on the part of high schools across the country when it comes to protecting its female students from rape and sexual assault. Largely, Kingkade writes, because the schools can’t even be bothered to look into the reports.
“Some schools explain this by stating they won’t take any action against an accused perpetrator unless police tell them a crime was committed, though experts say this runs counter to federal law under Title IX,” Kingkade writes.
He notes that though Title IX is an old and untouched law, it should protect against this negligence:
Title IX is over 40 years old and hasn’t changed. The Supreme Court affirmed in a landmark 1999 case that schools must address student-on-student harassment under the law, with sexual assault considered the most egregious form of harassment. The Education Department’s Office for Civil Rights issued guidance in 2010 and 2014 further stating what schools should do in cases of student-on-student sexual harassment or assault.
At a minimum, the school should ensure an alleged victim and their accused assailant do not come in contact with each other, and any ongoing bullying related to an allegation of assault should be stopped too. Schools can also conduct their own investigations and discipline a student as it deems necessary, which may include suspending or expelling them.
According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, 42.2 percent of female rape victims are first raped before age 18, and 29.9 percent of female rape victims are first raped between ages 11-17—an upsetting statistic meaning that high schools hold an increased burden of protecting their students. Yet too often, they leave investigations to law enforcement, which is meant to serve an entirely different purpose.
Art imitates life; the plot of Revenge of the Nerds is now becoming a reality in Cupertino.
In the latest news to come from the back-and-forth between Apple, Inc. and the federal government, several engineers at the company told The New York Times that they will fight back if the F.B.I. wins a court battle to force Apple’s to unlock an iPhone that belonged to Syed Rizwan Farook, the gunman who killed 14 people at the San Bernardino County Department of Public Health last December.
In this case, the Apple’s security engineers are Lewis Skolnick and Gilbert Lowe, and the FBI officers are the Alpha Betas:
Apple employees are already discussing what they will do if ordered to help law enforcement authorities. Some say they may balk at the work, while others may even quit their high-paying jobs rather than undermine the security of the software they have already created, according to more than a half-dozen current and former Apple employees.
Apple, the world’s most valuable company, has said before that it will resist the government’s order to unlock the phone, saying that the government is asking for “something we simply do not have, and something we consider too dangerous to create.”
Civil disobedience is no longer a tactic for the Thoreaus and the Gandhis of the world. Enter Apple’s engineers, the warriors on the front line of nonviolent government resistance.
Here’s a pretty picture to clearly illustrate the state of American politics today: Florida Sen. Marco Rubio, hot on the heels of the end of his sluggish though stylish campaign, is likely to endorse Republican candidate Ted Cruz, a man who has bullied him mercilessly for months.
On Thursday, Rubio told The St. Paul Pioneer Press Cruz was “the only conservative left in the race.” Rubio was reportedly close to endorsing Cruz, but wasn’t making an official announcement yet.
“There’s time to prevent a Trump nomination, which I think would fracture the party and be damaging to the conservative movement,” Rubio said.
But things haven’t always been peachy between the two, who share Cuban ancestry but not a love of one another. Just one month ago, the two were sparring words at a Republican debate, with Rubio calling Cruz a liar.
Just before that debate, Rubio campaign spokesman Alex Conant wrote sent an email to Rubio supporters with the catchy opening line “Ted Cruz is a liar.” Conant went on:
“First it was lying about Marco on fundamental issues like life and marriage; now Cruz and his supporters’ attempts to slander and distort Marco’s record have reached a new low.”
Cruz’s camp also mocked Rubio’s baby heels, while Rubio accused Cruz of “literally just making stuff up” last month:
“I just think it’s very disturbing [that] you can just come and make things up about people and believe no one is going to call you out on it. And it’s now become a pattern, so we have to clarify that we can’t let that stand unchallenged.”
These two deserve one another, and we should all just look away and let them be happy, together in an eternal embrace of mutual opportunism.
The “Jesus Shot” is the hottest new medical procedure you must know about—and every 60-year-old lawmaker you know has probably already gotten it.
According to a new report, the Agriculture Commissioner from Texas used taxpayer money to fly to Oklahoma City for the unusual medical procedure, while publicly stating that he had made the trip to meet with Oklahoma lawmakers.
The Houston Chronicle reported Thursday that longtime politician Sid Miller had used at least $1,120 for flights and a rental car to take a trip to Oklahoma in February, which he claimed was to meet lawmakers in the state. But interviews with several politicians he cited suggest that Miller wasn’t meeting with them that day, and all of the lawmakers pictured in a photograph from the trip said they weren’t with him on that day.
Instead, according to the Chronicle, Miller may have been receiving an unusual medical procedure to treat chronic pain:
Miller, a former rodeo cowboy who suffers from chronic pain, told the Houston Chronicle earlier this year he has received the “Jesus Shot,” a controversial but legal medication administered only by a single Oklahoma City-area doctor who claims that it takes away all pain for life.
Miller’s office will not confirm whether he received the treatment, but said Thursday that he was reimbursing the state for the trip “out of an abundance of caution.”
The news may not come as a surprise to anyone familiar with Miller’s sometimes erratic behavior. One of his most well-known moves as commissioner was to reverse an eleven-year ban on soft drinks and fried foods in public schools, arguing that children should be able to choose what food they eat. Last August, he faced backlash after posting a Facebook meme that seemed to encourage bombing civilians in the Middle East. The image featured a photo of a nuclear explosion with the caption:
“Japan has been at peace with the US since August 9, 1945. It’s time we made peace with the Muslim world.”
Perhaps the “Jesus Shot” will be just the medicine Miller needs.
For the past decade, every student in Alabama has been greeted by the same paragraphs-long disclaimer in the front of their bio textbooks claiming that evolution is a “controversial theory” that has “not been directly observed.” And after putting it to a vote last week, the state Board of Education decided that that disclaimer isn’t going anywhere.
To Alabama’s (minimal) credit, the state did at least mandate the teaching of evolution for the first time ever last year, saying that classes are required to “analyze scientific evidence (e.g., DNA, fossil records, cladograms, biogeography) to support hypotheses of common ancestry and biological evolution.”
When these fancy new regulations went into place last year, the Board promised to have a committee review its biology textbook disclaimer.
Of course, before they do that, they’ll be reading this:
Responding to a similar effort last year aimed at helping students with the “many unanswered questions about the origin of life,” the ACLU of Alabama noted that it was “a thinly-veiled attempt to open the door to religious fanatics who don’t believe in evolution, climate change or other scientifically-based teaching in our schools.”
In other news, according to a Pew Research poll, over a third of all Americans reject the theory of evolution entirely. Have fun in school, kids.
It’s day ten of the Bollea v. Gawker Media jury trial in St. Petersburg, Fla. and the closing arguments are being argued today. It’s your last chance to watch proceedings live before the jury deliberates—will you take it?
These times we live in—they are troubled, are they not? What hath the commoners wrought upon our noble republic, with this “Trump” whose gaudy habits offendeth the senses? Whose common voice shall explain to one and all the unknowable thoughts of the peasantry?
Peggy Noonan, defender of morals, whisperer of Reaganisms, consumer of potions. A famed friend to the sorts of lower classes who are oft seen in jobs of service. With roots in our noble past, Peggy is nevertheless able to seek out and interpret the ramblings of “regular” Americans, whose knowledge of Reagan-era dinner parties may be limited or even nonexistent. We thank the humble gods that she is here. Otherwise, we would be forced to rely solely upon rap-and-roll lyrics to divine the mental state of the average savage citizen.
This Trump matter. From whence has it arisen? To answer that, Peggy must leave her airy abode and venture forth, vehicularly, in search of the wisdom that is found only in the streets of dirt, and cobblestones.
It should probably be said again that everything had to fail for Mr. Trump to rise. You know all the failures, but since we seem to be quoting Uber drivers this cycle,
Are we??
I’ll offer the thoughts of one I talked to in Providence, R.I., a month ago.
For those less versed in gutter lingo than Peggy Noonan, please turn to your “urban dictionaries” in order to properly interpret the words to come.
She’s for Mr. Trump. Started out against him: Who is this guy, he’s a TV star. But she listened and thought: Yeah, I agree. She knows he has an unusual biography for a president. She said most of her friends have experienced the same arc from skepticism to support. She told me her reasons, the usual, but then said something poignant. This is from memory, not notes, but I’ll put it in quotes for easy reading: “Every four years we’re serious, we try to get it right, we do our best to choose the right guy. And nothing we do works! Bush, no, Romney, no, Obama’s a disaster. But we did our best! And now we’re thinking ‘Nothing worked. Take a chance.’ And if he’s no good we’ll fire him in four years.”
I feel as though the clouds have parted and Reagan himself has reached down a loving hand and graced me with a dose of heavenly wisdom. The words of a lowly chauffeur, filtered through the subtle grandeur of Peggy Noonan’s memory. A learning opportunity of this sort does not come along just any day.
I looked at the other passenger, and our eyes locked. We’d just heard the heart of it, the bottom-line mood.
The bottom-line mood of the American barbarian class: “Take a chance.” Etch this epithet into your moleskines, political ponderers. It shall go down as a defining piece of insight into the simplistic thoughts of your lessers.
My thanks to one Peggy Noonan for the unswervable nature of her search for truth, which led her into the darkest reaches of an “Uber” coach car, with neither footman nor butler to accompany her. I pray only that future political analysts possess courage equal to hers, that they too may find “Uber” drivers of their own to consult, as purveyors of folkloric wisdom and mythology.
First you should get real oats. NOT the “instant” oats. Instant oats are chopped-up mush. What you want are the real oats. Oats that are full, unadulterated oats. Quaker Old-Fashioned Oats are just fine, as are other oat brands. When it’s all said and done, they’re just oats.
Pour some into your bowl. The amount you want to eat.
Now it’s time to add the liquid. “What kind of liquid?” Only you can answer this question. I can tell you what I like, but I’m not you, and I never will be. Use the liquid that’s right for you. Flavor is what you’re looking for.
Whole milk? You might say that’s the gold standard of creaminess. Use 100 percent whole milk for a solid, creamy taste. At the other end of the spectrum, you have the option of water. Use 100 percent water for a taste that is absolutely devoid of creaminess. That one’s for the oat purists only—you can really taste the oats there. If you’re torn, what you want to do is use a little mix. Half milk, half water. Want to simplify? Use 100 percent skim milk. That’s basically milk and water together anyhow. As your taste in oatmeal becomes more refined, you can alter the milk/water ration to your liking. Some people might want 80 percent milk, 20 percent water for a creamy taste with a smooth edge. Others might want 20 percent milk, 80 percent water for an oat taste with just a hint of milkiness.
Again, only you can decide definitively what you prefer. Think of your choice of liquid as a dial that you can turn to match your preferred taste on a spectrum running from “Creamy” to “Oat-y.” As you practice, your favorite setting will become clear, and you’ll know just what kind of liquid to use. You can also use almond milk if you like your creaminess with a little twist of almondine. This is good, too. Mix it up and experiment. You’ll have a bowl of oatmeal no matter what, so even if you find that the liquid mix is not ultimately the exact way you would like it, just take it as a learning experience. You’ll get closer to perfection next time. In the meantime, you’ve got some decent oatmeal as your consolation prize.
Put enough liquid in the bowl to JUST cover the oats. If you put too little, you’ll end up with dry oats. If you put too much, you’ll be microwaving that mother all day.
Take your bowl and put it in the microwave. Set the microwave for three minutes and hit start. If you want to walk away and do something else, that’s fine, but only for the first minute or so. After that you need to be watching the oatmeal.
Every microwave is different. Some are weak. Others are very powerful. Microwaves are like humanity. Either way, you have to keep an eye on them. After a minute and a half, as long as you haven’t put in too much liquid, a very powerful microwave may have nearly cooked your oatmeal. You’ll be able to tell because it starts to form a bubble on the oatmeal surface. You will see the heated, fully cooked oats at the bottom of the bowl begin to bubble up on the surface. With each passing second, the bubble with grow larger and larger. If you were to allow the oatmeal to continue cooking indefinitely, the size of the oatmeal bubble would eventually exceed the height of the bowl, escaping and splattering over. You need to hit “stop” on the microwave before that happens. After much trial and error with this, you will get a good sense of your microwave, and you’ll be able to put the oatmeal in to cook for the exact amount of time that it takes for that bubble to form as high as the top of bowl, but no longer.
Take it out and stir the oatmeal. You may find that the top layer of oatmeal, which comprised the visible part of the rising bubble during the cooking process, is fully cooked, but that underneath there is still a less cooked layer of oatmeal with ample amounts of sloshing liquid. If that is the case, give it a good stir and put it right back in for a minute. When it bubbles up again, pull it out. Stir. Check the liquidity. Repeat this process until it becomes clear that the oatmeal is fully cooked. You want the consistency of a nice porridge. The individual oats will be discrete units, obviously, but you want them in a paste-like binding of hot, congealed liquid. Watery oatmeal isn’t worth a damn. Cook it until it’s thick enough to hold a G.I. Joe figurine posed to look like he was sinking in “quicksand,” which in this case is in fact oatmeal.
Want to add some toppings? You can. It would be more accurate to call them mix-ins. A bowl of oatmeal should have a common consistency, whether it’s pure oats or oatmeal mixed with things, so you don’t want to just set things on top. You want to mix them in. Again, your choice of mix-ins will depend on your own personal taste. But I can start you off with some recommendations: walnuts, pecans, raisins, cranberries, blueberries, bananas, honey. I wouldn’t recommend all of these mix-ins at once. Think of it more as a menu from which you can choose. Some combinations I’ve found to be enjoyable include: Walnut/ Banana; Walnut/ Raisin; Walnut/ Cranberry; Pecan/ Blueberry; Walnut/ Honey; Pecan/ Honey; Walnut/ Banana/ Honey; or Blueberry (only). I don’t recommend mixing a sweetener such as honey in with a mix-in that itself contains significant amounts of sugar, such as raisins. I find that’s just too sweet for my taste. Overpowering the taste of the underlying oatmeal that you’ve worked so hard to perfect isn’t desirable.
At times in my life I have experimented with placing a scoop of Greek yogurt on top of the oatmeal. It gives you a good hot-and-cold contrast. Some may find this to be too much creaminess in a single bowl, particularly if you’ve used a high percentage of whole milk for your liquid. I’d leave this option to advanced users only. It’s something to keep in mind, though, when you feel you want to take things a little farther.
If your oatmeal is too hot, blow on it. Then eat it while it’s warm. When you’re done, put the bowl in the sink and fill it with water. Let it soak like that and you won’t have dried oats stuck to the inside of the bowl when it’s time to wash it. You’ll be able to clean the bowl easily and put it right back into the cabinet—until it’s time for your next bowl of oatmeal. I have a feeling it won’t be too long.
Rikers Island is hell. For the latest evidence of this, see the case of Jairo Polanco Munoz, a 24-year-old man who was incarcerated there for just 70 hours before he died in his cell, likely by suicide.
Munoz was locked up awaiting trial on petty larceny charges after allegedly stealing a cell phone from a Dunkin’ Donuts. Like most people in Rikers, Munoz had not been convicted of the crime. Like most people in Rikers, he was poor: He was given $750 bail, bail he evidently could not afford to pay.
Munoz had a history of mental health issues, the New York Daily News reports. In a previous stay, he attempted suicide so seriously that he required a breathing tube to recover. Despite this history, he was not given any special supervision upon his entry to Rikers. He had a basic health checkup, with a further examination to be scheduled within the next 72 hours. But the jail went on lockdown after a stabbing, and the second examination was postponed until the lockdown was over.
Seventy hours after Munoz entered the facility, before he could have a full checkup, guards found him dead in his cell. It’s impossible to know what was inside his head, but we know quite well the horrors of what Rikers is like, especially for the mentally ill. The News notes that in January, Angel Perez-Rios, another inmate, killed himself after a series of health appointments that were also canceled due to lockdowns.
Even if a court does force Apple to create software that would unlock an encrypted iPhone, it might have some trouble enforcing it: Some engineers tell the New York Times they would sooner quit their jobs.
According to Apple, the software—which it refers to as “GovtOS”—would take eight to ten engineers up to a month to build. But some engineers within the company anonymously tell the Times they would quit or outright refuse if assigned to the project, which could essentially void the order.
And as the Times points out, there’s little downside for the engineers, whose experience at Apple makes them eminently employable, even at companies that don’t support Apple’s stand against the government.
That would actually be a great outcome for Apple, because it would not as be easy to replace them. Because of Apple’s corporate structure, the “GovtOS” project would be “substantially complicated” if key employees declined to participate. Those employees reportedly include:
[One is] an engineer who developed software for the iPhone, iPad and Apple TV. That engineer previously worked at an aerospace company. Another is a senior quality-assurance engineer who is described as an expert “bug catcher” with experience testing Apple products all the way back to the iPod. A third likely employee specializes in security architecture for the operating systems powering the iPhone, Mac and Apple TV.
Joseph DeMarco, a former federal prosecutor, tells the Times the fate of the court order could lie with them: “If — and this is a big if — every engineer at Apple who could write the code quit and, also a big if, Apple could demonstrate that this happened to the court’s satisfaction, then Apple could not comply and would not have to... It would be like asking my lawn guy to write the code.”
Last night in Arizona, Bernie Sanders held a rally in a Navajo casino. As you might expect from the venue, his speech was heavy on issues that directly affect American Indians. One controversy Sanders briefly touched on was the Washington Redskins, the National Football League team with a slur right there in their name. Perhaps because he was wading into an issue on which he has little experience, Sanders inadvertently made a deeply offensive remark. Via the Washington Post:
“Washington has a very good football team but it doesn’t have to be called the Redskins,” Sanders said.
What the fuck? The Washington football team is terrible. They are a laughingstock among the football-minded and have been for many years. A young voter, such as myself, knows only a world in which the Washington football team is a horrible joke, slip-sliding across a ragged swamp field as its ashen fans look on in disgust and horror, mostly at themselves for even showing up in the first place, and as the team’s moron owner plots, from his skybox, more schemes to wring cash out of the hopeless dupes below. The Washington football team had one good player—Robert Griffin III—and in his rookie season the coach played him on a torn-up knee, probably because the coach hated him, and now his career is over. And again, their owner is perhaps one of the most vile people on Earth.
New data from Seattle, Los Angeles, and other cities that raised their minimum wage recently show little to no negative effects on hiring after those wages went up. Don’t believe the hype.
Almost as soon as I arrived in Manhattan to seek my fortune, I backed into a knuckle-bruising battle with Playboy’s Hugh Hefner.
My new city-slick literary agent Lois Wallace had signed me because she liked my articles in a zippy new Yale monthly called The New Journal. So after Playboy editors approached Lois about a piece on something called the new feminism, she lipped a smoke ring into her telephone and asked me, “How’d you like to be the first woman to write for Playboy?”
The year was 1969. I thought Playboy defined cheesy, but I was too timid to say so. Furthermore, I was afraid to admit I’d never heard of any new feminists.
Lois, however sophisticated, was a shouter: “You’re in New York, dammit, not in some ivory tower.”
Jim Goode, Playboy’s articles editor, contacted me that afternoon. Speaking more slowly than I thought a human could, he explained that Playboy wanted an objective account of the entire spectrum of the brand new “women’s lib” movement. “These women have important things to say, and I want our readers to hear them,” he said. “Let yourself go. Write anything you like but don’t pass judgment. Be fair.”
He concluded, “Write in a tone that’s amused if the author is amused, but never snide.”
I didn’t dare tell him I knew nothing of these women and, moreover, I’d always written about subjects of my own choosing. But Lois shouted again and I accepted the assignment. I began scouring underground newspapers like the East Village Other and Rat for people to interview, ultimately attending my first consciousness-raising meeting with seven Columbia grad students in a Salvation Army-arty apartment above an Upper West Side Chinese restaurant. I quickly learned consciousness-raising was based on a Chinese revolution concept called “speaking bitterness.” For my subjects, it meant articulating the private indignities they suffered because they were women.
The Columbia students wept into clumps of damp Kleenex and gently chorused, “The personal is political.” I kept my mouth shut but I didn’t agree: my favorite writer Albert Camus had said, “We always take a step forward when we substitute a personal problem for a political problem.”
One silky-haired girl picked at her toes and sipped black coffee from a mug as she described her first (“icky”) sexual experience. As a journalist I felt elated because I’d connected with a fantastic and untold story. As a fellow human being and a woman I admired her guts. Yet I was repelled by the way she dwelled on what seemed to me to be private problems she could fix or learn to live with. I didn’t fall asleep easily that night.
But even if I didn’t feel comfortable generalizing from what the Columbia women had said, I knew they were speaking honestly. I didn’t yet know how moving it was to attend these sessions. It would take me more time to discover their sad stories were alike.
At meeting after meeting I heard a wide range of women speak passionately or woodenly about their “women’s rage.” They hurled questions: Why did men insist they were “helping” a woman do her job if they did housework? Should women compete for power outside the home like men? Would women ever be as free to enjoy sex as men?
Yet I wasn’t ready to make the leap from anecdotes to political analysis. Of course I saw my husband as my superior intellectually and socially; that’s largely why I was drawn to him. I hadn’t consciously dared to resent this. I’d been given many votes of no confidence by men trusted with my higher education. My philosophy professor had given me an A before he bought me a chocolate chip ice cream cone and advised me to quit grad school and get married.
I’d been kicked out of the Elizabethan Club at Yale, whose members were (still all-male) students, because, as a butler informed me, the club was for men only. (“What about her?” I asked, pointing to the oil painting of a sour Queen Elizabeth.) My fellow New Journal editor, Dan Yergin, looked sheepish as we left. That same week, I poked my head in Yale’s Sterling Library’s Linonia and Brothers reading room, filled with old leather club chairs. I heard snickers and two preppy-looking boys got red in the face. I thought my bra strap was showing or, as a faculty wife, I looked too old to be a student. A male librarian soon explained that after some controversy the space had only recently been opened to women.
But once again I’d assumed there was something wrong with me. I was a “ball buster” (words used rarely now) because I wanted to read in that beautiful room. Now one short year later in New York, talking to crazed visionary feminists blew my mind.
I soon interviewed Ti-Grace Atkinson, who had been my classmate in an ethics seminar. Ti-Grace, a southern beauty with a sense of humor, was in my mind (like many visionaries, alas) mad as a hatter. She told Life that the Mafiosos like “sister Joe Colombo” were her model for seizing power from men. She startled me by explaining what later become obvious: men allowed even privileged women only so much power.
Upon questioning me, Ti-Grace learned I’d married after I’d left graduate school. I confessed to her I considered marriage my only alternative once I decided not to pursue a lifelong study of philosophy. I said I loved my husband and I would have married him eventually, graduate school or no. But I had suffered during the early years of our marriage because my husband seemed so confident in his identity and work as a Yale graduate student of English, whereas I had no goal, except the marriage. “I pity you,” she said tears brimming her eyes. “How can you love the oppressor?”
And she added, though her manner belied the harshness of her words, that since I was taking advantage of the feminist movement to further my ambitions, I should expect little sympathy from her when Playboy put me out with the trash. As I was leaving, she recovered herself, thumped me on the back and recommended a divorce lawyer, who, though a man, was good and inexpensive. She advised me to write my article separate from my husband to protect myself from being seduced to a man’s point of view. Women like Ti-Grace had a gut-wrenching new logic on their side. I was struck by her conviction that we lived in a patriarchy. I joined her (as research for my article, I told myself) when she picketed the marriage license bureau.
Radical feminists were so angry it was almost impossible for them to organize. Ti-Grace was censured by her splinter group for sounding off to the press. She’d become too famous, and her colleagues voted she could no longer speak to reporters alone.
Others disagreed about whether men could join marches and if feminism could include married women or any women who were “male-identified,” then meaning conforming to standards set by men. Groups were forming and shattering because of social class, distrust, ambition, personal dislike, and consensus about whom to purge. When Yoko Ono brought John Lennon to one meeting, women shouted back and forth until he fled.
Roxanne Dunbar came from Boston to perform in New York: six women sat on stage and solemnly chopped off their long hair because their tresses pleased men. Other women cried, cheered and cursed Roxanne from their folding chairs. One woman exited yelling, “You’re all dykes!” Anselma Dell’Olio shouted, “Am I supposed to cut off my breasts because men like them?”
After a few skirmishes that made my stomach hurt, I stopped introducing myself as a journalist writing an article for Playboy. If after I’d been talking to a woman for a while and I had established my honest sympathy, I’d mention Playboy was looking for an article and I was going to sell mine to them. I showed some of them my New Journal article on Robert Penn Warren. Most women shrugged disdainfully and wished me luck. They said Playboy would never print an objective article.
As my feelings about second-wave feminist theory grew more positive. I was seized by conflicts. To quote Joan Didion in another context, “I began to doubt the premises of all the stories I had ever told myself.” I realized that I frequently viewed other women as competitors for men. I’d enjoyed my education at Philadelphia High School for Girls and at Bryn Mawr college but I preferred arguing ideas with boys. Now the question growing in me was why have we women put up with isolation from each other. It became clearer and clearer that problems I’d cringed over in private shame were suffered by most women.
Of the fifty-some women I interviewed, Gloria Steinem was the one I liked best. At this point she wasn’t a feminist activist, but a respected journalist in miniskirts and suede who reported positively on the new movement. She was not a mad visionary, but utterly contained.
I was hypnotized by Gloria. She was as gorgeous as anybody I’d seen on the movie screen and was what I longed to be—a sophisticated New York woman. She exhaled dazzle. Her exquisite Upper East Side brownstone apartment had been decorated by the Warhol superstar “Baby Jane” Holzer. Gloria slept on a hip platform bed and used her bedroom as a home office. She stocked her refrigerator with only two green bottles of Perrier water and a lime.
Gloria Steinem in her apartment, 1970. (AP Images.)
I watched a parade of men ring her doorbell proffering chocolates, flowers, and publishing offers. “I’ll never get married,” she told me. “Fifty percent of the women in this town are masochists—they’re wives. Wives get no respect. Widows get respect.”
During one of our interviews I watched her slowly peel thorns off yellow rose stems with her super long fingernails, a gift from the publisher of Chelsea Books.
When I confessed my fear that Playboy would never publish an objective article on the new feminism, she kindly encouraged me, saying that it was vital to try to send a message to theirreaders.
A few weeks later I telephoned Gloria and invited her to march with me (and 20,000 others) on August 26th in Betty Friedan’s 1970 Women’s Strike for Equality. Gloria was apologetic: she would be on the West Coast to support the farm workers’ leader Cesar Chavez.
Marching made me giddy. “I am not a Barbie Doll,” chanted the group in front of me; others behind me yelled, “Don’t iron while the strike is hot.” Friedan gave a rousing speech. Gloria spoke as well; I later found out she’d been persuaded at the last minute to forgo her Cesar Chavez obligation.
I soon accompanied Friedan to Philadelphia where she was to speak about masculine liberation at St. Joseph’s, a Catholic men’s college. At St. Joseph’s, Mrs. Friedan stood tall and wore a gold brooch on her chic black tent dress. She attacked Freud’s sacrosanct notion of penis envy, patting her casually coiffed gray hair before the tittering male audience. “Men don’t think with their penises any more than women think with their vaginas,” she said. “When men are freed from masculine stereotypes like not being able to cry, then they will be liberated too.”
Today her ideas seem casually acceptable. But when I first heard Friedan speak I seized on her words as my rationalization for writing for Playboy and reburied my guilt in missionary zeal. Of course, I thought, I’ll key my Playboy article to masculine liberation. Stereotypes for both sexes limit lives.
On our way back to Manhattan I became disenchanted with her when at Philadelphia’s 30th Street Station she berated an elderly female ticket seller for being old and slow. Not a practicing feminist, not a kind person.
After I sent my article to Playboy, editor Jim Goode telephoned. “You’ve done a fair and objective piece. You followed instructions.” All that remained was a routine clearance of the piece by A.C. Spectorsky, the associate publisher and editorial director.
I panicked when Goode told me a woman named Sandy North would be calling from TheAtlantic to interview me about troubles I’d had covering “women’s lib” both from male editors and movement women. I feared it was a ruse: someone I’d interviewed checking up on me.
“Just get rid of her if she calls,” Goode said. When North telephoned I was obnoxiously smug: “I’m having no problems with my male editors at Playboy.”
I was still feeling victorious a few weeks later when I found myself in Chicago researching an article for Life magazine. I decided to give Goode a kind of well-I’m-in-town-so-I-thought-I’d-say-hello call. He invited me to lunch. At the Playboy offices, Goode became suddenly busy but sent me to lunch with the magazine’s lone woman editor Julia Trelease. I shivered. But I told myself nobody was going to diminish me or Trelease. She turned out to have an amused perspective on our position: the rare woman writer being schlepped onto the sole woman editor.
Several female secretaries joined us. One mentioned that the joke going around the office before I’d arrived was that I would be instantly recognizable because I’d be wearing combat boots and battle fatigues. (Actually, I had deliberately worn a soft pink short dress and even managed to wash my hair before I stepped into what was then the land of air-brushed pubic hair.) One secretary pursed her lips and told me that she didn’t think my article would ever see print. When I nervously questioned her, she answered vaguely, “Oh, I just don’t trust people around here when it comes to women.”
At lunch I discovered these Playboy women knew much more about the new feminism than I’d expected. They’d read my article and liked it. I worried aloud about confronting Playboy on such a sensitive issue: women displayed breasts in Playboy, not brains.
Trelease said she’d been upset when she was made an editor because her name was not put on the masthead. Finally, after arguments, the other editors suggested she go on as “J. Trelease,” since they knew “Hef” wouldn’t like a female name on the masthead. When she insisted she be listed as Julia, it was done. But nobody had enough nerve to point out her name to “Hef,” and Julia wasn’t sure he ever noticed.
Afterwards I chatted with Nat Lehrman, the associate publisher and self-described “sex editor.” He joked about castrating women, nervously jingling coins in his pants pockets.
Hugh Hefner, 1961 (AP Images).
My article had a couple snags, he said. By building my story around three central figures—Betty Friedan, Robin Morgan and Roxanne Dunbar—I’d been too sympathetic to “crazies” within the movement. Lehrman had penciled in a few suggestions which he said pointed up the differences between “the radical crazies and the moderates.” He apologetically read me his “minor” corrections. “It’ll be a snap,” he coaxed.
But within a few hours the experience of debating a Playboy muckety-muck about the existence of the clitoral orgasm lost its charm. I started to suspect our fights were turning Mr. Lehrman on. I was a soft-core interlude.
Boy, was I naive. How could I have believed that Playboy would run a fair article about women’s liberation? Hugh Hefner had admitted on the Dick Cavett show, with a sincere furrow between his brows and a large suck on his pipe, that Playboy didn’t try to present a three-dimensioned view of women in pictures and stories. Why? Well, because the magazine is written for men, not women.
But I didn’t see why a magazine that titillated men couldn’t present real women. Why couldn’t Playboy display a woman’s jokes, insights, bitches, and loves—in short, human characteristics? Why must she be unreal — smoothed to blandness?
Lehrman extended his “light edit” by solemnly citing chapter and verse of the pompous and sleezy Playboy “philosophy.” He spoke of erotic stimuli and societal repression. I bent my head to the table to take notes, hiding behind my long hair.
That night in my hotel room in the Playboy building I puked into a wastebasket. My husband was encouraging on the phone. “Keep taking notes, drink water,” he said.
The next day, Hugh Hefner materialized and handed me a memo about my piece. He was the first man I’d ever spoken to with dyed hair. Hefner claimed he’d gotten late word that an objective article was in the works and he was furious that such a piece could have been assigned behind his back. I skimmed his memo, my stomach churning. I hurriedly copied as much of it as I could:
The women’s movement is rejecting the overall roles that men and women play in our society—the notion that there should be any differences between the sexes whatever other than the physiological ones. It is an extremely anti-sexual unnatural thing they are reaching for. It is now up to us to do a really expert, personal demolition job. Clearly if you analyze all of the most basic premises of the extreme new form of feminism, you will find them unalterably opposed to the romantic boy-girl society that PLAYBOY promotes. Doing a rather neutral piece on the pros and cons of feminism strikes me as being rather pointless for PLAYBOY. What I’m interested in is the highly irrational, emotional, kookie trend that feminism has taken. These chicks are our natural enemy — and there is, incidentally, nothing that we can say in the pages of PLAYBOY that will convince them that we are not.
We must destroy them before they destroy the PLAYBOY way of life.
My stomach growled, but I was speechless.
I didn’t get how right Hefner was. It took us decades, but it happened: ordinary women helped destroy the Playboy way of life as a model of coolness for American men. At the age of 89, an apparently immortal Hefner has acquiesced: Playboy, which has featured nude women—famous and not—in its pages since its first issue in 1953, no longer publishes pictures of naked women.
But back then, Hefner’s memo meant trouble for his naive Playboy editors and for me. “Sex expert” Lehrman ushered me into his office decorated by photos of women posed with nightclubby 1950s provocativeness. He played with the change in his pants pocket. I no longer felt shy. I was angry.
Lehrman waved “Hef’s” memo, declaring that bigger changes were in order. And more upsetting, he decided to argue me into making those changes. Debate ensued; I politely refused to skew topic sentences and details against my article subjects.
Lehrman had written “bull” in pencil over the paragraph of my article dealing with masturbation and the clitoral orgasm. For the second time in two days we returned to our argument about this. This time I was more assertive. I explained that Masters and Johnson had written in their first book that the clitoral orgasm, self-induced, gave women they tested a more physiologically intense orgasm than did “normal” sex.
Possible implications of this had been seized upon by radical women’s liberationists. First of all, they felt deprived. Second, the most radical of them pointed out that men are not necessary to a woman’s sexual fulfillment. And the clitoral orgasm is much more important than patriarchal pillars like Freud, who labeled it immature, had preached. Lehrman was angry. He tossed me a reprint of a Playboy interview he’d conducted with Masters and Johnson. He said it proved “women’s libbers” had misinterpreted the experts. He then directed his secretary to get him “Bill” on the telephone, and while looking at me out of the corner of his eye to make sure I was impressed, he let me know “Bill” was Dr. William Masters.
I sweetly said I was impressed.
His secretary got “Bill” on the telephone. Before they spoke I took out a cigarette and tried to conciliate, using the Hugh Hefner matchbook I’d gotten earlier that day. Lehrman shook his head, and tossed me his own matchbook.
Women were not supposed to win arguments about masturbation when fighting with Playboy sex experts. But I did. First Masters spoke to Lehrman, then Masters deferred to Johnson for a woman’s view. She concurred: women who masturbated to clitoral orgasm registered more intense orgasms than they did with vaginal orgasms achieved during intercourse.
I felt uncomfortable during the short silence that followed the call. I knew I shouldn’t claim victory with a great shout. I guess I was what some of my feminist subjects called “Aunt Tomming.” “Pretty weird,” I said, nodding my head a few times.
I didn’t say another word to Lehrman about masturbation. But we continued to argue. He kept saying, “I told them not to hire a writer with ideological hangups.”
Lehrman asked me to spend another night in Chicago while he puzzled out a compromise. The next morning, he offered me a solution. I was to redo my article to remove every nuance of editorial sympathy with the feminists—any analysis would be deleted. It would be coldly descriptive. Then, a male author would write a speculative, separate article analyzing sex roles in this country, which would tout the Playboy line. Herbert Gold, Lionel Tiger, Philip Roth—these were a few of the names I heard discussed as potential masculine analysts. I was in the halls of power.
I called my husband and told him that I was not going to be home that night as we’d planned. Back in my hotel room, I ordered a solitary dinner, took two Valium and went to sleep.
At nine the next morning I greeted Lehrman, who offered me an olive branch. He told me with a flashing glance that avoided meeting my eyes that our argument had upset him so much that he had to take a sleeping pill to get to sleep. “Well,” I smiled, prepared to accept the peace offer, “it took two tranquilizers to get me asleep.” “Tsk, tsk,” he wagged his finger at me. “No good, no good, that lowers the sex urge.”
Hugh Hefner with expensive metaphor, 1970 (AP Images).
I then argued about my article with a different editor. I asked if I could simply use the first person to speak as a woman. No, he said, and insisted I write solely about man-hating in the movement. I retreated to note-taking. At one point I asked for a guarantee that if I agreed to changes in the article Playboy would make no further edits. He said, “Not on such a sensitive issue.”
During our discussion, several hip-looking Playboy people ducked into the office to tell me abruptly they were on my side. Male editors told me they were upset that Playboy’s first serious article on the role of American women would emphasize the militant crazies of the women’s liberation movement without trying to probe historical and psychological reasons for their actions. One young woman said she’d been sad ever since she’d heard what was happening to my article, predicting trouble among Playboy’s woman employees.
I didn’t realize yet that the issue of Playboy’s distortion of the women’s rights battle and its casual byproduct—the refusal to allow me my own voice in an article I’d been assigned to write and which had been accepted by the editors who assigned it—was much bigger than my personal defeat. For starters, Playboy’s mistreatment of the women’s point of view had more relevance to the women who worked in Hefner’s empire than to me. I withdrew my article: it would not be published. I soon learned Playboy hired Morton Hunt to write a piece expressing Hefner’s point of view.
Months later I heard a TV news broadcaster announce, “Playboy employee quits over exploitation of women by Hefner.”
I wasn’t sure I’d heard the words right, but sure enough, Shelly Schlicker, a Playboy secretary, had been caught late one night in Playboy offices xeroxing Hugh Hefner’s memo about my article. Playboy’s article on the new feminism, titled “Up Against The Wall, Male Chauvinist Pig!” had just appeared and Schlicker wanted to get Hefner’s revealing memo about my piece to the press.
Her story was picked up by many underground newspapers and by Newsweek, which praised my courage and quoted a Hefner spokesman that HH still stood behind his memo. Hunt’s article astonishingly concluded by relegating the women’s movement to “the discard pile of history”; in response, Newsweek called it a “long, rambling, and rather dull article.” (A year later Newsweek hired me as their second woman writer ever.)
I laughed. Playboy’s title for Hunt’s piece (“Up Against The Wall, Male Chauvinist Pig!”) was the kind of invective I was too “ladylike” to hurl at the magazine’s editors. But I would have loved to have had the chutzpah to have said, “Up against the centerfold, MCP.”
Susan Braudy is the Pulitzer Prize nominated author of five books including her 1975 bestselling memoir Between Marriage and Divorce: A Woman’s Diary and her historic investigation of a liberal dynasty, Family Circle: The Boudins and the Aristocracy of the Left. She’s written screenplays for Martin Scorsese, Oliver Stone, and Francis Ford Coppola, and is on the board of The New Journal at Yale. She wrote about her experience at Playboy previously at Glamour in May 1971.
All covers via Playboy.com. Photos of Gloria Steinem and Hugh Hefner via AP Images.
What do you do when you really want one person to win an election, but you understand that by saying that out loud, you’re actually making him more likely to lose? You pretend to support the other person, obviously. And if anyone asks you why, you say, uh, well, I don’t like my guy’s toupee.
“We want Hillary Clinton to win,” Mr Quigg told The Telegraph. “She is telling everybody one thing, but she has a hidden agenda. She’s telling everybody what they want to hear so she can get elected, because she’s Bill Clinton’s wife, she’s close to the Bushes. [But] once she’s in the presidency, she’s going to come out and her true colours are going to show.
You’re sure you’re not a Trump fan, Mr. Quigg?
Asked why he was not therefore supporting Mr Trump, Mr Quigg replied: “We don’t like his hair. We think it’s a toupee. He won’t do what he says he will do. He says he’s going to build a 20-foot high fence along with border with Mexico and make them pay. How’s he going to do that?”
Uh huh.
It’s a plan so obvious only this mustachioed doofus could have cooked it up. Quigg’s views on immigration and Mexican immigrants run closely to Trump’s, the Telegraph notes. But any time anyone like Quigg says that Trump Is Good, the corrupt liberal lamestream media interprets it to mean that Trump Is Actually Bad. Solution: pretend to support someone else. (If you don’t believe me, take a look at Quigg’s Twitter history.)
Cocaine and nuclear weapons: A good mix? That’s what an official probe into coke abuse by “about a dozen airmen” at the F.E. Warren Air Force Base in Wyoming will investigate, the AP reports.
The coked-up airmen in question are, reassuringly, not the people who have their fingers on the literal button required to begin a nuclear war. But they are, scarily, the people tasked with defending the 150 Minuteman III ICBMs (each with an explosive yield roughly eight times greater than the bomb that leveled Hiroshima, easily capable of destroying an entire large modern city) from the rest of the world. As the AP notes, they’re crucial to the operation and safety of America’s vast nuclear stockpile:
Security forces at nuclear missile bases are entrusted to patrol the missile fields and respond to any security emergencies. They are highly trained and given enormous responsibility. Just last month, Deputy Defense Secretary Robert Work visited F.E. Warren and observed a demonstration by security forces of the techniques and equipment they would use to recapture a missile silo that had been taken over by intruders.
In other words, not the kind of people you want doing key bumps in the bathroom.
This is the second time in two years that F.E. Warren has been under investigation: In 2014, missile officers responsible for actually launching those ICBMs were caught cheating on their proficiency tests and also doing a lot of illegal drugs.
This sounds like it would be a very fun job were it not for the possibility of fucking up and beginning a nuclear holocaust.
If Hillary Clinton secures the Democratic nomination, who will be her vice president? I have no idea. Some people think: Tom Perez.
As you are no doubt aware because you follow labor issues and cabinet appointments closely, Tom Perez is the current Secretary of Labor of these United States. Earlier this week, Politico ran a long, gossipy story speculating that Perez could be Hillary’s VP pick, based largely on chatter from White House aides and circumstantial evidence from various Perez fans. It is true that Perez has endorsed Clinton and campaigned with her. Asked about the speculation on CNN this morning, he gave a vague answer that did not rule anything out, which will no doubt fuel the rumors even more. And he would probably be a pick that would make the following constituencies happy:
Labor people
Latinos (he is Dominican)
People in Maryland (he lives in Maryland)
Progressives (more or less, though he’s no Bernie Sanders)
On the other hand: nobody ever knows who the fuck the Labor Secretary is, Maryland isn’t a key state Hillary needs help in, and she very well might choose a moderate, establishment white guy to appeal to centrists rather than a somewhat progressive labor guy to appeal to lefties who will probably suck it up and vote for her anyhow.
