Author Archives

Professional writer, editor, napper, and dog-snorgler. Knows you are, but what is she?

When Forensic “Science” Is Anything But

Blood spatter expert Duane Deaver testifies during a trial in Durham, N.C. in 2003. (AP Photo/Sarah Davis, Pool, File)

Part two of Pamela Colloff’s ProPublica/New York Times “Blood Will Tell” investigation into the faulty forensic “science” of blood spatter analysis came out today. It’s a sobering look at the reliability — or lack there of — of what has become an important crime scene investigation technique, and anyone who cares about criminal justice or understands forensics only via Dexter should read it. If you haven’t yet read part one, which details the unlikely arrest and conviction of Joe Bryan for the murder of his wife, Mickey, now’s the time:

When Robert Thorman settled into the witness box on the fifth and final day of the state’s case, it marked a turn in the prosecution’s fortunes. Thorman was the bloodstain-pattern analyst who was called to the Bryan home when investigators were still working the scene. As an interpreter of bloodstains, Thorman possessed a singular expertise, and the prosecution would use this to bring its hazy narrative into focus, lending a sense of scientific certainty to an otherwise equivocal set of facts…

The district attorney began by leading Thorman through a recitation of his credentials. The detective explained that he had served as a military police officer for 20 years before working his way up through the ranks of several small law-enforcement agencies and that he had been trained in bloodstain interpretation. The jury did not know that Thorman’s training was limited to a 40-hour class he took four months before Mickey was killed.

Bryan was convicted despite a complete lack of other forensic evidence (in fact, there was evidence that pointed away from him), an extremely improbable timeline, and no motive; there is zero evidence that he was anything other a supportive husband who was deeply in love with his wife. Then he got a re-trial, and was convicted a second time on the same shoddy evidence.

Thorman told the jury not only that the flashlight was in the bedroom at the time of the shooting but also that the killer, before fleeing the scene, had changed into clothes that were already in the Bryan home. He delivered his findings with the authority of an expert, stripping away the ambiguities of the state’s case. As he spoke to the jury, he grounded his findings in the certainty of science. “Based on my knowledge and experience in bloodstain interpretation,” he said, “the flashlight itself was right next to or near the source of energy, that being the gun.” By the time the guilty verdict came down on the last day of the trial, it seemed like a foregone conclusion. Joe was again sentenced to 99 years.

Read the story

Why Were We All So Upset About Jason Bateman?

Mitchell Hurwitz, Jeffrey Tambor, Jason Bateman, Jessica Walter, and Will Arnett at ceremony honoring Bateman with a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame. (Photo by Willy Sanjuan/Invision/AP)

NPR’s Linda Holmes wrote about last week’s painful New York Times interview with the cast of “Arrested Development.” Why, in a time of constantly horrifying news about how men treat women, did this story — which is “only” about verbal abuse — strike a nerve?

But maybe it was this interview because the disrespect felt so benign in the delivery and so destructive in the effect. How can you have “zero complaints” about a workplace someone else remembers as containing the worst verbal abuse of her career? Is that not, itself, a complaint? Why is it important that over and above forgiveness, Tambor receives absolution from the utterly unaffected men in the cast, right in front of the woman who initially told the Hollywood Reporter she didn’t even want to talk about her history with him in the first place? Tambor brought all this up, put all of it out in public, just so everyone else could explain why it didn’t matter? Is this reverse roast, this closing argument by a self-appointed defense attorney — is this supposed to be his reckoning?

Many of us — yes, women, but humans in general — prepare for conflict by trying to toughen up. We build leathery skins and metal bones, and we learn how to fight back without being blamed for the force we used. Come at us throwing rocks, and we cross our forearms and hope they bounce off. Come at us in secret, we run for light. Come at us harder, we at least try to get away. But there is something about these gentle poisoned touches, where someone puts a hand on your shoulder and says, “I understand, but after all,” and an audience cheers, and something bad seeps underneath your skin and up your neck.

Read the essay

You Are What Your Fingerprint Says You Are

A U.S. soldier uses a handheld tool to scan the retinas of military-aged males in Paktika Province, Afghanistan.
A U.S. soldier uses the Biometric Automated Toolset-Handheld Interagency Identity Detection Equipment (BAT-HIIDE) System to scan the retinas of military-aged males in Paktika Province, Afghanistan. Photo by The U.S. Army via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY 2.0).

Atossa Araxia Abrahamian’s essay at The New York Review of Books asks us to reconsider the passport: while the West uses “passport” as shorthand for “opportunity and exploration,” the reality is very different, and passports are more frequently tools of control than liberation. And what happens as they’re increasingly digitized, and we move from passports to fingerprints and retinal scans for identification? Our movement is constrained by our very bodies.

Passports, in other words, were invented not to let us roam freely, but to keep us in place—and in check. They represent the borders and boundaries countries draw around themselves, and the lines they draw around people, too. This is the case in wartime and in peace. While most countries no longer ask for Casablanca’s famous exit visas, all their elimination has done is remove a cudgel from the bureaucratic gauntlet. As barriers on people’s leaving fall away, blocks on their entering shoot up. And what is the use in leaving if you have nowhere to go?

If the passport served as a symbol of belonging to a sovereign nation, and, for the more fortunate, a way to travel outside it, not long from now the lines will be drawn around our bodies, rather than our countries. As printed papers and analogue technologies are giving way to intricate scans that can identify us by the patterns on our irises, the shape of our faces, and even maps of our veins and arteries, we no longer are our papers; rather, our papers become us.

Read the essay

Death By Tchotchke

People walk past plastic garbage washed ashore at Versova beach near Mumbai, India. (AP Photo/Rajanish Kakade)

Plastic is everywhere: bottles, toys, cars, and, increasingly, in the ocean and its inhabitants. At National Geographic, Laura Parker takes a close look at the dramatic increase in our plastic production over the last half-decade and our profound global failure to properly deal with its disposal. This isn’t just about fish strangling in discarded six-pack rings — its about waterways so clogged with plastic that you can walk across them, and not Jesus-style.

No one knows how much unrecycled plastic waste ends up in the ocean, Earth’s last sink. In 2015, Jenna Jambeck, a University of Georgia engineering professor, caught everyone’s attention with a rough estimate: between 5.3 million and 14 million tons each year just from coastal regions. Most of it isn’t thrown off ships, she and her colleagues say, but is dumped carelessly on land or in rivers, mostly in Asia. It’s then blown or washed into the sea. Imagine five plastic grocery bags stuffed with plastic trash, Jambeck says, sitting on every foot of coastline around the world—that would correspond to about 8.8 million tons, her middle-of-the-road estimate of what the ocean gets from us annually. It’s unclear how long it will take for that plastic to completely biodegrade into its constituent molecules. Estimates range from 450 years to never.

Getting plastics out of our water isn’t just a matter of producing less disposable plastic, which is unlikely anyway — it’s also an issue of waste management, and making sure the plastic we do create is properly destroyed or recycled. Unfortunately, the countries producing the most plastic are also those least able to deal with its long tail.

In recent years the surge in production has been driven largely by the expanded use of disposable plastic packaging in the growing economies of Asia—where garbage collection systems may be underdeveloped or nonexistent. In 2010, according to an estimate by Jambeck, half the world’s mismanaged plastic waste was generated by just five Asian countries: China, Indonesia, the Philippines, Vietnam, and Sri Lanka.

“Let’s say you recycle 100 percent in all of North America and Europe,” says Ramani Narayan, a chemical engineering professor at Michigan State University who also works in his native India. “You still would not make a dent on the plastics released into the oceans. If you want to do something about this, you have to go there, to these countries, and deal with the mismanaged waste.”

Read the story

The Whole World is Naples Now

Photo by Mario Mancuso via Flickr (CC BY 2.0).

At the Los Angeles Times, Didier Jacob interviews Elena Ferrante, the pseudonymous author of the massively popular “Neapolitan novels.” In the four-volume story of friends Lila and Lenù, the city of Naples — sprawling, crumbling, beautiful, violent — is less a setting than a character; in the interview, Ferrante talks about her own experience of the city.

One has to be very fortunate not to be touched even slightly by violence and its various manifestations in Naples. But perhaps that’s true of New York, London, Paris. Naples isn’t worse than other cities in Italy or in the world. I’ve spent a lot of time coming to an understanding of it. In the past, I used to think that only in Naples did the lawful continuously lose its boundaries and become confused with the unlawful, that only in Naples did good feelings suddenly, violently, without any break, become bad feelings. Today it seems to me that the whole world is Naples and that Naples has the merit of having always presented itself without a mask. Since it is a city by nature of astonishing beauty, the ugly — criminality, violence, corruption, connivance, the aggressive fear in which we live defenseless, the deterioration of democracy — stands out more clearly.

Read the interview

Feeding Our Kids, In Fatness and in Health

Illustration by Hana Jang

Lots of public health work in the U.S. focuses on the “obesity crisis” and how poverty and fatness intersect. But what stereotypes are we internalizing about poor parents and fat kids? What does it feel like to be a fat person doing this work? Harmony Cox, a fat food justice activist, tells us in her essay at Narratively.

We were discussing the neighborhood, and how we could help people here get healthier food. Creating access to healthy food is my job, but it’s also my passion. It’s how I pay my bills and find an outlet for my frustration with a society that allows the poor to suffer. I was hoping to hear some optimism. Instead I got this:

“Nobody would eat it. Everyone around here is just so… fat.”

I felt the folds of my belly pushing against the table. I felt familiar shame burn the back of my throat, bitter as a $7 coffee.

She went on, “The kids always eat fast food. It’s like nobody loves them.”

I wondered how she could know what the kids around here always eat, and what that has to do with how loved they are…

In the reality of feeding a struggling family, the food pyramid is irrelevant. Keeping us fed was a source of pride, junk food was a source of joy, and so our diets endured.

I don’t remember parents who didn’t love me. If anything, they loved me too much, and their love language came deep-fried. It may have hurt me in the long run, but that’s never been a sign that something wasn’t borne from love.

Read the story

In the End, It’s All Just the Stories We Tell

The Monument to the Armenian Alphabet in the hills around the village of Artashavan, Armenia. Photo by Rita Willaert via Flickr (CC BY 2.0).

Diana Arterian published a sad, lyrical essay at the Los Angeles Review of Books on the legacy of the Armenian Genocide on descendants and diaspora members, skillfully weaving together family memories and verse by Armenian diasporic poets. At its center is a family story that everyone has heard — but that no one knows the truth of.

There is a story. A shepherd boy, 13 or so, has a dozen brothers. His family lives in a small village near a large mountain. One day the boy is gone — with his flock, or to complete a chore, or perhaps even to find a safer place for the family to stay. He returns and finds everyone in the village dead. His brothers are all decapitated, and his father, too. His mother raped by attackers and dead by suicide. Over many years, he makes his way, somehow, halfway across the earth, where he marries a woman from a country near his homeland. They have three sons, none of whom marry. Until one of them does, at the age of 41, to a woman who is 38. They have two daughters, one of whom tells this story to her children for as long as they can remember.

Read the essay

Man vs. Gig: Doug Schifter’s Last Stand

Drivers protest Uber X and Lyft in Philadelphia, PA. (AP Photo/Matt Rourke)

In a devastating profile in New York Magazine, Jessica Bruder tells the story of Doug Schifter, a New York City black-car driver who saw Uber’s disruption of the taxi industry decimate his income. After trying to organize drivers to seek stronger regulations — and suffering a string of health issues that ate up what savings he had — he made one last statement: he shot himself outside City Hall. Bruder’s piece is both an important look at a dysfunctional industry and a master class in profile writing.

But at the press conference about Schifter’s suicide, Mayor Bill de Blasio downplayed Schifter’s parting explanation. “Let’s face it,” he told reporters. “For someone to commit suicide, there’s an underlying mental-health challenge.” De Blasio was hardly in a position to diagnose Schifter. There was, in fact, no evidence that Schifter was mentally ill — just a long written record, published over the course of three years in Black Car News, that underscored how the upheaval in the taxi industry had left him physically impaired, financially desperate, and emotionally devastated. De Blasio himself had done little to rein in Uber, backing down on a cap he had proposed placing on app-driven services. “I heard you were going to end the cruelty to the Central Park horses,” Schifter had addressed de Blasio in one of his columns. “How about ending the government’s cruelty to us?”

Read the profile

Great News Everyone, We’ll Never Have Shared Food Experiences Ever Again

a man in a restaurant seen through a window, eating alone. the people and cars of the city are reflected in the window.
Image by Jim Pennucci via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY 2.0)

At The New Food Economy, Nadia Berenstein profiles Jason Cohen, founder of the startup Analytic Flavor Systems. Analytic Flavor Systems wants to make sure you love what you eat: they’ll map you specific taste preferences, and food companies will be able to create tailored offerings that make your particular tastebuds sing.

The point, however, is not macrocosmic trend-tracking, but microcosmic customization: to predictively model the perceptions and preferences of increasingly narrow demographic clusters.  “You can enter in a flavor profile for that latte,” Cohen says, pointing to my half-finished drink, “and the system will spit out an optimization—what to change to make it even better.”  There is no platonic ideal of a latte, of course. There is only your ideal latte: the one optimized to be maximally delicious to your palate. The Gastrograph would not merely suggest that a seltzer be grapefruit flavored, for instance, but how to tweak its floral, fruity, bitter, and sour dimensions to captivate the fancy of Northeastern millennial guys, or German ladies over forty.

Is this a flavor breakthrough, or an unnecessary endeavor based on a fundamental misunderstanding of sensory science? (And if it is a breakthrough, how long until I get my case of Michelle-optimized La Croix?)

Read the story

The Painful Resilience of Hope

Laura Turner and her husband Zack are expecting a baby boy on June 3 — their fourth pregnancy but the only one to make it past the first trimester. In an essay for Catapult, Turner powerfully articulates the pain of her repeatedly crushed hopes — crushed, but ultimately indestructible — and the challenge of planning for a birth when your self-protection instincts tell you not to bother.

There was a third miscarriage, after a trip to Turkey and Georgia, and in my anger I held it over Zack’s head, this lost child, because I hadn’t really wanted to try a third time without some kind of medical intervention—except that I had; I had wanted it more than anything, dreamed about how we would tell the story: After two miscarriages, everything had simply worked, probably because we had been on vacation and we were relaxed (stress being the ultimate enemy of pregnancy). We would tell the story of how we conceived in a cave hotel in Cappadocia on a day too windy to go up in the hot air balloons.

That part was true enough, but the end came quickly, and this time without the foretaste of blood, just with depressing calls from the doctor’s office about my hormone levels, which were low and not rising quickly enough to indicate a viable pregnancy. The blood came a few days later. At least with the last two I was spared the discomfort of a “procedure,” which is what they call the removal of the pregnancy and its remains, when they insert a catheter into your body and aspirate what was to have been the person who occupied the room next door.

Read the essay