A Velvet Fist

Profile of Srdja Popovic, who was a member of Otpor (Resistance), the nonviolent group that helped topple Serbia’s dictator, Slobodan Milosevic, in 2000. He’s since formed an NGO called Canvas, which advises rebels in 40 countries on how to use the tools of nonviolent struggle:

“The trainers, all former participants in protests, deliver the curriculum, usually in English. The trainees analyse and evaluate their country’s situation, after being coached in the theory of nonviolent struggle and the three principles for its success: unity, planning and nonviolent discipline. They study the role of consent and obedience, and ‘pillars of society’ (military, police, judiciary, bureaucracy), and how to lure ordinary people away from them and towards the nonviolent movement. Next come strategy and tactics, especially ‘low-risk tactics’, such as co-ordinated banging of metal pans at set times across a city—actions in which all can join, and which keep people in the movement even under harsh oppression.”

Published: Apr 26, 2012
Length: 18 minutes (4,540 words)

The Criminalization of Bad Mothers

A new chemical endangerment law in Alabama, originally designed to protect children from meth labs, is now being used to prosecute mothers who used drugs during their pregnancy:

“Emma Ketteringham, the director of legal advocacy at the National Advocates for Pregnant Women, a New York-based reproductive-justice group, has been following Kimbrough’s case closely. She has drafted ‘friend of the court’ briefs for Kimbrough signed by groups like the National Organization for Women-Alabama and the American Medical Association. She argues that applying Alabama’s chemical-endangerment law to pregnant women ‘violates constitutional guarantees of liberty, privacy, equality, due process and freedom from cruel and unusual punishment.’ In effect, she says, under Alabama’s chemical-endangerment law, pregnant women have become ‘a special class of people that should be treated differently from every other citizen.’ And, she says, the law violates pregnant women’s constitutional rights to equal protection under the law. Ketteringham also recruited two prominent Alabama lawyers, Jake Watson and Brian M. White, to take Kimbrough’s case pro bono. ‘I love babies, too, but I don’t like locking up their mamas,’ Watson told me.”

Published: Apr 25, 2012
Length: 23 minutes (5,763 words)

The Bedford Quarry

[Fiction] A teenage boy falls into criminal life:

“It was the first summer Jack and Mom didn’t care when I came home. Finding things missing around the house, Jack had said something about his wallet springing a leak, and it better fix itself fast. I was a much better liar than Betsy, and had perfected the pose of injured innocence when accused. It helped a lot that she had strings of goateed boyfriends around the house, guys with bottle openers on their key rings. I started coming to the quarry after dark. At night, the quarry was a completely different story.”

(Thanks Instafiction)

Source: AGNI
Published: Jan 1, 1999
Length: 23 minutes (5,967 words)

The Man Who Makes the Future: Wired Icon Marc Andreessen

Q&A with the man who created Mosaic and Netscape, and has since funded some of the biggest companies on the web:

“The future was much easier to see if you were on a college campus. Remember, it was feast or famine in those days. Trying to do dialup was miserable. If you were a trained computer scientist and you put in a tremendous amount of effort, you could do it: You could go get a Netcom account, you could set up your own TCP/IP stack, you could get a 2,400-baud modem. But at the university, you were on the Internet in a way that was actually very modern even by today’s standards. At the time, we had a T3 line—45 megabits, which is actually still considered broadband. Sure, that was for the entire campus, and it cost them $35,000 a month! But we had an actual broadband experience. And it convinced me that everybody was going to want to be connected, to have that experience for themselves.”

Source: Wired
Published: Apr 25, 2012
Length: 20 minutes (5,038 words)

Why Do They Hate Us?

A call for justice for women in the Middle East. The writer, who was sexually assaulted by Egyptian police last year, says the revolutions have not addressed the plight of women:

“Yes: They hate us. It must be said.

“Some may ask why I’m bringing this up now, at a time when the region has risen up, fueled not by the usual hatred of America and Israel but by a common demand for freedom. After all, shouldn’t everyone get basic rights first, before women demand special treatment? And what does gender, or for that matter, sex, have to do with the Arab Spring? But I’m not talking about sex hidden away in dark corners and closed bedrooms. An entire political and economic system — one that treats half of humanity like animals — must be destroyed along with the other more obvious tyrannies choking off the region from its future. Until the rage shifts from the oppressors in our presidential palaces to the oppressors on our streets and in our homes, our revolution has not even begun.”

Source: Foreign Policy
Published: Apr 25, 2012
Length: 12 minutes (3,098 words)

The Man Who Hacked Hollywood

Chris Chaney was a 33-year-old loner in Florida who decided to shake up his boredom by breaking into celebrities’ email accounts. Soon he discovered nude photos of Scarlett Johansson and other stars, and then the FBI came calling:

“While perusing the e-mail of celebrity stylist Simone Harouche in early November 2010, he stumbled across photos of her client Christina Aguilera trying on outfits in a dressing room, wearing little more than silver pasties. Chaney found a random guy on a celebrity message board and sent him an e-mail telling him he knew ‘someone’ who had hacked pictures of Aguilera. Did he want to check them out?

“Chaney freaked the moment he sent it. What the hell am I doing? he thought. He was using a phony e-mail address, but he didn’t know how to effectively cover his tracks. On December 8, a headline appeared on TMZ: ‘Christina Aguilera: My Private Sexy Pics Were Hacked.’ Aguilera’s rep told TMZ they were ‘attempting to determine the identity of the hackers and will pursue them aggressively.'”

Source: GQ
Published: Apr 25, 2012
Length: 16 minutes (4,017 words)

‘We Thought the Sun Would Always Shine on Our Lives’

The writer reflects on a 1987 tragedy that forever changed the lives of the sisters of Ole Miss’s Chi Omega sorority:

“In my mother’s house I keep a packet of newspaper stories, yellowed relics. And when I look at them I feel no time has passed. I am back in the Chi O house, living in the room above the front door, listening to girls come and go, drifting off for a nap as Lynn strums ‘Leaving on a Jet Plane’ on her guitar, as Michelle practices piano in the parlor off the front hall, as Chandler and Fig and Bryan and the other houseboys banter in baritone while setting up the dining room for dinner. I see Robin and Margaret lined up for the lunchtime salad bar minutes before they leave for Highway 6. And Margaret tucking her keys in her hiding place in the foyer, because she’d be right back.”

Published: Apr 24, 2012
Length: 22 minutes (5,703 words)

Get Rich U.

Stanford University, and its president John L. Hennessy, have a tight relationship with Silicon Valley, which has helped the university’s endowment grow to nearly $17 billion. A look at how those relationships are shaping what’s next:

“John Hennessy’s experience in Silicon Valley proves that digital disruption is normal, and even desirable. It is commonly believed that traditional companies and services get disrupted because they are inefficient and costly. The publishing industry has suffered in recent years, the argument goes, because reading on screens is more convenient. Why wait in line at a store when there’s Amazon? Why pay for a travel agent when there’s Expedia? The same argument can be applied to online education. An online syllabus could reach many more students, and reduce tuition charges and eliminate room and board. Students in an online university could take any course whenever they wanted, and wouldn’t have to waste time bicycling to class.”

Source: The New Yorker
Published: Apr 23, 2012
Length: 30 minutes (7,629 words)

A Teacher, a Student and a 39-Year-Long Lesson in Forgiveness

A man attempts to track down his middle school teacher and offer a long-overdue apology:

“Only by chance was I curious enough about the subject line — ‘Customer Feedback’ — to open the email from a man named Larry Israelson.

You published an item involving retired teacher James Atteberry and the CASA program. Mr. Atteberry was a teacher of mine in the early ’70s, and I wish to apologize to him for a regrettable incident that occurred when I was his student. Can you provide any contact information for him, or would you be willing to serve as an intermediary and deliver a message on my behalf? Thank you for your time, and I await your reply.

Source: The Oregonian
Published: Apr 21, 2012
Length: 8 minutes (2,106 words)

Fighting Back

Domestic violence homicides in Maryland have dropped by 40 percent since 2007—and its success is attributed to a simple new approach to helping victims:

“A few years after moving to Johns Hopkins in 1993, Campbell and a team of researchers began studying domestic violence murders in Maryland. Their work, which was published in 2002, sought to identify the key indicators that predicted whether a case of domestic violence was likely to become a domestic homicide. The study produced some surprisingly precise findings. If a man had a history of hitting his partner, that in itself was a predictor of murder. But certain kinds of behavior came with even higher chances of death. For instance, if a man choked his partner, she was five times more likely to be killed by him at some point. If he was unemployed, he was four times more likely to kill her. The researchers also found that only 4 percent of homicide victims had ever sought help from a shelter; in a follow-up study, they found that a stay in a safehouse decreased the risk of violent re-assault by 60 percent. Their findings offered new ways to measure risk. ‘It also informed the system about which cases needed heightened scrutiny,’ says Campbell.”

Published: Apr 23, 2012
Length: 13 minutes (3,497 words)