The reverend has a new primetime show, but remains a polarizing figure:
Sharpton has a long record of involvement in civil rights cases, but there are still those who want to remember him as the guy who defended Tawana Brawley, the teenage girl who claimed to be gang raped by a group of white men before a grand jury dismissed her claims as bogus and Sharpton was successfully sued for defamation. They want to remember him as the guy who said inflammatory things—the man who railed against ‘diamond merchants’ and an ‘apartheid ambulance’—during the Crown Heights riots. Last year, he penned an apology in The New York Daily News for his language during the riots, and for failing to pay more tribute to Yankel Rosenbaum, an Australian graduate student who was killed in what some Jews remember as the worst episode of anti-Semitic violence in American history. ‘I said things growing up. I used to use the ‘N’ word. I used to talk street language about a lot of things that you just can’t do,’ he says. ‘And they’ll bring it back to haunt you.’
‘The other thing I’ve learned, when I’ve had to deal with things I’ve said 20 years ago, 30 years ago, the first thing you should say is, “I shouldn’t have said it,”’ he says. ‘You don’t justify something. If you said something that’s wrong or that was stated wrongly, say that. The public can accept a mistake. What they can’t accept is you digging in and it’s an obvious mistake.’
“Al Sharpton’s Got a Brand New Bag.” — Marin Cogan, GQ
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The reverend has a new primetime show, but remains a polarizing figure:
“Sharpton has a long record of involvement in civil rights cases, but there are still those who want to remember him as the guy who defended Tawana Brawley, the teenage girl who claimed to be gang raped by a group of white men before a grand jury dismissed her claims as bogus and Sharpton was successfully sued for defamation. They want to remember him as the guy who said inflammatory things—the man who railed against ‘diamond merchants’ and an ‘apartheid ambulance’—during the Crown Heights riots. Last year, he penned an apology in The New York Daily News for his language during the riots, and for failing to pay more tribute to Yankel Rosenbaum, an Australian graduate student who was killed in what some Jews remember as the worst episode of anti-Semitic violence in American history. ‘I said things growing up. I used to use the ‘N’ word. I used to talk street language about a lot of things that you just can’t do,’ he says. ‘And they’ll bring it back to haunt you.’
“‘The other thing I’ve learned, when I’ve had to deal with things I’ve said 20 years ago, 30 years ago, the first thing you should say is, ‘I shouldn’t have said it,” he says. ‘You don’t justify something. If you said something that’s wrong or that was stated wrongly, say that. The public can accept a mistake. What they can’t accept is you digging in and it’s an obvious mistake.'”
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Published: Sep 17, 2012
Length: 13 minutes (3,282 words)
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How Lisette Lee, a privileged young woman with ties to the Samsung fortune, turned to drug trafficking:
Lee would go on to tell federal authorities a lot of things about herself: that she was a famous Korean pop star as well as the heiress to the Samsung electronics fortune; she was so emphatic on this last point that on police paperwork agents listed ‘heiress’ as her occupation. Back at home in L.A., Lee called herself the ‘Korean Paris Hilton’ and played the part of the spoiled socialite, with two Bentleys, a purse-size lap dog and, especially, her commanding, petulant personality that kept her posse of sycophants in check. It was as though Lisette Lee had studied some Beverly Hills heiress’s handbook: how to dress, how to behave, how to run hot and cold to keep people in her thrall – in short, how to be a modern celebrity. But all of that would begin to unravel – amid the crowd and confusion on the Columbus tarmac that June 2010 evening – once a drug-sniffing German shepherd padded over to the van and sat down, signaling a hit.
Agents threw open the van doors. Inside the suitcases were more than 500 pounds of marijuana in shrink-wrapped bricks. In Lee’s crocodile purse were three cellphones, $6,500 in cash, a baggie of cocaine and a hotel notepad scrawled with weights and purchase prices totaling $300,000: a drug ledger.
“The Gangster Princess of Beverly Hills.” — Sabrina Rubin Erdely, Rolling Stone
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How Lisette Lee, a privileged young woman with ties to the Samsung fortune, turned to drug trafficking:
“Lee would go on to tell federal authorities a lot of things about herself: that she was a famous Korean pop star as well as the heiress to the Samsung electronics fortune; she was so emphatic on this last point that on police paperwork agents listed ‘heiress’ as her occupation. Back at home in L.A., Lee called herself the ‘Korean Paris Hilton’ and played the part of the spoiled socialite, with two Bentleys, a purse-size lap dog and, especially, her commanding, petulant personality that kept her posse of sycophants in check. It was as though Lisette Lee had studied some Beverly Hills heiress’s handbook: how to dress, how to behave, how to run hot and cold to keep people in her thrall – in short, how to be a modern celebrity. But all of that would begin to unravel – amid the crowd and confusion on the Columbus tarmac that June 2010 evening – once a drug-sniffing German shepherd padded over to the van and sat down, signaling a hit.
“Agents threw open the van doors. Inside the suitcases were more than 500 pounds of marijuana in shrink-wrapped bricks. In Lee’s crocodile purse were three cellphones, $6,500 in cash, a baggie of cocaine and a hotel notepad scrawled with weights and purchase prices totaling $300,000: a drug ledger.”
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Published: Aug 31, 2012
Length: 32 minutes (8,007 words)
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In Arizona’s Maricopa County, 80-year-old Joe Arpaio has made a name for himself “for being not just the toughest but the most corrupt and abusive sheriff in America.” He’s now being sued by the Justice Department for civil rights violations against Latinos:
Arpaio began focusing on illegal immigration about six years ago, after he watched an ambitious politician named Andrew Thomas get elected chief prosecutor of Maricopa County by promising to crack down on illegal immigrants. In 2006, shortly before the Department of Homeland Security empowered local law-enforcement agencies to act as an arm of the federal immigration effort, Arpaio created a Human Smuggling Unit – and used Thomas’ somewhat twisted interpretation of the law to focus not on busting coyotes and other smugglers, but on going after the smuggled.
The move may have been indefensible from a legal standpoint, but it was political gold: Arpaio quickly ramped up his arrest numbers, bringing him a round of fresh media attention. The sheriff made a splash by setting up roadblocks to detain any drivers who looked like they could be in the U.S. illegally – a virtual license to racially profile Hispanics. Reports of pull-overs justified by little or no discernible traffic violations were soon widespread: Latinos in the northeastern part of the county, one study shows, were nine times more likely to be pulled over for the same infractions as other drivers. Arpaio’s men, the Justice Department alleges, relied on factors ‘such as whether passengers look “disheveled” or do not speak English.’ Some stops were justified after the fact: A group of Latinos who were photographed sitting in a car, neatly dressed, were described in the police report as appearing ‘dirty,’ the ostensible rationale for the pull-over. Testifying on the stand on July 24th in a federal trial over his department’s blatant record of racial profiling, Arpaio himself acknowledged that he once called the crackdown a ‘pure program to go after the illegals and not the crime first.’
“The Long, Lawless Ride of Sheriff Joe Arpaio.” — Joe Hagan, Rolling Stone
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How the down-on-its-luck city ended up becoming a stronghold for the Occupy movement—and whether the radicals will stick around when gentrification takes hold:
Their small capitalist enterprise — named to evoke the famous anti-capitalist tract — represents another side of Oakland, albeit one that’s still in its infancy. Think of it as a less twee, more D.I.Y. version of artisanal Brooklyn. Oakland even has its own take on the Brooklyn Flea, known as the Art Murmur, a sprawling hipster street fair, cultural bazaar and gallery-and-pub-crawl. At the Flea, you can buy refurbished manual typewriters; at the Murmur, you can buy Sharpie-on-foam-cup drawings by a local artist.
The collision between Oakland’s growing cadre of small-business owners and the local Occupy movement has produced some memorable moments of low comedy. In November, 30-year-old Alanna Rayford, who owns a showroom for local fashion designers in a Gothic Revival building downtown, closed up shop to join the march to the port. She returned the following morning to find the windows of her store smashed and some artwork missing. One of the paintings, a gorilla smoking a blunt, had been placed on prominent display at the entrance to the Occupy encampment.
“Oakland, the Last Refuge of Radical America.” — Jonathan Mahler, New York Times Magazine
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How the down-on-its-luck city ended up becoming a stronghold for the Occupy movement–and whether the radicals will stick around when gentrification takes hold:
“Their small capitalist enterprise — named to evoke the famous anti-capitalist tract — represents another side of Oakland, albeit one that’s still in its infancy. Think of it as a less twee, more D.I.Y. version of artisanal Brooklyn. Oakland even has its own take on the Brooklyn Flea, known as the Art Murmur, a sprawling hipster street fair, cultural bazaar and gallery-and-pub-crawl. At the Flea, you can buy refurbished manual typewriters; at the Murmur, you can buy Sharpie-on-foam-cup drawings by a local artist.
“The collision between Oakland’s growing cadre of small-business owners and the local Occupy movement has produced some memorable moments of low comedy. In November, 30-year-old Alanna Rayford, who owns a showroom for local fashion designers in a Gothic Revival building downtown, closed up shop to join the march to the port. She returned the following morning to find the windows of her store smashed and some artwork missing. One of the paintings, a gorilla smoking a blunt, had been placed on prominent display at the entrance to the Occupy encampment.”
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Published: Aug 1, 2012
Length: 24 minutes (6,232 words)
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A review of new book Demon Fish and the truth about sharks—from their mating rituals to the real odds of being attacked:
There were 75 verified shark attacks last year, and 12 fatalities. Even in the US, a global hotspot, you are forty times more likely to be hospitalised by a Christmas tree ornament than by a shark. Meanwhile, to supply the shark fin soup trade alone, an estimated 73 million sharks are killed each year. Many shark populations have declined by 70 per cent or more in the last thirty years. One reason little is done about this is that although their fins fetch high prices, shark fisheries are of negligible economic value compared to, say, tuna or cod or herring, so little is done to protect stocks. And then of course humans tend to make more of a fuss over animals we can relate to – because they stand on two legs or live in charming family units, or are unthreateningly charismatic. One of the recent PR successes of the shark conservationists is the ‘walking shark’, which crawls along the sea bottom on its fins and has an appealing little face. The best-protected species are the big, peaceful filter feeders, the basking shark and particularly the whale shark, with its photogenic polka dots and mysterious long-range migration patterns. But we’re gradually becoming more enlightened. The third best-protected species is the great white, described approvingly here by E.O. Wilson as ‘one of the four or five last great predators of humanity’.
“Don’t Wear Yum-Yum Yellow.” — Theo Tait, London Review of Books
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A review of new book Demon Fish and the truth about sharks—from their mating rituals to the real odds of being attacked:
“There were 75 verified shark attacks last year, and 12 fatalities. Even in the US, a global hotspot, you are forty times more likely to be hospitalised by a Christmas tree ornament than by a shark. Meanwhile, to supply the shark fin soup trade alone, an estimated 73 million sharks are killed each year. Many shark populations have declined by 70 per cent or more in the last thirty years. One reason little is done about this is that although their fins fetch high prices, shark fisheries are of negligible economic value compared to, say, tuna or cod or herring, so little is done to protect stocks. And then of course humans tend to make more of a fuss over animals we can relate to – because they stand on two legs or live in charming family units, or are unthreateningly charismatic. One of the recent PR successes of the shark conservationists is the ‘walking shark’, which crawls along the sea bottom on its fins and has an appealing little face. The best-protected species are the big, peaceful filter feeders, the basking shark and particularly the whale shark, with its photogenic polka dots and mysterious long-range migration patterns. But we’re gradually becoming more enlightened. The third best-protected species is the great white, described approvingly here by E.O. Wilson as ‘one of the four or five last great predators of humanity’.”
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Published: Jul 26, 2012
Length: 13 minutes (3,493 words)
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One man’s quest to reshape the online porn industry through the “.xxx” top-level domain:
The resistance to Lawley, whatever its merits, has the ring of desperation. ICM arrived at a moment of crisis for commercial porn. After enabling several boom years, the Internet has brought many smut marketers to their knees. Rampant freebies on “tube” sites have reduced global porn revenue by 50 percent since 2007, to less than $10 billion, including about $5 billion generated in the U.S. Those are rough guesses by Diane Duke, executive director of the industry’s trade group, the coyly named Free Speech Coalition. Speaking privately, some porn executives say the coalition’s revenue estimates are optimistic. In a field dominated by privately held companies, no provable statistics exist.
Setting aside moral judgments and potential social harms—we’ll get to those—it’s remarkable that Lawley is making any money at all. Especially since he had to fight for seven years, spending millions of his own dollars, to get permission for .xxx from the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN), a nonprofit regulatory body. His persistence in the face of hostile lobbying by competitors, religious conservatives, and the U.S. government suggests that if the stubborn British entrepreneur claims to have a money-spinning solution for the Great Porn Depression, he should not be underestimated.
“The New Republic of Porn.” — Paul M. Barrett, Bloomberg Businessweek
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