The Week Link 8/12/16
Welcome to our new column where we recommend the best articles we’ve read each week. This week, we explore talking cartoon horses, criminal cops in Baltimore, and Olympic gender-testing of female athletes
By Sam Mather and Nicholas Keywork
We’ll be writing great things here at Case in Pointe, but we also spend a lot of our time reading. There’s a lot — an overwhelming amount, really — to read on the internet, but we’ve found that our friends have good taste. Recommendations make it much easier to navigate all the articles out there.
So we’ve created The Week Link! Every Friday, we’ll share the highlights from our reading. These will be the most novel, thought-provoking and well-written articles we’ve seen that week. We’ll blurb the articles to tell you what they’re about and why they’re so good. You can expect a mix of culture, politics, world events and literature.
Take a look at what we’ve put together for you this week; we hope you enjoy and come back in seven days. Since this a joint project between the two of us, we’ll alternate who posts — so to make sure you don’t miss out, be sure to follow both of us, or just check here at the Case in Pointe homepage!
The Bleakness and Joy of “Bojack Horseman,” by Emily Nussbuam at The New Yorker
This is a wonderful commentary on Netflix’s series BoJack Horseman, an animated comedy centered on a depressed, anthropomorphic horse. The print title, in true 4North and BoJack punning style, is “The Neigh-Sayer.”
It’s no coincidence that “BoJack Horseman” itself replicates the plots of sitcoms — Princess Carolyn goes on a series of bad dates, BoJack crashes a wedding — to inject them with something rawer and more unsettling.
Here are Some of the Most Shocking Parts of the DOJ’s Report on Baltimore Police, by Ryan Reilly and Julia Craven at Huffington Post
The Department of Justice just released its report on the Baltimore Police Department — where several officers were just acquitted in the death of Freddie Gray, who sustained life-ending injuries while handcuffed in a police vehicle. In it you’ll find several horrible manifestations of a culture of racism and lawbreaking that was sustained by repression and retaliation against the officers who tried to report it.
A black officer with a reputation for speaking out over misconduct was harassed by a supervisor, who placed signs warning him to “stay in your lane” and “mind your own business” on his desk.
An officer decided not to report a colleague for planting drugs because he feared retaliation.
A single officer received 125 complaints in just a few years.
Donald Trump transcript: The Republican nominee in his own words, by The Washington Post
Trump’s awful soundbites get a lot of coverage, but it’s worth getting a sense of how awful he is even when speaking longform. The transcript of this Washington Post interview shows he’s as wildly uninformed and incoherent as you’d imagine, and at moments appears to lapse entirely into Newspeak:
RUCKER: Do you support Ryan?
TRUMP: Nobody has asked me if I support Ryan.
Voter-Fraud Laws Are All About Race, by Van R. Newkirk II at The Atlantic
Some Americans remain unconvinced that requiring ID to vote is unreasonable, and don’t see how it could be racist. Some excellent reporting around the recent law in North Carolina will hopefully make it more clear, and remind us that these policies are never neutral, even when they are less obviously discriminatory.
Legislators requested data on racial voting patterns — including extensive data on early voting — just before creating reforms that displayed “surgical precision” in their ability to restrict early voting and establish voter ID.
The fact that it was passed immediately after Shelby County [v Holder] effectively ended federal oversight of potentially discriminatory election laws was a brazen, winking challenge to common sense.
Moral Clarity, by Adam Shatz at London Review of Books
After the Charlie Hebdo attacks, Adam Shatz wrote about the rhetoric of popular responses and the ideology each one suggests. Shatz’s framework has held up well, and it’s important to try to think through how we understand terrorism even when we’re not in the aftermath of a tragedy, so I’m including this link deliberately when it’s not topical.
Packer says this is no time to talk about the problem of integration in France, or about the wars the West has waged in the Middle East for the last two decades…
That such rhetoric helped countenance the disasters of Afghanistan and Iraq seems not to occur to him, bathed as he is in what liberal hawks like to call ‘moral clarity’. To demonstrate ‘moral clarity’ is to be on the right side, and to show the courage of a fighting faith, rather than the timorous, context-seeking analysis of those soft on what Christopher Hitchens called ‘Islamofascism’. Packer’s New Yorker article is a declaration of this faith, a faith he confuses with liberalism.
Why Khizr Khan Will Haunt Paul Ryan, by Conor Friedersdorf at The Atlantic
The always excellent Conor Friedersdorf describes, in no-holds-barred language, how cowardly and shameful the GOP has been about their new nominee.
Before, Republicans could always maintain, with at least some veneer of plausibility, that they would of course repudiate a politician who crossed a certain line.
With Donald Trump as their standard-bearer, that line has been shown to encompass a candidate who, feeling attacked by the father of a fallen soldier, finds that his first instinct is to lash out at the man’s grieving wife, the fallen soldier’s mother, impugning both with ignorant, derogatory speculation rooted in prejudice.
For Ryan and other informed Republicans who back him, the inescapable conclusion is that neither naked racism nor prejudice are deal-breakers for them. And a man with a knack for TV will keep reminding them of their shame.
Fair? The IOC’s Gender Testing Policy Is The Exact Opposite, by Kate Fagan at espnW
Most people acknowledge that in many sports, women should have the option of athletic competitions separate from men. But it turns out that it is not scientifically simple to divide male and female athletes. Kate Fagan does an excellent job explaining and discussing the Olympics’ approach to this issue, which has involved a shameful and discriminatory history of “gender testing.”
Of all the lines the IOC could use, measuring testosterone is likely the trickiest for many reasons, including that there is no evidence to date that higher natural testosterone impacts athletic success more than any other genetic variable.
Every elite athlete (actually, every human, for that matter) is born with certain genetic variations that either aid or hinder his or her potential for success on the playing field. An incomplete list: arm length, leg length, toe length, foot size, lung capacity… For example, take Jamaican superstar sprinter Usain Bolt. Why aren’t we outraged at his ridiculously long legs, which allow him to gobble up the track faster than his competitors?
Out of the thousands of genetic variants that athletes possess, the IOC has singled out just one for regulation, and it affects only female athletes.
