| Boy Hood |
[19 Jun 2015|11:18am] |
|
http://www.slate.com/articles/arts/movies/2015/06/rick_famuyiwa_s_dope_starring_shameik_moore_reviewed.html Rick Famuyiwa’s sly coming-of-age comedy Dope opens with an onscreen dictionary definition of its multivalent title. Depending on the context, dope can be an illegal substance sold as a street drug; a person who acts in a foolhardy manner; or a term of praise in black American slang, signifying the coolness of the person or thing so designated. All three meanings work in tandem in Dope, a movie about a black teenager who foolishly gets mixed up in the sale of an illegal street substance, then winds up discovering inner reserves of cool he never knew he possessed.
|
|
| The Other Other Major Supreme Court Cases This Term |
[19 Jun 2015|01:21pm] |
|
http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/jurisprudence/2015/06/supreme_court_decisions_gay_marriage_and_obamacare_aren_t_the_only_huge.html Although there are 11 cases still outstanding on the Supreme Court’s docket following Thursday’s decisions, someone reading recent coverage of the court could be forgiven for thinking there are only two cases the court has yet to decide this term: Obamacare tax credits and gay marriage. This is nothing new. Every year the court decides roughly 70 cases, but the coverage of two or three often crowds out the rest, making the work of an already opaque institution even less visible to the public. That’s why it’s worth remembering that even though marriage and health care may be the biggest cases the court will decide over the next few weeks, they’re hardly the only important ones. As I and others have written, the legacy of Chief Justice John Roberts and of his court will be shaped by where they land on these two cases. But many of the other cases the court will be deciding over the next few weeks could be incredibly consequential as well. And they, too, will help define the legacy of Roberts and his court.
|
|
| What I Read (Even When I’m Not Trying to Impress You) |
[19 Jun 2015|04:05pm] |
|
http://www.slate.com/articles/arts/20x/2015/06/how_to_read_the_internet_every_day_slate_editor_laura_bennett_on_the_sites.html A year or so ago, I wrote a piece about “media diets” and interviewed some journalists about just how much they’d fudged their self-reported news consumption. Media diets are bogus, I concluded. No one actually reads 19 magazines and watches an hour of Al Jazeera before breakfast. But now that I’ve been asked to catalog my own Internet habits, I’ll happily offer them up to you in all their graphic, eyeball-freezing detail. I will try not to fudge it. Specifically, this diet is centered on Internet media loyalty: the corners of the Web I visit at least 20 times a month.
|
|
| Fewer Beds, Fewer Inmates |
[19 Jun 2015|07:02pm] |
|
http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/crime/2015/06/new_orleans_how_hurricane_katrina_helped_reduce_the_population_of_the_orleans.html One of the great scandals of the American criminal justice system is that on any given day, there are about half a million people locked up in jail who have not been convicted of any crime. They’re behind bars because they’ve been arrested and are awaiting hearings or trial dates. Some of them are there because they’ve been deemed dangerous, or because a court determined that they could not be counted on to show up for their next appearance. But in many cases, they are in jail because only they couldn’t afford to pay the bail set for them by a judge.
|
|
| 20 Years in a Windowless Cell |
[19 Jun 2015|07:34pm] |
|
http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/jurisprudence/2015/06/supreme_court_and_solitary_confinement_justice_anthony_kennedy_finds_it.html On Feb. 22, 1994, Justice Harry Blackmun handed down one of the most famous Supreme Court opinions of all time. Dissenting from the court’s decision to allow the execution of Bruce Edwin Callins, Blackmun graphically described Callins’ impending execution. The prisoner, Blackmun wrote, will “no longer be a defendant,” but “a man, strapped to a gurney, and seconds away from extinction.” Blackmun could not condone that fate. After years of struggling to enforce the death penalty fairly, Blackmun wrote, he was now convinced the entire system was unconstitutionally “cruel and unusual.”
|
|
| Land of Pork and Honey |
[19 Jun 2015|07:43pm] |
|
http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/roads/2015/06/pork_in_israel_how_russian_immigrants_and_hipster_foodies_are_challenging.html TEL AVIV, Israel—As the sun sets on Tel Aviv’s Dizengoff Square, a nearby Kabbalah Center wraps up its outdoor lecture series, boutiques and galleries close up for the night, and beachgoers still in their bikinis park at the bike-share station. Nearby, normcore-clad hipsters are descending on one of the city’s only barbecue joints. They come in hordes for cocktails and soul food, but mostly for something that, while unremarkable in most cosmopolitan cities, has long been viewed as forbidden fruit in Israel: pork.
|
|
