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A renowned Canadian poet who had worked with the man convicted of killing an Indigenous woman 25 years ago says he won’t read the killer’s poetry at an upcoming University of Regina event amidst calls for it to be cancelled. George Elliott Clarke said earlier this week that he wasn’t ruling out reading the work of Steven Kummerfield, who was convicted of manslaughter in the beating death of Pamela George in 1995. Clarke had previously edited poetry by Kummerfield, who has changed his name to Stephen Brown.

Source: Canadian poet George Elliott Clarke won’t read convicted killer’s poetry at MMIWG event | CBC News

This is a fascinating and disturbing story. In case you don’t already know about it (as I didn’t until recently), Steven Kummerfield and his university friend Alex Ternowetsky killed Pamela George by beating her to death and leaving her in a ditch outside Regina in 1995 after one or both of them had sex with her. George was a young mother of two who sometimes worked as a prostitute to support her family.

Kummerfield and Ternowetsky, meanwhile, were both young white men from well-off families in Saskatchewan, families who helped them financially and in other ways. According to one report from the trial, Kummerfield told his mother about what he had done the day after it happened, and she told him to call in to CrimeStoppers with a false tip, and then washed the clothes he was wearing that night. According to testimony from a friend, both men bragged that they had “killed a chick” and Ternowetsky said she deserved it because “she was an Indian.”

Continue reading “What happens when a convicted killer becomes a celebrated poet?”

Note: This is something I originally wrote for the daily newsletter at the Columbia Journalism Review, where I’m the chief digital writer

The holiday season and the arrival of a new year are often cause for reflection and soul-searching. Whether any of the senior management at the New York Times spent the holidays engaged in this kind of activity is unknown, but many critics have made it abundantly clear that they would like them to, if only to explain why the newspaper allows op-ed columnist Bret Stephens to write the things he does. As most people were winding down their work week and preparing to turn out the lights on 2019, Stephens chose to lob a hand grenade into the Twitter-sphere with a column entitled The Secrets of Jewish Genius. In it, the Times columnist posed — and then tried to answer — the question of why there have been so many noteworthy Jewish scientists and leading thinkers like Einstein. As he put it: “How is it that a people who never amounted even to one-third of 1 percent of the world’s population contributed so seminally to so many of its most pathbreaking ideas and innovations?”

In the end, Stephens comes to the conclusion that Jewish genius “operates differently” from the intelligence displayed by others. It is, he says, “prone to question the premise and rethink the concept; to ask why (or why not?) as often as how; to see the absurd in the mundane and the sublime in the absurd. These differences, according to Stephens, stem from cultural factors, as well as a focus on questioning authority. But those ideas weren’t what triggered a multi-day backlash against Stephens or the Times (although many argued they were also wrong-headed). What drove the wave of criticism was that in the course of making this argument, Stephens cited a paper he said supported the theory that Ashkenazi Jews (i.e., those with a primarily European background) have higher IQs than the average population. Within hours of the column being posted, multiple people had pointed out that one of the co-authors of the paper had expressed racist views and had ties to white supremacist organizations, and that the journal the paper was published in was formerly known as Eugenics Review.

On Sunday the 30th, two days after the column originally appeared, the Twitter account for the Times opinion section announced that the piece had “been edited to remove a reference to a paper widely disputed as advancing a racist hypothesis.” The column was also updated with a long editor’s note (at the top of the piece, rather than at the bottom, as some notes often are), which pointed out that the reference to the paper had been removed and why. The note went on to say that “Mr. Stephens was not endorsing the study or its authors’ views, but it was a mistake to cite it uncritically” and admitted that the effect of doing so was to “leave an impression with many readers that Mr. Stephens was arguing that Jews are genetically superior [but] that was not his intent. The column was also edited to remove all references to Ashkenazi Jews, something that was a central part of Stephens’ argument in the original column, but these removals weren’t mentioned in the editor’s note.

Continue reading “The ongoing dilemma that is Times columnist Bret Stephens”

Note: This is something I originally wrote for the daily newsletter at the Columbia Journalism Review, where I’m the chief digital writer

Everyone keeps on saying how historic it is to have an impeachment vote against a sitting US president, and there’s no question it fits the technical definition, since it has only happened twice before, and Trump’s impeachment will undoubtedly go down in history. And yet, the vote in the House on Wednesday — much like everything else that has led up to this point — didn’t feel like history in the making, it felt like a circus sideshow. One in which the facts no longer matter, for one side of the debate at least; all that matters is to be seen waving the flag and supporting the “duly elected” president, dropping code words like Biden and Hillary Clinton, and muttering darkly about the “deep state” and a Ukrainian Crowdstrike server that doesn’t exist. There’s no such thing as a good-faith disagreement about the severity of certain actions by the president, just a wholesale denial of all the pertinent facts. The main approach seems to be to repeat untruths over and over in the hope that, if they don’t convince anyone, at least they will muddy the waters a little.

In this fictional universe — as represented in Trump’s unhinged six-page letter to Nancy Pelosi — there were no crimes or misdemeanors, just a “perfect” conversation with the Ukrainian president, no quid pro quo, etc. But wholesale denial of the facts isn’t even the worst of it. According to Playboy correspondent Brian Karem, a White House source said one theory inside the administration is that “Hillary Clinton lost the election with the aid of Russian hacking so the Democrats could then impeach Trump” (that one drew an animated reaction from Clinton). After spending most of the day tweeting about the upcoming vote, the president held a rally in Michigan, where he went through all his usual rhetorical gambits, including blaming the impeachment on Hillary (to chants of “Lock her up!”) and saying the Democrats were planning to impeach him before he even ran for the Republican nomination. Breitbart News had a story up calling the event a “raucous rally for the ages” before it had even started.

None of this is surprising to anyone who has been paying attention for the last two years, of course. As Kevin Roose of the New York Times pointed out in a September article entitled “Brace yourself for the Internet impeachment,” previous impeachments were fairly sedate affairs. But thanks to 24-hour news channels, social-media networks that prioritize clickbait, and the weaponization of right-wing anger over a host of social and political issues, we — and especially Trump — now live in a stew of disinformation — some of it targeted for political gain, some to cash in on ad revenue, and some for what the denizens of 4chan and Reddit describe as “the lulz.” And all of those forces tend to coalesce around issues like the impeachment, like moths to a flame. As my colleague Jon Allsop put it recently, “an unusually clear story about Trump seems to have become murkier by the day… not because the central facts have been undercut, but because of the present, hellish nature of our information ecosystem.”

Continue reading “Impeachment vote makes history, but right-wing circus continues”

This decade started with me taking a pretty big risk, when I quit my job at the Globe and Mail to join a blog network in San Francisco. I had a great few years and made a lot of new friends, and even though it all came to an abrupt end, I don’t regret it at all — in fact, I would do it again in a heartbeat! That was followed by a job at Fortune, where I learned a lot about how big-city news magazines work (not all of it good, if I’m being completely honest) and then I had the good fortune of landing a plum gig at the Columbia Journalism Review in New York, where I work with a great group of people on things that I am passionate about, which is all one can ask for in a job.

I’ve been fortunate enough to visit and make new friends in some amazing places, including a number of locations in Italy, as well as New York, Paris, London, Amsterdam, Munich, and more. I should note that none of this would have been possible without the help and support of my wife Rebecca, who overlooks my many flaws and is a great travelling partner! Our three awesome daughters made it out of high school and into various universities, where they pursued their respective passions with flair and enthusiasm. And I gained a great son-in-law and a furry grandson, and spent a lot of time in kayaks and canoes and walking in the woods, which restores the soul better than just about anything I can think of.

There have been some ups and downs along the way, no question; some cracks in a not-so-perfect facade. But as Leonard Cohen put it, there’s a crack in everything — that’s how the light gets in! All in all, it’s been a pretty great decade (and yes, I know that technically the decade doesn’t end until next year, but what can I say — people are drawn to round numbers). Here’s hoping that 2020 brings you and yours as much joy and happiness as humanly possible!

This is a fascinating story about the art — as well as clothing, musical instruments, furniture and other things — that internees made while they were incarcerated in Japanese internment camps during World War II. Collectively, this kind of art-making behavior was often referred to using the term “gaman,” a Zen Buddhist term meaning “enduring the seemingly unbearable with patience and dignity.”

Being stripped of all their resources made the newly incarcerated extra resourceful. At first, they used every little scrap they could get their hands on to make necessities like chairs, drawers, door signs, Buddhist altars, walking sticks, and shower shoes, as well as doilies and decorations to make their barrack rooms less bleak. But eventually, many of the Issei, who were given fewer responsibilities than their American-born children who could speak fluent English, turned to art as a way to pass the time. Hirasuna first documented these artifacts as artworks made to lessen the emotional pain of being locked up and having their civil rights stripped in her book, The Art of Gaman: Arts and Crafts from the Japanese American Internment Camps 1942-1946.

As many as 120,000 people — about 90 percent of the ethnically Japanese people in the US at the time — were forced to give up their homes and belongings and take up residence in these camps, surrounded by soldiers and barbed wire. They had to grow and cook their own food, make their own clothes, and so on. And to keep themselves busy, they made things: sandals from blocks of wood, bird brooches from planks taken from the crates that brought in food and other supplies, even working model trains they fashioned out of watch parts and old cans.

via
https://www.collectorsweekly.com/articles/the-art-of-wwii-japanese-american-camps/

Note: This was originally published as the daily newsletter for the Columbia Journalism Review, where I am the chief digital writer

It often feels as though free speech and the press are under attack around the world, and there’s new evidence that this is in fact the case: according to a new report from the UK-based charity Article 19 (named for one of the clauses in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights) freedom of expression has reached a ten-year low globally, as a result of what the report calls “digital authoritarianism” and threats against journalists. Governments in a number of countries have been increasing online surveillance and cracking down on content and behavior that indicates dissent, the report says. The survey notes that while there were some improvements in the overall freedom of expression environment around the world between 2008 and 2013, these gains were eroded in the five subsequent years. According to Article 19’s analysis, more than 65 countries with a combined population of over 5 billion people have seen their freedom of expression decline over the past decade.

The report looked at what it argues are five key metrics of freedom of expression: 1) Civic space, which looks at indicators related to the ability of individuals and civil society organisations to associate and be active; 2) Digital, which measures online censorship and freedom of online discussion, and covers internet shut-downs by governments, censorship of social media, and approach to online content moderation; 3) Media, which measures factors such as government censorship and self-censorship, laws that limit online expression, etc. 4) Protection, which measures threats to the safety of journalists and other communicators and human rights defenders are rising, including murders and imprisonment, as well as judicial harassment, and 5) Transparency, which looks at whether laws are transparent and enforced in a predictable manner, whether there are effective oversight bodies, impartial public administration, and so on.

Legal threats to freedom of expression continue in a number of countries, the report says, “from broad and ambiguous national security laws to laws that unduly limit online expression, as well as new frameworks that delegate blocking and removal to online platforms, which often do so without transparency or accountability.” That latter comment is clearly directed at Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube, which have been under fire for some time for their poorly communicated and often haphazard attempts to block hate speech and other bad behavior. According to Article 19, media freedom and digital free expression “are both lower than they were a decade ago in every region of the world except the Middle East and North Africa.” Executive director Thomas Hughes said that many of the threats are not new — state violence, judicial harassment, etc. — but the group has also seen an increase in governments “using digital technology to surveil their citizens, restrict content and shut down communications.”

Continue reading “Freedom of expression is at a ten-year low, study says”