Epstein: The Sports Gene(s)

Here's a level-headed sounding new book by a Sports Illustrated writer:

The Sports Gene: Inside the Science of Extraordinary Athletic Performance

by David Epstein 

In high school, I wondered whether the Jamaican Americans who made our track team so successful might carry some special speed gene from their tiny island. In college, I ran against Kenyans, and wondered whether endurance genes might have traveled with them from East Africa. At the same time, I began to notice that a training group on my team could consist of five men who run next to one another, stride for stride, day after day, and nonetheless turn out five entirely different runners. How could this be? 

We all knew a star athlete in high school. The one who made it look so easy. He was the starting quarterback and shortstop; she was the all-state point guard and high-jumper. Naturals. Or were they? 

The debate is as old as physical competition. Are stars like Usain Bolt, Michael Phelps, and Serena Williams genetic freaks put on Earth to dominate their respective sports? Or are they simply normal people who overcame their biological limits through sheer force of will and obsessive training? 

The truth is far messier than a simple dichotomy between nature and nurture. In the decade since the sequencing of the human genome, researchers have slowly begun to uncover how the relationship between biological endowments and a competitor’s training environment affects athleticism. Sports scientists have gradually entered the era of modern genetic research. 

In this controversial and engaging exploration of athletic success, Sports Illustrated senior writer David Epstein tackles the great nature vs. nurture debate and traces how far science has come in solving this great riddle. He investigates the so-called 10,000-hour rule to uncover whether rigorous and consistent practice from a young age is the only route to athletic excellence. 

He cites Donald Thomas, a basketball player from the Bahamas, who took up high-jumping in early 2006 and won the World Championship in the summer of 2007. Still, for more complicated sports, the 10,000 hour rule seems reasonable. Of course, as Epstein emphasizes, 10,000 hours of practice is not sufficient. LeBron James is going to be better at you than basketball no matter how much you practice.

Along the way, Epstein dispels many of our perceptions about why top athletes excel. He shows why some skills that we assume are innate, like the bullet-fast reactions of a baseball or cricket batter, are not, and why other characteristics that we assume are entirely voluntary, like an athlete’s will to train, might in fact have important genetic components. 

This subject necessarily involves digging deep into sensitive topics like race and gender. Epstein explores controversial questions such as: 

Are black athletes genetically predetermined to dominate both sprinting and distance running, and are their abilities influenced by Africa’s geography? 

Are there genetic reasons to separate male and female athletes in competition? 

Should we test the genes of young children to determine if they are destined for stardom? 

Can genetic testing determine who is at risk of injury, brain damage, or even death on the field? 

Epstein claims there's a high correlation between football players getting brain damage and one allele of one gene. If true, it would make sense to have your son genetically tested before allowing him to play football.

Through on-the-ground reporting from below the equator and above the Arctic Circle, revealing conversations with leading scientists and Olympic champions, and interviews with athletes who have rare genetic mutations or physical traits, Epstein forces us to rethink the very nature of athleticism.

Here's an interview with Epstein.

It sounds rather like Jon Entine's 2001 book Taboo: Why Black Athletes Dominate Sports And Why We're Afraid To Talk About It, but recast somewhat for the self-help genre.

He says that in a test of simple reaction times, slugger Albert Pujols, three-time National League MVP, only scored at the 66th percentile compared to Washington U. of St. Louis undergrads. I don't know exactly what to make of this, but I've always found Arthur Jensen's work on reaction times doesn't map all that well to what's observable in sports. Clearly, there must be some complicated wrinkles to fully understanding reaction times that I've never managed to get clear in my head.

CNN: Here's a giant Marco McMillian story with no new news!

From CNN last month, the opening of an 18-page article:

Mysterious Mississippi murder stokes suspicions bred by an ugly past  

Beaten. Dragged. Burned. 

The words leave attorney Daryl Parks' lips like a barrage of gunfire in the sanctuary of Chapel Hill Missionary Baptist Church, where people have gathered not for prayer but for answers. 

Some wear "Justice for Marco" T-shirts. They are enraged over the investigation into the death of Marco McMillian, a young black gay mayoral candidate, whose broken body was discovered dumped downhill from a Mississippi River levee on February 26. 

Parks' words suggest the most heinous of murders. Here in the Mississippi Delta, they conjure even more: a chilling history of racial hatred.

Except that back in February a blood-covered young black man named Lawrence Reed, who was driving McMillian's stolen car, confessed to multiple witnesses that he had just murdered McMillian with his wallet chain.

They just can't admit defeat, can they?

What's next? A Michael Moore documentary about the Oberlin KKK rally?

NYT: "Bush drive for home ownership fueled housing bubble"

For six years, I've been pointing out that the mortgage meltdown of 2007 that kicked off the great recession of 2008 was tied to George W. Bush's successful 2002-2004 push to make mortgages easier for minorities to obtain. But if you Google "White House Conference on Increasing Minority Homeownership," there's not much interest in Bush's role. The first two hits are government archives, and the third is my 9/24/2008 post of Bush's 10/15/2002 speech at his conference. 

Interestingly, though, the sixth hit is a New York Times article from two months later that I'd never seen before, which closely follows and validates much of my argument:

Bush drive for home ownership fueled housing bubble 

By Jo Becker, Sheryl Gay Stolberg and Stephen Labaton 

Published: Sunday, December 21, 2008 

WASHINGTON — "We can put light where there's darkness, and hope where there's despondency in this country. And part of it is working together as a nation to encourage folks to own their own home." 

- President George W. Bush, Oct. 15, 2002 

... Eight years after arriving in Washington vowing to spread the dream of home ownership, Bush is leaving office, as he himself said recently, "faced with the prospect of a global meltdown" with roots in the housing sector he so ardently championed. 

There are plenty of culprits, like lenders who peddled easy credit, consumers who took on mortgages they could not afford and Wall Street chieftains who loaded up on mortgage-backed securities without regard to the risk. 

But the story of how the United States got here is partly one of Bush's own making, according to a review of his tenure that included interviews with dozens of current and former administration officials. 

From his earliest days in office, Bush paired his belief that Americans do best when they own their own homes with his conviction that markets do best when left alone. Bush pushed hard to expand home ownership, especially among minority groups, an initiative that dovetailed with both his ambition to expand Republican appeal and the business interests of some of his biggest donors. But his housing policies and hands-off approach to regulation encouraged lax lending standards. 

Bush did foresee the danger posed by Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the government-sponsored mortgage finance giants. The president spent years pushing a recalcitrant Congress to toughen regulation of the companies, but was unwilling to compromise when his former Treasury secretary wanted to cut a deal. And the regulator Bush chose to oversee them - an old school buddy - pronounced the companies sound even as they headed toward insolvency. 

As early as 2006, top advisers to Bush dismissed warnings from people inside and outside the White House that housing prices were inflated and that a foreclosure crisis was looming. ...

And both Paulson and his predecessor, John Snow, say the housing push went too far. 

"The Bush administration took a lot of pride that home ownership had reached historic highs," Snow said during an interview. "But what we forgot in the process was that it has to be done in the context of people being able to afford their house. We now realize there was a high cost." 

For much of the Bush presidency, the White House was preoccupied by terrorism and war; on the economic front, its pressing concerns were cutting taxes and privatizing Social Security, a government retirement and disability benefits program. The housing market was a bright spot: Ever-rising home values kept the economy humming, as owners drew down on their equity to buy consumer goods and pack their children off to college. 

Lawrence Lindsay, Bush's first chief economic adviser, said there was little impetus to raise alarms about the proliferation of easy credit that was helping Bush meet housing goals. 

"No one wanted to stop that bubble," Lindsay said. "It would have conflicted with the president's own policies." 

Today, millions of Americans are facing foreclosure, home ownership rates are virtually no higher than when Bush took office, Fannie and Freddie are in a government conservatorship, and the bailout cost to taxpayers could run in the trillions of dollars. 

As the economy has shed jobs - 533,000 last month alone - and his party has been punished by irate voters, the weakened president has granted his Treasury secretary extraordinary leeway in managing the crisis. 

... Darrin West could not believe it. The president of the United States was standing in his living room. It was June 17, 2002, a day West recalls as "the highlight of my life." Bush, in Atlanta to introduce a plan to increase the number of minority homeowners by 5.5 million, was touring Park Place South, a development of starter homes in a neighborhood once marked by blight and crime. 

West had patrolled there as a police officer, and now he was the proud owner of a $130,000 town house, bought with an adjustable-rate mortgage and a $20,000 government loan as his down payment - just the sort of creative public-private financing Bush was promoting. 

"Part of economic security," Bush declared that day, "is owning your own home." 

A lot has changed since then. West, beset by personal problems, has left Atlanta. Unable to sell his home for what he owed, he said, he gave it back to the bank last year. Like other communities across the United States, Park Place South has been hit with a foreclosure crisis affecting at least 10 percent of its 232 homes, according to Masharn Wilson, a developer who led Bush's tour. "I just don't think what he envisioned was actually carried out," she said. 

Park Place South is, in microcosm, the story of a well-intentioned policy gone awry. Advocating home ownership is hardly novel; Bill Clinton's administration did it, too. For Bush, it was part of his vision of an "ownership society," in which Americans would rely less on the government for health care, retirement and shelter. It was also good politics, a way to court black and Hispanic voters. 

But for much of Bush's tenure, government statistics show, incomes for most families remained relatively stagnant while housing prices skyrocketed. That put home ownership increasingly out of reach for first-time buyers like West. 

So Bush had to, in his words, "use the mighty muscle of the federal government" to meet his goal. He proposed affordable housing tax incentives. 

He insisted that Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac meet ambitious new goals for low-income lending. 

Concerned that down payments were a barrier, Bush persuaded Congress to spend as much as $200 million a year to help first-time buyers with down payments and closing costs. 

This bill, which Congress passed in 2004, was largely symbolic, but symbolism is important.

And he pushed to allow first-time buyers to qualify for government insured mortgages with no money down. Republican congressional leaders and some housing advocates balked, arguing that homeowners with no stake in their investments would be more prone to walk away, as West did. Many economic experts, including some in the White House, now share that view. 

The president also leaned on mortgage brokers and lenders to devise their own innovations. "Corporate America," he said, "has a responsibility to work to make America a compassionate place." 

And corporate America, eyeing a lucrative market, delivered in ways Bush might not have expected, with a proliferation of too-good-to-be-true teaser rates and interest-only loans that were sold to investors in a loosely regulated environment. But Bush populated the financial system's alphabet soup of oversight agencies with people who, like him, wanted fewer rules, not more. 

The president's first chairman of the Securities and Exchange Commission promised a "kinder, gentler" agency. The second was pushed out amid industry complaints that he was too aggressive. Under its current leader, the agency failed to police the catastrophic decisions that toppled the investment bank Bear Stearns and contributed to the current crisis, according to a recent inspector general's report. 

As for Bush's banking regulators, they once brandished a chain saw over a 9,000-page pile of regulations as they promised to ease burdens on the industry.  

When states tried to use consumer protection laws to crack down on predatory lending, the comptroller of the currency blocked the effort, asserting that states had no authority over national banks. 

The administration won that fight at the Supreme Court. But Roy Cooper, North Carolina's attorney general, said, "They took 50 sheriffs off the beat at a time when lending was becoming the Wild West."

State laws regarding lending, which tend to be older and less fashionable than federal laws, were generally better. They could make a difference, as the sharp distinction between Pennsylvania (strict regulations, fewer foreclosures) and Ohio (loose regulations, more foreclosures) showed.

The president did push rules aimed at requiring lenders to explain loan terms more clearly. But the White House shelved them in 2004, after industry-friendly members of Congress threatened to block confirmation of his new housing secretary. 

In the 2004 election cycle, mortgage bankers and brokers poured nearly $847,000 into Bush's re-election campaign, more than triple their contributions in 2000, according to the nonpartisan Center for Responsive Politics. The administration did not complete the new rules until last month. 

Today, administration officials say it is fair to ask whether Bush's ownership push backfired. Paulson said the administration, like others before it, "over-incented housing."

Indeed.

O'Hehir: Detroit went bankrupt because Republicans hate Smokey Robinson

Salon's movie critic Andrew O'Hehir is one of the more interesting liberal writers around because he notices things: e.g., he was practically the only mainstream film critic to be unsettled by Neill Blomkamp's District 9. O'Hehir is just about the only conventionally liberal film critic who is aware that many top filmmakers aren't conventional liberals. Of course, O'Herir doesn't have anything more intelligent to offer in response than the conventional wisdom of 1975, but he's at least not immune to pattern recognition.

Why the right hates Detroit 

How the fates of two great cities, Detroit and New Orleans, symbolize what's gone wrong with America 

BY ANDREW O'HEHIR

Two great American cities have now faced near-death experiences in the 21st century. While Detroit’s gradual slide into bankruptcy and the almost biblical inundation of New Orleans in 2005 look quite different on the surface, I’m more struck by the similarities. ... Then there’s the obvious but uncomfortable fact that both are cities with large black majorities, in a country where African-Americans are only about 13 percent of the population. 

But Detroit and New Orleans are not just cities where lots of black people happen to live. They are uniquely important and symbolic centers of African-American culture in particular and American culture in general, whose influence spread into every luxury high-rise, every suburban street and every farmhouse in the country. Both cities have been rigidly resegregated now, but at their cultural height both were places of tremendous fusion and ferment. Jazz was born from the children and grandchildren of kidnapped Africans learning to play European instruments for the dance parties of biracial French-speaking aristocrats; Berry Gordy’s great Motown recordings borrowed the Detroit Symphony’s string section to create what he called “the Sound of Young America,” driving white teenagers to shake a tail feather at sock hops across the land. ...

Is it pure coincidence that these two landmark cities, known around the world as fountainheads of the most vibrant and creative aspects of American culture, have become our two direst examples of urban failure and collapse? If so, it’s an awfully strange one.

Why? Why is it "awfully strange" that a local talent for party music correlates with a local lack of skill at administration? Shouldn't even movie reviewers have been introduced to the concept of cultural tradeoffs via Orson Welles' speech in The Third Man about how Switzerland had more civic virtues but fewer artistic accomplishments than Borgia Italy?

As I wrote during Hurricane Katrina:

No, the perfect storm was actually the combination of social and governmental incompetence at local, state, and federal levels—and unmentionable racial reality. 

Republican Presidents are supposed to provide adult supervision for crooked Democratic urban machines. But the White House is now occupied by George W. Bush ... 

The ineptitude displayed by the Louisiana state government is also unsurprising. The state is unique in having a Latin political tradition, ... a culture in which the Argentinean demagogue Juan Peron would have felt at home. 

The unofficial state motto is "Laissez les bons temps rouler" or "Let the good times roll." Compare that to New Hampshire's official motto of "Live free or die," which display a rather different understanding of freedom. Louisiana's reigning philosophy is freedom from responsibility. 

It's a general rule that the tastier the indigenous cuisine, the lousier the government. Its culture has provided America with jazz, A Street Car Named Desire, and the great American comic novel of the 20th Century, A Confederacy of Dunces. New Orleans is a nice place to visit. But you wouldn't want to raise your kids there. 

All this is now common parlance, more or less. What you won't hear, except from me, is that "Let the good times roll" is an especially risky message for African-Americans. The plain fact is that they tend to possess poorer native judgment than members of better-educated groups. Thus they need stricter moral guidance from society.

Black-run polities aren't doomed to failure, but they tend to have a smaller margin for error. Out of about 40 black African countries, Botswana, for example, has been ruled fairly well since independence, with some others improving over time. Others, not so much.

New Orleans itself is two-thirds black. It has had nothing but black mayors since 1978. All four of them are from the light-skinned "creole of color" elite, including the notorious Marc H. Morial, now head of the National Urban League. The city government is corrupt and lackadaisical. While the police department has perhaps rebounded from the depths it reached a decade ago when an officer was condemned to death for having a mother of three rubbed out by drug gangstas in his employ, nobody should be surprised that last week numerous officers ran away, and some even freelanced as looters. 

In a racially diverse democracy like New Orleans, voting for good government takes a backseat to voting for your tribe's representatives in the eternal ethnic tussle over slices of the pie. 

O'Herir goes on:

I’m tempted to propose a conspiracy theory: As centers of African-American cultural and political power and engines of a worldwide multiracial pop culture that was egalitarian, hedonistic and anti-authoritarian, these cities posed a psychic threat to the most reactionary and racist strains in American life. I mean the strain represented by Tom Buchanan in “The Great Gatsby” (imagine what he’d have to say about New Orleans jazz)

Oh, boy, Tom Buchanan again. Someday, I'm going to have to explain the racial emotions besetting F. Scott Fitzgerald. They are more complicated than many people today are capable of noticing.

or by the slightly more coded racism of Sean Hannity today. As payback for the worldwide revolution symbolized by hot jazz, Smokey Robinson dancin’ to keep from cryin’ and Eminem trading verses with Rihanna, New Orleans and Detroit had to be punished. Specifically, they had to be isolated, impoverished and almost literally destroyed, so they could be held up as examples of what happens when black people are allowed to govern themselves. 

Hang on, you can stop composing that all-caps comment – I don’t actually believe that what happened to Detroit and New Orleans resulted from anyone’s conscious plan. Real history is much more complicated than that. I do, however, think that narrative has some validity on a psychological level, and that some right-wingers in America are so delusional, so short-sighted and, frankly, so unpatriotic and culturally backward that they were delighted to see those cities fail and did everything possible to help them along. ...

In the wake of both Hurricane Katrina and the Detroit bankruptcy, many mainstream commentators have tried, with varying degrees of subtlety, to frame these events as “black stories,” and specifically as stories of black dysfunction and black political failure. I’m willing to bet that many white Americans still believe those hysterical early post-Katrina stories about New Orleans residents shooting at aid helicopters (all were later retracted or exposed as false), or believe there was widespread rape and murder among the 20,000 refugees in the Louisiana Superdome. (There were no homicides and only one reported sexual assault, an attempted rape.)

No, that's just part of the usual cover-up after a big riot. See this December 21, 2005 NPR story on how three months later, the authorities still didn't want to know how many rapes were committed during Katrina.

Mediawise, what happened in New Orleans was that the first day or two of the disaster were covered primarily by local TV news. Local TV has an "if it bleeds, it leads" mindset, so they put all sorts of horrifying news on the air for the national audience. After the early going, however, the Washington and New York bigfoot TV correspondents descended with an agenda of scrubbing the local story of chaos and recasting it instead as the event that would bring down George W. Bush (a not wholly undeserving villain, of course).

While the Detroit situation is normally described as a failure of tax-and-spend, pro-union liberal policies, the racial coding you’ll find on Fox News and elsewhere is crystal clear – and the reader comments on any Detroit-related article, on Salon as elsewhere, will curl your hair with overt racial hatred. ...

But the long, hot summer of 2013 – the summer of Paula Deen’s Aunt Jemima costumes and the upside-down O.J. verdict of the George Zimmerman case and the barely concealed conservative jubilation at Detroit’s demise – has reminded us that America’s ugly old-school racial narratives die hard, if they die at all. 

It's almost as if those old patterns still keep recurring.

Noticing patterns

From the AP:

A person familiar with the negotiations tells The Associated Press that all players targeted for drug suspensions other than Alex Rodriguez have accepted 50-game penalties from Major League Baseball.... 

The person says All-Stars Nelson Cruz of Texas, Jhonny Peralta of Detroit and Everth Cabrera of San Diego are among the 12 who accepted penalties Monday. 

Others include Yankees catcher Francisco Cervelli and outfielder Fernando Martinez; Philadelphia pitcher Antonio Bastardo; Seattle catcher Jesus Montero; New York Mets infielder Jordany Valdespin and outfielder Cesar Puello; Houston pitcher Sergio Escalona; San Diego pitcher Fautino De Los Santos; and free agent pitcher Jordan Norberto. 

MLB informed the Yankees on Sunday that [Alex] Rodriguez will be suspended for his links to the Biogenesis of America clinic ... 

Milwaukee outfielder Ryan Braun accepted a 65-game suspension two weeks ago, bringing to 14 the number of players - including Rodriguez - facing discipline in the probe, which was sparked when the Miami New Times published documents obtained from former Biogenesis associate Porter Fisher that linked several players to the clinic.

So, 13 players with Spanish surnames and Ryan Braun, a smart Valley Dude who weaseled his way to beating the rap once before by attacking the veracity of the poor bastard whose job it is to collect the urine samples of rich baseball players.

I've long been interested in the hidden history of the spread of performance-enhancing drugs. It's hard to come up with a history of performance-enhancing drug use in the U.S. because we only have records of those who got caught (leaving out those smart enough to not get caught), and, before testing, memoirs and inferences.

My guess is that steroids in American sports got started in the late 1950s in Olympic track and field, such as the weightlifting and throwing events. 

The geographic hotspots where PEDs made the leap into pro team sports likely included California (e.g., the 1963 San Diego Chargers) and the steel state of Pennsylvania, the home of barbell manufacturing and the doctor who invented Dianabol and gave it to the 1960 U.S. Olympic weightlifting team (e.g., the 1970s Pittsburgh Steelers).

But, at some point, the Latin connection (e.g., Jose Canseco of Miami) becomes obvious in baseball. Alex Rodriguez, for instance, was born in New York, moved to the Dominican Republic, then went to high school in Miami in the early 1990s. By the way, Rodriguez has been paid $353,000,000 to play baseball. 

Latin ballplayers used to be known as wiry middle infielders who didn't get many walks. Over time, they became known as big sluggers. There are various reasons for this evolution, but we shouldn't overlook the fact that steroids could be bought without a prescription in corner drug stores in the Dominican Republic. Much of the rise of DR in baseball has to do with 16-year-old professional ballplayers shooting up steroids.

A hazier possible link is that certain sports doctors in Spain and other Mediterranean countries sometime around the Barcelona Olympics of 1992 developed a variety of more sophisticated ways to use chemicals to enhance performance than just to shoot up with steroids. Is that connected to Miami?

Finally, and most tenuously, there might be some distant Latin cultural connection to Mediterranean body worship in Renaissance Italy (e.g., Michelangelo's David), Rome, and Greece.

Being a Human Sign is just another job robots will do

2006

Back in 2006, I pointed out that the rapid spread from Mexico to California of "human directionals," people paid to stand on street corners and jiggle giant arrows pointing to real estate open houses exemplified the 21st Century's Cheap Labor / Expensive Land economy.

As I wrote in a 2008 short story "Unreal Estate" about a house-hunting trip to Antelope Valley:

Once off the highway, you see at least one person standing at every intersection twirling or jiggling a giant arrow pointing to an open house. “Human Signs,” nods Travis. “Like back in the Depression when guys would walk around wearing sandwich boards reading ‘Eat at Joe’s.’ But this is the opposite of a depression. Real estate commissions are six percent, so, on a $400k house, that’s $20k, which pays for a lot of twirling.”

2013

But, robots are now taking over the Human Sign profession.

From the L.A. Times:

Levy imports his battery-operated mannequins from China. They rent for $370 a month or can be purchased for $797. The plug-in electric models go for about $50 less. 

Although male mannequins are available, "the females outsell them 99 to 1," Levy said. "We have a busty model and one with a regular figure. The regular one is more popular: I personally think the busty one is overdone." 

Passing motorists find the 65-pound sign wavers convincingly realistic. 

"I was at a convention in Las Vegas last weekend, and several guys came up and tried to talk to the sign dolls," Levy said. Bar customers, he said, sometimes pose with the mechanical female sign waver parked in front of a nearby shop. 

The makers of robotic mannequins tout their creations as ideal workers who are always on time, never need a lunch break and never complain about being underpaid. 

Lactose tolerance hotspots

From Nature:

Most people who retain the ability to digest milk can trace their ancestry to Europe, where the trait seems to be linked to a single nucleotide in which the DNA base cytosine changed to thymine in a genomic region not far from the lactase gene. There are other pockets of lactase persistence in West Africa (see Nature 444, 994–996; 2006), the Middle East and south Asia that seem to be linked to separate mutations3 (see 'Lactase hotspots'). 

The single-nucleotide switch in Europe happened relatively recently. Thomas and his colleagues estimated the timing by looking at genetic variations in modern populations and running computer simulations of how the related genetic mutation might have spread through ancient populations4. They proposed that the trait of lactase persistence, dubbed the LP allele, emerged about 7,500 years ago in the broad, fertile plains of Hungary. 

Once the LP allele appeared, it offered a major selective advantage. In a 2004 study5, researchers estimated that people with the mutation would have produced up to 19% more fertile offspring than those who lacked it. The researchers called that degree of selection “among the strongest yet seen for any gene in the genome”. 

Compounded over several hundred generations, that advantage could help a population to take over a continent. But only if “the population has a supply of fresh milk and is dairying”, says Thomas. “It's gene–culture co-evolution. They feed off of each other.”

Much of Northwestern Europe comprises difficult land for growing crops, but grows grass abundantly. Without dairying, the population density would have stayed low outside the rich river valleys, keeping this largely a fringe area, like Finland. (This lactose tolerance-centric theory of history was put forward by Irish dairy farmer/economist Raymond D. Crotty.)

Random fluctuation causes crisis

For some reason, turnout was low.

From the New York Times:

Women Scarce In the Top Posts Of Los Angeles 

By ADAM NAGOURNEY 

LOS ANGELES — There are 1.9 million women in Los Angeles. The two senators from California are women, as is the state’s attorney general.

But this city, a bastion of progressive politics, has a curious distinction these days. Only one woman holds elective office in the entire government of Los Angeles, a member of the 15-person City Council from the San Fernando Valley who was sworn in only on Friday. 

The mayor is a man, Eric M. Garcetti, who defeated a woman, Wendy Greuel, for the job in May. The city attorney is a man. The city controller? You guessed it. 

Los Angeles County, with a population of 9.9 million that includes Los Angeles, has just one woman on its five-member Board of Supervisors. And the race to fill the City Council seat for Hollywood, which Mr. Garcetti vacated when he was elected mayor, gave voters a choice of 12 candidates — all men.

Los Angeles, especially the hilly section like Garcetti's old district, has a lot of gay men, but it's a lousy place for lesbians: too expensive, and Los Angeles's straight women are far too obsessed with their looks to pay heed to lesbian feminist scolds. Beverly Hills Persian women, for instance, pay a lot of money to gay men for various luxuries, but they would also be about the last people on earth to take lesbians seriously. Vermont would be a lot more attractive to lesbians.

The overwhelmingly male lineup in local elected offices has caught many people here by surprise, overlooked in the general lack of interest in this year’s campaigns. And it has become a subject of considerable chagrin, civic embarrassment and impassioned discussions about exactly what happened. 

“When I was in elementary school, there were like five women on the City Council,” said Nury Martinez, the city’s lone woman in elected office, speaking in her empty Council office at City Hall. “It’s a shame and embarrassing that in a city of four million people we are down to one woman.” 

Eventually, Nagourney gets around to relating this non-story to something more interesting:

The case in Los Angeles might be particularly egregious, but the number of women holding office across the country has flat-lined in recent years. 

“Can you believe it?” said Celinda Lake, a Democratic pollster who works extensively with female candidates, including Ms. Greuel. “It’s part of a national trend. We are seeing this in a lot of places — in offices in statewide office, in a number of city councils. But it’s really shocking. That is a state that is very pro-women.” 

The situation here has caught the attention of national women’s advocacy groups, including Emily’s List, which is planning to begin a training and recruitment campaign here aimed at enlisting women to run for office. 

“We do not want to see any city without equal representation of women — and in this case, we are really, really off, “said Stephanie Schriock, the president of the organization. 

Katherine Spillar, the head of the Feminist Majority Foundation, called the situation “shocking.” 

“I’m very concerned,” she said. “We have gone backwards instead of forwards. Shame on Los Angeles.” 

To some extent, the gender lineup at City Hall is an anomaly, the result of the natural ebb and flow of electoral politics. Ms. Greuel, the previous city controller, had to leave her position because of term limits — in this case, to run unsuccessfully for mayor. She would have been Los Angeles’s first female chief executive. 

Several analysts suggested that the sheer number of women in high elected office in California had inured voters to the issue, and blunted what might otherwise have been a historical urgency to Ms. Greuel’s campaign. 

I've met Wendy Greuel. She's a nice lady. But, "historical urgency" is hardly the first term that she inspires.

There is no reason to expect the situation to change significantly any time soon; few obvious female candidates are on the horizon. Indeed, to a large extent, the issue here and across the country reflects a lack of interest on the part of many women in seeking office, political analysts said. 

“The issue isn’t that voters won’t vote for women — it’s that we don’t have enough women running,” Debbie Walsh, the director of the Center for American Women and Politics at Rutgers University, said in an e-mail. “It’s a recruitment issue.” 

In one measure of the representation of women in state and local government, 73 women hold elected statewide positions across the nation, or 23 percent of available positions, according to the center. That is almost identical to the percentage reported in 1993. The figure then increased through 2001, to 28 percent, but has been in a steady decline over the past 12 years, the center said. 

The current surge in these kind of feminist bean-counting articles is an artifact of the 2012 Obama campaign reinflating old feminist resentments for the sake of increasing turnout among Obama's core supporters, who are America's fringe voters.

But the reality is that nothing much is going on in terms of gender trends. The current feminist era began 44 years ago, and by a couple of decades ago, most of what was going to change had changed.

Nate Silver and Small Data

Colby Cosh writes on prognosticator Nate Silver's move from the New York Times to ESPN

It is amusing to me, and I bet it is pretty amusing to him, that Nate Silver has become so venerated even as the popular understanding of what he does remains so impoverished. ... Silver went to the trouble of writing a whole book about what he does, but it is in the nature of such books to be bought more than they are read and read more than they are understood. The proof is that Silver’s name has become inextricably linked with one of the oppressive buzzwords of 2013: “big data”. 

People know “big data” has something to do with statistics, and, hey, who’s the most famous statistics guy on the planet? I’ll let you in on a bluffer’s secret: what “big data” denotes are massive realtime streams of ever-changing information, such as web traffic or the Twitter “firehose”, that can potentially be bent to commercial purposes using powerful and bleeding-edge computational techniques. Silver has always worked exclusively, at least in public, with what might be called “small data”: sets of a few hundred political polls or ballplayers’ statistical lines. He is living proof that there is money to be made applying 50- or 100-year old statistical nostrums and exploratory techniques to such small data. 

As for why Silver moved from a newspaper to a TV network, why wouldn't an ambitious young media figure want to be with a powerful TV network? What makes you money is getting your name and face recognized, and TV is a lot better for the latter.

Arches National Park's five languages

At the visitor's center in Arches National Park, just outside Moab, Utah, there are touch screens to help you plan your visit. 

The first question that comes up on the screen is which of five languages do you want to work in. Can you guess which four languages are offered to tourists besides English?

Answers after the break:

Testing going out of fashion

Oh, wait ... despite all the articles I've read asserting that over the last 40 years, that isn't actually happening. Instead, the test business is booming. For example, the number of students taking the ACT (the Iowa-based college admissions exam has gone up 128% since 1986).

More and more high school students are taking both the ACT and the SAT.

Because you can't test prep enough.

In general, we live in a world where increasingly more people behave like devout readers of iSteve, while everybody swears they don't believe in what they are doing.

Robert Mugabe wins again

Robert Mugabe, age 89, won a reported 61% of the vote in Zimbabwe last week, propelling him into his second third-of-a-century as ruler of the former Rhodesia. While he had to nominally share power with a rival for the last five years, his new 3/4th majority in parliament allows him to now govern alone.

Here are some music videos of what Zimbabwe looked like, despite international economic boycotts, when it was called Rhodesia in the mid-1970s.

It's a land blessed by nature. For example, the capital city is at 4,865 elevation, which makes for a pleasant climate.

Here's Theodore Dalrymple's 2003 City Journal article on his years in Rhodesia:

After Empire

As soon as I qualified as a doctor, I went to Rhodesia, which was to transform itself into Zimbabwe five years or so later. In the next decade, I worked and traveled a great deal in Africa and couldn’t help but reflect upon such matters as the clash of cultures, the legacy of colonialism, and the practical effects of good intentions unadulterated by any grasp of reality. I gradually came to the conclusion that the rich and powerful can indeed have an effect upon the poor and powerless—perhaps can even remake them—but not necessarily (in fact, necessarily not) in the way they wanted or anticipated. The law of unintended consequences is stronger than the most absolute power. 

I went to Rhodesia because I wanted to see the last true outpost of colonialism in Africa, the final gasp of the British Empire that had done so much to shape the modern world. True, it had now rebelled against the mother country and was a pariah state: but it was still recognizably British in all but name. As Sir Roy Welensky, the prime minister of the short-lived and ill-fated Federation of Rhodesia and Nyasaland, once described himself, he was “half-Polish, half-Jewish, one hundred percent British.” 

Until my arrival at Bulawayo Airport, the British Empire had been for me principally a philatelic phenomenon. ... And my father—a communist by conviction—also encouraged me to read the works of G. A. Henty, late-nineteenth-century adventure stories, extolling the exploits of empire builders, who by bravery, sterling character, superior intelligence, and force majeure overcame the resistance of such spirited but doomed peoples as the Zulu and the Fuzzy-Wuzzies. Henty might seem an odd choice for a communist to give his son, but Marx himself was an imperialist of a kind, believing that European colonialism was an instrument of progress toward History’s happy denouement; only at a later stage, after it had performed its progressive work, was empire to be condemned. 

And condemned Rhodesia most certainly was, loudly and insistently, as if it were the greatest threat to world peace and the security of the planet. By the time I arrived, it had no friends, only enemies. Even South Africa, the regional colossus, with which Rhodesia shared a long border and which might have been expected to be sympathetic, was highly ambivalent toward it: ... 

I expected to find on my arrival, therefore, a country in crisis and decay. Instead, I found a country that was, to all appearances, thriving: its roads were well maintained, its transport system functioning, its towns and cities clean and manifesting a municipal pride long gone from England. There were no electricity cuts or shortages of basic food commodities. The large hospital in which I was to work, while stark and somewhat lacking in comforts, was extremely clean and ran with exemplary efficiency. The staff, mostly black except for its most senior members, had a vibrant esprit de corps, and the hospital, as I discovered, had a reputation for miles around for the best of medical care. The rural poor would make immense and touching efforts to reach it: they arrived covered in the dust of their long journeys. The African nationalist leader and foe of the government, Joshua Nkomo, was a patient there and trusted the care implicitly: for medical ethics transcended all political antagonisms. 

The surgeon for whom I worked, who came from England, was the best I have ever known ... Within a short time of the political handover in 1980, however, he returned to England—not because of any racial feeling or political antagonism but simply because the swift degeneration of standards in the hospital made the high-level practice of surgery impossible. The institution that had seemed to me on my arrival to be so solid and well founded fell apart in the historical twinkling of an eye. 

... I, whose salary was by other standards small, lived at a level that I have scarcely equaled since. It is true that Rhodesia lacked many consumer goods at that time, due to the economic sanctions imposed upon it: but what I learned from this lack is how little consumer goods add to the quality of life, at least in an equable climate such as Rhodesia’s. Life was no poorer for being lived without them. 

The real luxuries were space and beauty—and the time to enjoy them. ... The luxury of our life was this: that, our work once done, we never had to perform a single chore for ourselves. The rest of our time, in our most beautiful surroundings, was given over to friendship, sport, study, hunting—whatever we wished. 

Of course, our leisure rested upon a pyramid of startling inequality and social difference. The staff who freed us of life’s little inconveniences lived an existence that was opaque to us, though they had quarters only a few yards from where we lived. Their hopes, wishes, fears, and aspirations were not ours; their beliefs, tastes, and customs were alien to us. 

Our very distance, socially and psychologically, made our relations with them unproblematical and easy. ...

By contrast, our relations with our African medical colleagues were harder-edged, because the social, intellectual, and cultural distance between us was far reduced. Rhodesia was still a white-dominated society, but for reasons of practical necessity, and in a vain attempt to convince the world that it was not as monstrous as made out, it had produced a growing cadre of educated Africans, doctors prominent among them. Unsurprisingly, they were not content to remain subalterns under the permanent tutelage of whites, so that our relations with them were superficially polite and collegial, but human warmth was difficult or impossible. Many belonged secretly to the African nationalist movement that was soon to take power; and two were to serve (if that is the word to describe their depredations) as ministers of health. 

Unlike in South Africa, where salaries were paid according to a racial hierarchy (whites first, Indians and coloured second, Africans last), salaries in Rhodesia were equal for blacks and whites doing the same job, so that a black junior doctor received the same salary as mine. But there remained a vast gulf in our standards of living, the significance of which at first escaped me; but it was crucial in explaining the disasters that befell the newly independent countries that enjoyed what Byron called, and eagerly anticipated as, the first dance of freedom. 

The young black doctors who earned the same salary as we whites could not achieve the same standard of living for a very simple reason: they had an immense number of social obligations to fulfill. They were expected to provide for an ever expanding circle of family members (some of whom may have invested in their education) and people from their village, tribe, and province. 

An income that allowed a white to live like a lord because of a lack of such obligations scarcely raised a black above the level of his family. Mere equality of salary, therefore, was quite insufficient to procure for them the standard of living that they saw the whites had and that it was only human nature for them to desire—and believe themselves entitled to, on account of the superior talent that had allowed them to raise themselves above their fellows. In fact, a salary a thousand times as great would hardly have been sufficient to procure it: for their social obligations increased pari passu with their incomes. 

These obligations also explain the fact, often disdainfully remarked upon by former colonials, that when Africans moved into the beautiful and well-appointed villas of their former colonial masters, the houses swiftly degenerated into a species of superior, more spacious slum. Just as African doctors were perfectly equal to their medical tasks, technically speaking, so the degeneration of colonial villas had nothing to do with the intellectual inability of Africans to maintain them. Rather, the fortunate inheritor of such a villa was soon overwhelmed by relatives and others who had a social claim upon him. They brought even their goats with them; and one goat can undo in an afternoon what it has taken decades to establish. 

It is easy to see why a civil service, controlled and manned in its upper reaches by whites, could remain efficient and uncorrupt but could not long do so when manned by Africans who were supposed to follow the same rules and procedures. The same is true, of course, for every other administrative activity, public or private. The thick network of social obligations explains why, while it would have been out of the question to bribe most Rhodesian bureaucrats, yet in only a few years it would have been out of the question not to try to bribe most Zimbabwean ones, whose relatives would have condemned them for failing to obtain on their behalf all the advantages their official opportunities might provide. ... 

Of course, the solidarity and inescapable social obligations that corrupted public and private administration in Africa also gave a unique charm and humanity to life there and served to protect people from the worst consequences of the misfortunes that buffeted them. There were always relatives whose unquestioned duty it was to help and protect them if they could, so that no one had to face the world entirely alone. Africans tend to find our lack of such obligations puzzling and unfeeling—and they are not entirely wrong. 

These considerations help to explain the paradox that strikes so many visitors to Africa: the evident decency, kindness, and dignity of the ordinary people, and the fathomless iniquity, dishonesty, and ruthlessness of the politicians and administrators. 

Noblesse oblige in the 21st Century

From MondoWeiss:

Jewish success– is it ever a story? 

Philip Weiss on July 30, 2013 38 

This morning National Public Radio aired a story on the rivalry between Lawrence Summers and Janet Yellen to be the next Fed chairperson, succeeding Ben Bernanke. All three of these economists are Jewish.

Besides Summers and Yellen, Obama is also interviewing for the job a third economist, Donald Kohn.

It is plain evidence of the fact that Jews make up a large segment of the new Establishment, if not the leading segment. 

I had the same impression Friday night, when the nightly news was also filled with Jews. The sex scandals involving San Diego mayor Bob Filner and would-be New York Mayor Anthony Weiner-- their pictures opened the NBC news. Then the lead story was food safety, and Nancy Snyderman was interviewing FDA head Margaret Hamburg, then Andrea Mitchell, who is married to a former chair of the Fed, was interviewing Ruth Marcus of the Washington Post about the sex scandals, and at the end of the broadcast they teased David Gregory's interview on Meet the Press of Jack Lew, Treasury Secretary. All these folks are Jewish or have some Jewish background. They're all in the center ring. 

In recent months, I've heard Peter Beinart, Lester Crown, Jane Eisner, and Jeffrey Goldberg exclaim over Jewish success. Crown said that the acceptance of Jews "in almost everything is unbelievable, just remarkable, every place." But it seems to me that Jews in the media have largely avoided dealing with the implications of our success. They're embarrassed about it. Or they fear anti-Semitic riots if they say openly what everyone knows. The exception is Marc Ellis, who writes openly about Empire Jews.  

This lack of reflection is unacceptable. Elites are traditionally criticized in the American discourse. It's the price. David Brooks's book about the "new upper class" is filled with slams of the previous order, the "WASPs," but has nothing to say about Jews. Nick Lemann wrote a highly-acclaimed book on the meritocracy that described the last ruling elite in religious terms-- as "the Episcopacy"-- and said that the folks in it got there by birth. It seems to me that the Jewish presence in the establishment merits some scrutiny: what is the role of birth in awarding place in the U.S.? What is the role of social kinship networks? What is the extent of Zionist ideology in the Jewish establishment? And how do successful Zionist Jews justify adherence to an ideology based on separation/colonization when they have done so well here? I'm a liberal and I trust Americans to have this conversation. I don't remember pogroms against the WASPs.

I've written several times about the valuable old concept of noblesse oblige. In essence, it meant that in feudal times, it meant that those on the top of a social order were honor-bound to personally fight to defend the social order, including those lower down in society, in which their privileged position depends. 

Clearly, that concept needs to be updated for a 21st Century in which leading cavalry charges is no longer the most important manifestation of defense of the nation, but a public discussion over what exactly are the responsibilities of the people who have benefited most from living in America, and who they are, is long overdue.

As I wrote in 2008:

American Jews should start thinking of themselves less as oppressed outcasts who need to go for whatever they can get while the getting is good, and start more accurately thinking of themselves as belonging to the best-connected inner circle of the contemporary American Establishment. 

Thus, American Jews should realize that, like the Protestant elite of yore, their privileged position as a de facto leadership caste bestows upon themselves corresponding duties to conserve the long-term well-being of the United States—rather than to indulge in personal and ethnic profit and power maximization. 

But that's unlikely to happen until the Jewish elite to begin to tolerate non-Jewish criticism, rather than to continue to try to destroy the careers of critics—or even just honest observers—in what seems to be an instinctive reaction intended to encourage the others. 

A group self-image of victimization, combined with a penchant for ideological intensity and powerful ethnocentric lobbies, can lead to bizarre political manifestations—such as the dominant Jewish assumption that proper veneration of their Ellis Island ancestors requires opposition to patriotic immigration reform today. 

In contrast, Italian-Americans, who lack institutions such as the ADL, appear to feel themselves freer to make up their own minds about what immigration policy will be best for their American posterity.

Oregon v. Alabama football palaces

Since college football teams aren't supposed to pay their players, they spend vast sums to wow beefy boys with practice facilities that 17-year-olds will consider awesome. Oregon recently revealed its new Phil Knight of Nike-funded palace, complete with barbershop:

Not to be outdone, Alabama countered the next day. Here's the football players' video arcade:

Wouldn't it be simpler just to pay the players?

Israel tests some would-be immigrants' DNA for Jewishness

From The Times of Israel:

A number of people from the former Soviet Union wishing to immigrate to Israel could be subjected to DNA testing to prove their Jewishness, the Prime Minister’s Office said Sunday. 

The policy was reported in Maariv on Monday, one day after the Israeli paper revealed that a 19-year-old woman from the former Soviet Union was required to take the test to qualify for a Birthright Israel trip.

The Prime Minister’s Office confirmed that many Jews from the FSU who were born out-of-wedlock can be required to bring DNA confirmation of Jewish heritage in order to be allowed to immigrate as a Jew. 

A source in the PMO told Maariv that the consul’s procedure, approved by the legal department of the Interior Ministry, states that a Russian-speaking child born out-of-wedlock is eligible to receive an Israeli immigration visa if the birth was registered before the child turned 3. Otherwise a DNA test to prove Jewish parentage is necessary.

This seems not unreasonable. Going back to Sen. Henry Jackson's legislation to give special rights to immigrate to Israel (and America) to Soviet Jews, a lot of fairly random Russians have claimed to be Jewish to cash in. For example, I knew a lady from Leningrad in the early 1990s who wasn't noticeably Jewish in looks, demeanor, culture, or family ties, but her Plan C for staying in America (she wanted to be blackjack dealer in Las Vegas) was to assiduously pull together a stack of genealogical paperwork (of who knows what authenticity) to prove she was Jewish enough to attain refugee status.

Want to get into UC Berkeley? Lie

Back in 1996, Proposition 209 outlawing racial preferences was passed by California voters and became part of the state Constitution. State officials have ever since pursued a strategy of "massive resistance" to this unwelcome demand for equal treatment of the law, such as by switching the evaluation of University of California admissions from a cheap, mechanical system to an expensive, subjective "holistic" system. After all, the Latino lobby in the state legislature could cut UC's budget if they don't get more of their people into UC.

Ruth Starkman took a job as a reader of applications to Berkeley, and writes in the NYT:

Admissions officials were careful not to mention gender, ethnicity and race during our training sessions.  

Privately, I asked an officer point-blank: “What are we doing about race?” 

She nodded sympathetically at my confusion but warned that it would be illegal to consider: we’re looking at — again, that phrase — the “bigger picture” of the applicant’s life. 

After the next training session, when I asked about an Asian student who I thought was a 2 but had only received a 3, the officer noted: “Oh, you’ll get a lot of them.” She said the same when I asked why a low-income student with top grades and scores, and who had served in the Israeli army, was a 3. 

Which them? I had wondered. Did she mean I’d see a lot of 4.0 G.P.A.’s, or a lot of applicants whose bigger picture would fail to advance them, or a lot of Jewish and Asian applicants (Berkeley is 43 percent Asian, 11 percent Latino and 3 percent black)? 

... In a second e-mail, I was told I needed more 1’s and referrals. A referral is a flag that a student’s grades and scores do not make the cut but the application merits a special read because of “stressors” — socioeconomic disadvantages that admissions offices can use to increase diversity. 

Officially, like all readers, I was to exclude minority background from my consideration. I was simply to notice whether the student came from a non-English-speaking household. I was not told what to do with this information — except that it may be a stressor if the personal statement revealed the student was having trouble adjusting to coursework in English. In such a case, I could refer the applicant for a special read. 

Why did I hear so many times from the assistant director? I think I got lost in the unspoken directives. Some things can’t be spelled out, but they have to be known. Application readers must simply pick it up by osmosis, so that the process of detecting objective factors of disadvantage becomes tricky.
It’s an extreme version of the American non-conversation about race. 

I scoured applications for stressors. 

To better understand stressors, I was trained to look for the “helpful” personal statement that elevates a candidate. Here I encountered through-the-looking-glass moments: an inspiring account of achievements may be less “helpful” than a report of the hardships that prevented the student from achieving better grades, test scores and honors. 

Should I value consistent excellence or better results at the end of a personal struggle? I applied both, depending on race. An underrepresented minority could be the phoenix, I decided. 

We were not to hold a lack of Advanced Placement courses against applicants. Highest attention was to be paid to the unweighted G.P.A., as schools in low-income neighborhoods may not offer A.P. courses, which are given more weight in G.P.A. calculation. Yet readers also want to know if a student has taken challenging courses, and will consider A.P.’s along with key college-prep subjects, known as a-g courses, required by the U.C. system. ...

Another reader thinks the student is “good” but we have so many of “these kids.” ...

IN personal statements, we had been told to read for the “authentic” voice over students whose writing bragged of volunteer trips to exotic places or anything that “smacks of privilege.” 

Fortunately, that authentic voice articulated itself abundantly. Many essays lucidly expressed a sense of self and character — no small task in a sea of applicants. Less happily, many betrayed the handiwork of pricey application packagers, whose cloying, pompous style was instantly detectable, as were canny attempts to catch some sympathy with a personal story of generalized misery. 

The torrent of woe could make a reader numb: not another student suffering from parents’ divorce, a learning difference, a rare disease, even dandruff! 

As I developed the hard eye of a slush pile reader at a popular-fiction agency, I asked my lead readers whether some of these stressors might even be credible. I was told not to second-guess the essays but simply to pick the most worthy candidate. Still, I couldn’t help but ask questions that were not part of my reader job. 

The assistant director’s words — look for “evidence a student can succeed at Berkeley” — echoed in my ears when I wanted to give a disadvantaged applicant a leg up in the world. I wanted to help. Surely, if these students got to Berkeley they would be exposed to all sorts of test-taking and studying techniques. 

But would they be able to compete with the engineering applicant with the 3.95 G.P.A. and 2300 SATs? Does Berkeley have sufficient support services to bridge gaps and ensure success? Could this student with a story full of stressors and remedial-level writing skills survive in a college writing course? 

I wanted every freshman walking through Sather Gate to succeed. 

Underrepresented minorities still lag behind: about 92 percent of whites and Asians at Berkeley graduate within six years, compared with 81 percent of Hispanics and 71 percent of blacks. A study of the University of California system shows that 17 percent of underrepresented minority students who express interest in the sciences graduate with a science degree within five years, compared with 31 percent of white students.

When the invitation came to sign up for the next application cycle, I wavered. My job as an application reader — evaluating the potential success of so many hopeful students — had been one of the most serious endeavors of my academic career. But the opaque and secretive nature of the process had made me queasy. Wouldn’t better disclosure of how decisions are made help families better position their children? Does Proposition 209 serve merely to push race underground? Can the playing field of admissions ever be level? 

For me, the process presented simply too many moral dilemmas. In the end, I chose not to participate again.

Like I've been saying ...

For a long time now, I've been suggesting that after gay marriage, the next big Civil Rights Struggle will be transgender rights. The New York Times agrees, editorializing today:

EDITORIAL
The Next Civil Rights Frontier
By THE EDITORIAL BOARD
Published: July 31, 2013 

Federal civil rights officials reached an important settlement late last month with a California school district accused of discriminating against a transgender student by denying him equal access to educational programs and activities. Under the agreement, the Arcadia Unified School District in California will revise its policies and ensure that the student, who was born female but has since assumed a male name and identity, is treated fairly and like other male students. The agreement should be required reading for school officials at all levels nationally.

Profiling by NYPD: Complex issue needing more study

From the New York Times, after a decade of Mayor Bloomberg's policy of massive stop and frisk stops of blacks, Latins (and white guys waiting for their man).

More Complaints Than Proposals on Police Searches 

By JOSEPH GOLDSTEIN 8:39 PM ET 

Lawyers who brought a suit on New York City’s stop-and-frisk tactic seem to lack ideas on how to fix it.

Profiling by George Zimmerman: Unmitigated evil.