The Trouble with Racial Profiling

In July of last year, following the transit bombings in London, the New York City Police Department announced that it would send officers into the subways to conduct random searches of passengers’ bags. On the face of it, doing random searches in the hunt for terrorists—as opposed to being guided by generalizations—seems like a silly idea. As a columnist in New York wrote at the time, “Not just ‘most’ but nearly every jihadi who has attacked a Western European or American target is a young Arab or Pakistani man. In other words, you can predict with a fair degree of certainty what an Al Qaeda terrorist looks like. Just as we have always known what Mafiosi look like—even as we understand that only an infinitesimal fraction of Italian-Americans are members of the mob.”

But wait: do we really know what mafiosi look like? In “The Godfather,” where most of us get our knowledge of the Mafia, the male members of the Corleone family were played by Marlon Brando, who was of Irish and French ancestry, James Caan, who is Jewish, and two Italian-Americans, Al Pacino and John Cazale. To go by “The Godfather,” mafiosi look like white men of European descent, which, as generalizations go, isn’t terribly helpful. Figuring out what an Islamic terrorist looks like isn’t any easier. Muslims are not like the Amish: they don’t come dressed in identifiable costumes. And they don’t look like basketball players; they don’t come in predictable shapes and sizes. Islam is a religion that spans the globe.

“We have a policy against racial profiling,” Raymond Kelly, New York City’s police commissioner, told me. “I put it in here in March of the first year I was here. It’s the wrong thing to do, and it’s also ineffective. If you look at the London bombings, you have three British citizens of Pakistani descent. You have Germaine Lindsay, who is Jamaican. You have the next crew, on July 21st, who are East African. You have a Chechen woman in Moscow in early 2004 who blows herself up in the subway station. So whom do you profile? Look at New York City. Forty per cent of New Yorkers are born outside the country. Look at the diversity here. Who am I supposed to profile?”

--From "Troublemakers" by Malcolm Gladwell, in The New Yorker, February 6, 2006.

The Invisible Hand Goes Virtual

Millions of people now spend several hours a week immersed in “massively multiplayer online role-playing games” (MMORPGs). These are often Tolkienesque fantasy worlds in which players battle monsters, go on quests, and build up their virtual power and wealth ... Sociologists and anthropologists have written about MMORPGs before, but Mr Castronova looks at the phenomenon from a new perspective: economics.

Mr Castronova's thesis is that these synthetic worlds are increasingly inter-twined with the real world. In particular, real-world trade of in-game items—swords, gold, potions, or even whole characters—is flourishing in online marketplaces such as eBay. This means in-game items and currency have real value. In 2002, Mr Castronova famously calculated the GNP per capita of the fictional game-world of “EverQuest” as $2,000, comparable to that of Bulgaria, and far higher than that of India or China. Furthermore, by “working” in the game to generate virtual wealth and then selling the results for real money, it is possible to generate about $3.50 per hour. Companies in China pay thousands of people, known as “farmers”, to play MMORPGs all day, and then profit from selling the in-game goods they generate to other players for real money.

Land and other in-game property has been sold for huge sums: one “Project Entropia” player paid $26,500 for an island in the game's virtual world last year, and has already made his money back by selling hunting and mining rights to other players. Trade in virtual items is now worth more than $100m each year. In some Asian countries, where MMORPGs are particularly popular, in-game thefts and cheats have led to real-world arrests and legal action. In one case in South Korea, the police intervened when a hoard of in-game money was stolen and sold, netting the thieves $1.3m. In-game money is, in short, no less real than the dollars and pounds stored in conventional bank accounts.

--"Worlds Without End," The Economist, December 14, 2005.

Paradise Lost - the Text Message

Here, for example, is a text-message version of "Paradise Lost" disseminated by some scholars in England: "Devl kikd outa hevn coz jelus of jesus&strts war. pd'off wiv god so corupts man (md by god) wiv apel. devl stays serpnt 4hole life&man ruind. Woe un2mnkind."

From “The Pleasures of the Text,” by Charles McGrath, January 22, 2006, the “New York Times Magazine."

Why Math Matters

From a review of the new Airbus A380, the world's biggest passenger plane:

Debra also pointed out ... the hydraulic system that operates the A380's control surfaces ... The hydraulics also handle the braking on the A380's twenty-wheel main landing gear. A 302-page promotional Airbus publication titled A New Dimension in Air Travel informed me that "the brake is capable of stopping 45 double-decker buses traveling at 200 mph, simultaneously, in under 25 seconds." It is an ambition of mine to learn enough math to figure out comparisons like that and write them myself. But I'm afraid I'd get carried away with digressions about what kind of engine you'd have to put in a double-decker bus to make it go that fast, where you'd drive it, how you'd find forty-four people to drive the other buses, and what would happen to the bus riders.

--"The Mother Load," by P.J. O'Rourke, The Atlantic Monthly, November 2005, p. 173.

Another Entry for the Devil's Dictionary of Ambrose Bierce

The French philosopher and historian Ernest Renan once wrote that a nation "is a group of people united by a mistaken view about the past and a hatred of its neighbors."

--Quoted in "In a Dark Time," by David Remnick, The New Yorker, March 18, 2002, p. 51.

They Know How to Make a Point

From a recent L.A. Times article on the ascendancy of Mandarin over Cantonese in L.A.'s Chinese community and in North America -- I learned something about the difference between the two. I'd known that Chinese is a tonal language, but I hadn't known that while Mandarin has four tones, "so a character can be intonated four ways with four meanings," Cantonese uses a staggering nine tones.

Which gets us to the good part: the comparative expressiveness of Cantonese. As one woman said, "The Italians need body language. We don't need that at all. We have adjectives."

From Cantonese is Losing Its Voice, by David Pierson, January 3, 2006.

On Brokaw's Keen Insight

Readers will recall that it was Tom Brokaw's great good luck as a journalist, as a reporter of news, to uncover that back in the 1930s and 1940s, a large mass of young Americans had to suffer, a) the trials and deprivations of the Great Depression, then b) fight a terrible war —a “world war” in the parlance of the time—against countries bent on global domination. Not only did Brokaw have the courage to bring to light this virtually hidden chapter of our history, but he or an associate had the marketing savvy to title the book The Greatest Generation, an irresistibly flattering phrase which sustained the book through many printings and multiple sequels.

--From a review of "The Greater Generation" by Leonard Steinhorn. Jamie Malanowski, "The Aging of Aquarius," Washington Monthly, January 2006.

"P" is for "Pungent"

"I almost never read the editorials, following the advice of the journalist Jack Germond who once compared the writing of a newspaper editorial to wetting oneself in a dark-blue serge suit: 'It gives you a nice warm feeling, but nobody notices.'”

-- from Joseph Epstein’s otherwise predictable diatribe against newspapers, “Are Newspapers Doomed?” in *Commentary* magazine.

Why Do Supreme Court Justices Move to the Left?

The following quotation is taken from an interesting article on the judiciary generally, and on the tendency of Supreme Court justices to become more moderate and even left-leaning over time. It gives hope, but also implies reasons why the most recent appointees, like Scalia and Thomas, might remain as doctrinaire. This quote talks about a recent development that's affecting the independence of judges in the state courts, namely campaign contributions. Both unsurprising and scary:

"There is also recent evidence that state courts to which judges are elected rather than appointed have been powerfully transformed by campaign financing. A study by Texans for Public Justice, for example, found that the ten Texas Supreme Court justices elected or reelected between 1994 and 1998 raised over half of their $12.8 million in campaign money “from lawyers, law firms and litigants who filed appeals with the high court during this same period.” The study also found that, although the Texas Supreme Court declines to hear nearly 90 percent of the cases for which appeal petitions are filed, “the more money that a petitioner contributed to the justices, the more likely they were to accept a given petition.” For example, the court was ten times more likely to accept the petitions from petitioners who made campaign contributions of more than $250,000 than they were of those of non-contributing petitioners. Trends in decisions have also shifted over the same time period decidedly in favor of corporate defendants, and it seems likely that a major factor in that drift is the lack of the same independence-bolstering structures enjoyed by judges in the federal system."

--From "The Drifters: why the Supreme Court makes justices more liberal," by Jon D. Hanson and Adam Benforado. In The Boston Review, January/February 2006.

So THAT Explains It!

In a review of James English’s “The Economy of Prestige,” Louis Menand writes:

“When the first Nobel Prize in Literature went to Sully Prudhomme, in 1901, the choice was regarded as a scandal, since Leo Tolstoy happened to be alive. The Swedish Academy was so unnerved by the public criticism it received that its members made a point of passing over Tolstoy for the rest of his life—just to show, apparently, that they knew what they were doing the first time around—honoring instead such immortals as Bjørnstjerne Bjørnson, José Echegaray, Henryk Sienkiewicz, Giosuè Carducci, Rudolf Eucken, and Selma Lagerlöf. When you have prizes for art, you will always have people complaining that prizes are just politics, or that they reward in-group popularity or commercial success, or that they are pointless and offensive because art is not a competition. English believes that contempt for prizes is not harmful to the prize system; that, on the contrary, contempt for prizes is what the system is all about. “This threat of scandal,” as he puts it, “is constitutive of the cultural prize.” His theory is that when people make these objections to the nature of prizes they are helping to sustain a collective belief that true art has nothing to do with things like politics, money, in-group tastes, and beating out the other guy. As long as we want to believe that creative achievement is special, that a work of art is not just one more commodity seeking to aggrandize itself in the marketplace at the expense of other works of art, we need prizes so that we can complain about how stupid they are. In this respect, it is at least as important that the prize go to the wrong person as that it go to the right one. No one thinks that Tolstoy was less than a great writer because he failed to win the Nobel. The failure to win the Nobel has become, in the end, a mark of his greatness.”

--Louis Menand, “All that Glitters: Literature’s Global Economy,” The New Yorker, issue of 12/26/05 and 1/2/06, posted 12/19/05.

Long in the Truthiness

"In a nightly feature called 'The Word,' [Stephen Colbert] introduced that night's entry: 'truthiness.' Contemptuously acknowledging those who deny the word's existence, Colbert excoriated the 'wordinistas over at Webster's' and dismissed dictionaries and reference books as élitist. A couple of weeks ago, he went after black holes: 'I'm going on the record as being against this swirling vortex of nothingness ... Let me tell you something, black hole. You may have swallowed a hundred million suns, but now you're dealing with America.' Pointing his finger at the camera, Colbert made one more rhetorical flourish: 'Black hole at the center of the galaxy? You're on notice.'"

From "The Spinoff Zone," by Nancy Franklin, in The New Yorker, November 28, 2005, p. 184.