Opinion
Sandy Hook Parents: There will be change. There has to be.
This week, we spent time with Francine and David Wheeler, parents of six-year-old Ben Wheeler, one of the 20 children and six educators shot and killed at the Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut. Francine and David moved from New York City to Newtown to raise a family somewhere safe…
[Image of Francine Wheeler via a screenshot of the White House's weekly address]
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'Islamophobia' and the Atheist movement
Whether or not 'Islamophobia' is a valid term, leading Atheists like Sam Harris and Richard Dawkins have been confused, inconsistent and blundering in their attempts to talk about Muslims.
Sam Harris is about as consistent as Glenn Greenwald is concise, which made their exchange of multi-thousand word cowpats last month particularly grueling reading. That's a shame, because Harris dropped a retrospective clanger that very few people picked up on. It came in a recent volley against Greenwald, in which Harris attempted to deconstruct the idea of Islamophobia (my emphasis):
"[Islamophobia] is, Greenwald tells us in his three points, an 'irrational' and 'disproportionate' and 'unjustified' focus on Muslims. But the only way that Muslims can reasonably be said to exist as a group is in terms of their adherence to the doctrine of Islam. There is no race of Muslims. They are not united by any physical traits or a diaspora. […] The only thing that defines the class of All Muslims—and the only thing that could make this group the possible target of anyone's "irrational" fear, "disproportionate" focus, or "unjustified" criticism—is their adherence to a set of beliefs and the behaviors that these beliefs inspire."
"So 'Islamophobia' must be—it really can only be—an irrational, disproportionate, and unjustified fear of certain people, regardless of their ethnicity or any other accidental trait, because of what they believe and to the degree to which they believe it."
"They are not united by any physical traits or a diaspora," says Harris. Which is absolutely fine, except this is same Sam Harris who wrote 'In Defense of Profiling' barely a year ago, an article in which he suggested: "We should profile Muslims, or anyone who looks like he or she could conceivably be Muslim, and we should be honest about it."
In a later update to that post, in response to an avalanche of criticism, he elaborated further: "To say that ethnicity, gender, age, nationality, dress, traveling companions, behavior in the terminal, and other outward appearances offer no indication of a person's beliefs or terrorist potential is either quite crazy or totally dishonest."
I'm not going to bother tackling the merits and demerits of this when they've been covered so well by others. Suffice it to say that in my lifetime white Christians have been consistently the largest terrorist threat in my country, and I suspect that one of the first lessons people learn at terrorist school is how to not look, dress and act like one of the villains from Team America: World Police.
No, what's interesting here is how badly Harris contradicts himself. Last year he argued that it was trivial for a TSA agent to identify a Muslim in a crowd; now he's suggesting that there can't possibly be an irrational focus on Muslims because you can't identify a Muslim by anything other than their beliefs. It's hard to see how these two positions can be reconciled in one mind without dislocating a neuron.
Harris's confusion is interesting because it highlights a fundamental problem with a lot of recent discussion about the validity of 'Islamophobia' as a term – the label 'Muslim' is inextricably linked to race in people's minds. If you ask a thousand random people to draw a Muslim, you will end up with 999 drawings of people with the same ethnicity and one person who drew a bowl of cereal because they thought you said 'muesli'. I'd be willing to bet that, all else being equal, hordes of conspiracy theorists would not be calling Obama a secret Muslim if his skin were a different colour.
The irony of this of course is that Muslims are the most racially diverse religious group in America. One look at the top graph in Gallup's 2009 study of Muslim Americans blows apart the kind of lazy stereotyping that Harris promoted three years later.
On one hand, critics of the term 'Islamophobia', like Oliver Kamm, rightly point out that it's ludicrous and censorious to conflate hostile coverage of a religion to xenophobia, as Mehdi Masan appears to do. On the other, it's clear that there's a very real phenomenon of bigotry directed against Muslims, recklessly inflamed by elements of the press, that blurs at the edges into something barely distinguishable from racism, the last acceptable form of racial prejudice. Kamm described it neatly last year:
"There is something disturbing in public discourse about Islam. A segment of opinion cannot distinguish between Muslims and the theocratic fanatics of al-Qaeda. It holds to a conspiracy theory that genuinely does recall the ancient prejudice, given modern garb in the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, against the Jews. This is not only a problem but a pathology and an evil."
Whatever you choose to call this phenomenon, it's clear that there's a line between criticism (or ridicule) of Islam, and bigotry against Muslims. Sam Harris and Richard Dawkins have blundered into that line with an alarming degree of recklessness.
Harris's support for profiling can be put in the context of his other remarks about Muslims, from his suggestion that: "The people who speak most sensibly about the threat that Islam poses to Europe are actually fascists," to the sort of tortured logic he wielded in response Greenwald last month, logic that recalls Kamm's assertion that 'a segment of opinion cannot distinguish between Muslims and the theocratic fanatics of al-Qaeda':
"My condemnation of Islam does not apply to "all members of a group or the group itself based on the bad acts of specific individuals in that group. […] …in the case of Islam, the bad acts of the worst individuals … are the best examples of the doctrine in practice. Those who adhere most strictly to the actual teachings of Islam, those who expound its timeless dogma most honestly, are precisely the people whom Greenwald and other obscurantists want us to believe least represent the faith."
Answers on a postcard, please.
Meanwhile, Dawkins - a man for whom Twitter does not seem to be a good medium - has taken to spouting the sort of rhetoric that wouldn't seem out of place at a BNP meeting. I'll be charitable, and suggest that his swiftly-deleted retweet of a link to a website that exposes the 'secret Islamist infiltration of the Obama administration' was a slip of the mouse. I'll also leave to one side his bizarre vendetta against Mehdi Hassan, whose platform at New Statesman seems to be a source of great offense to the atheist.
As Nathan Lean pointed out in Salon a few weeks ago, this is part of a pattern of behavior that has seen Dawkins flirt with hard-right thinking on numerous occasions, from his words of support for the likes of Geert Wilders and Pat Condell to his adoption of vaguely conspiracy-minded beliefs about the police, the suggestion that 'multiculturism' is "code for Islam" in Europe, and clumsily overblown rhetoric about the "menacing rise of Islam." Like Harris, he regularly promotes the idea that extremists are representative of a wide section of Muslims in general.
Whatever you choose to call this, it's far from intelligent. Both men are at risk of buying in to Kenan Malik's a 'culture of delusion'; their rhetoric not dissimilar to the far right's talk of 'Eurabia' or 'Londonistan', fuelled by fears blown out of all proportion to any real threat. Criticism of Islam is vital, mockery of any religion is a right worth fighting for, and there's a sensible debate to be had about the validity or otherwise of terms like 'Islamophobia'. None of that alters the point that inflammatory, irrational and blundering attacks by privileged white male atheists against Muslims of all stripes achieve little more than book sales.
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I don't want to hear how sexy – or not – I look when I'm running, thanks
Bare Minerals can shove its campaign using frat boys to cheer on female runners with signs like 'You look beautiful all sweaty'
When I first started running, I lived in Pitsmoor – a spectacularly ropy district of Sheffield. I hoiked on some tracksuit bottoms and a sports bra that I'd probably owned since before I had proper bosoms. I pulled on a T-shirt and laced up my ancient PE trainers. And, with the timorous demeanour of the non-sporty person attempting something sporty, I headed out of my door and down the street at an unthreatening clip. Fortunately, my neighbours must have sensed my self-consciousness and come out to defuse it, because here was the man from the corner off-licence, standing in his doorway and shouting: "You look great!" And here was a man waiting for a bus, hollering: "Keep it up, love!"
Cheered by such support, I churned out several more laps and entered the next available half marathon. Except – oh, haha, no I didn't. I stumbled home miserably, scorching with humiliation, feeling like a tubby gobbet of flesh bound in elastic fibres. I threw my trainers in the bottom of the wardrobe and didn't get them out again for several years. Now cosmetics company Bare Minerals doesn't want any runner to go without this special validation of her desirability, so it has launched something called the Go Bare campaign, which involves gangs of frat boys spectating at half marathons, cheering on female participants with signs like "You look beautiful all sweaty" and "Cute running shoes".
Well … thanks for that guys, although to be honest I'm amazed you bothered. One thing I've never been struck by while running is a shortage of volunteers to critique my hotness. From the beepers and leerers hanging out of car windows to the moped-riding little tit who took time out from his pizza delivery round to bark at me (because it was important for me to know that he considered me a dog), my journey from couch to 42K has been punctuated by all too many men who've been all too willing to let me know whether they'd put me on the do or do-not list. Making a special effort to bring this stuff to race day seems an unusual way to hawk foundation.
Because if I'm running a race, it's not so I can get an index of my bangability. It's because I want to run 13.1 miles or 26.2 or however many it takes to push me over the finish line, and during that time I will be gross. I will sniff and spit and sweat and grunt and piss in chemical toilets fouled by hundreds of nervous runners ahead of me. I will hurt, with the dull lactic ache of constant propulsion and the flayed sting of blistered feet. If things go really well, I might be sick. And I won't care about how any of it looks, because all I want is to get to the end. At no point during any of this should the question "Does a frat boy want to prod me?" be invited into my brain.
I took up running in part because I was anxious about the way I looked. This isn't particularly exalted as motives go, but I don't think it's that surprising when we live in a culture that scrutinises appearance and sees a slumpy buttock as a moral failing. This was the surprising thing: once I'd started running regularly, I realised I didn't care that much about how I looked. For as long as I could remember, I'd judged my body on aesthetic standards and found it wanting. Too stumpy of leg, too big of thigh, too sturdy of calf. But now, I started to appreciate my body for its function, and it turned out that it was actually pretty rocking.
No, I didn't have the fragile and dangling limbs of a confused foal, but – to my surprise and delight – I could crank out mile after mile at a respectable pace. How perverse that I'd spent decades damning my legs for not looking like they'd sprouted impossibly on another body, and now I was delirious to find that they could do the perfectly workaday leg thing of transporting me between two points. Running was a flit from all the bizarre ideas I'd developed over body image.
It is not a welcome development when some powder shark drags up a horndog army to tell women that the real race isn't for your personal best, but for the position of Most Desirable Ambulant Vagina 2013. So Bare Minerals can shove its stupid makeup – it might give me acne if I wear it when I'm running anyway. And it can stick its idiot placards up its idiot placard wavers too.
Like all the best things in the world – eating, laughing, having monstrously good, wallpaper-tearing sex – running is much better if you don't have to think about the way you look when you're doing it.
© Guardian News and Media 2013
[Woman running via Shutterstock]
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It's time we stopped giving trademark bullies a free pass
Trademarks are funny things. At their best, they're great: a clever way to incentivise companies to divert some of their profits to preventing fraud and sharp dealing. At their worst, though, they're terrible; a means for companies to steal the very words out of our mouths through legal bullying.
Let's look at the good that trademarks do first. Trademarks as we know them today evolved out of consumer protection court cases where one company sued another for using deceptive marketing practices. In these cases, the issue turned on the idea that Company A had set up an association between a design, word, or mark and the products or services it provided. Then, Company B came along and cloaked its own competing products and services in the distinctive marks that the public associated with Company A.
Now, the public was paying the price: unsuspecting consumers were buying Company B's products under the mistaken impression that they were getting Company A's products. This is not good. When you plunk down your money, you should get what you think you're paying for, not something else that's been deceptively packaged for the express purpose of tricking you.
Most of the time, only the victim of a fraud has standing to sue for redress. If you only witness someone else getting defrauded, you don't get to sue the fraudster – you haven't been wronged. That is, you, personally, have to have been victimised to seek redress.
But in the realm of deceptive trademark use, this produces a bad outcome all around. If you've spent a pound or two on a substandard pen or bottle of juice or packet of facial tissues, you aren't likely to go to the expense of hiring a solicitor and hauling the fraudster into court. If we limit trademark enforcement to victims of fraud, many fraudsters would operate with permanent impunity.
Trademark hacks around this by giving Company A – the company you thought you were doing business with – standing to sue on your behalf, and on behalf of all the customers past and future who might be tricked into buying Company B's products through deceptive packaging and marketing. Companies often want this right, because deception diverts customers and profits from their products to their competitors.
So, when you give a company standing to sue on behalf of its customers for this kind of chicanery, you create a system where companies voluntarily foot the bill for something society needs – protection from fraud – and avoid the pain of trying to convince someone who's been sold a chancy box of breath mints to go to court to punish the wrongdoer. You also avoid the expense of making government inspectors primarily responsible for policing this social ill.
On its face, it's a good deal all around. The last century has seen increased codification of trademark into statute, with the establishment of trademark offices where formal trademarks can be registered, to help firms identify which marks are in use and so avoid inadvertently using someone else's marks.
Both the statutes and the jurisprudence treat trademarks as a right to defend the public, not as property. When you successfully register a trademark, the government isn't saying, "Congratulations, that word belongs to you now!" They're saying "Congratulations: You've been deputised to sue fraudsters who use that word in a way that deceives the public." It's the difference between being Bruce Wayne – a proprietor who owns an asset like Wayne Manor – and being Batman – a crusader whose duty is to keep the public safe. (This is why mentioning Bruce Wayne and Batman here does not violate Warner's trademarks, which include a risible claim over the term "superhero," jointly shared with Marvel/Disney).
Trademarks are there to protect the public from deceit They are "designators of origin." If you buy a tin of fizzy drink with the word Pepsi on the side, you should get a tin of Pepsi, not a tin of battery acid. We all know what Pepsi means, the Pepsi company has spent billions encouraging to make an association between the word and its products. In nearly all contexts, someone other than Pepsi selling something with the word Pepsi on it would be engaged in fraud, because in nearly all cases, that sale would be made to people who believed they were buying a Pepsi product.
Brand association
Trademark enforcement hinges on this ethereal business of "association."
The core of trademark's right to sue resides in the public's heaving subconscious, on how the public thinks about something. If the public sees your mark and makes no association with your products and services, then it would not deceive the public to market something else with the same mark. Where there is no confusion, trademark law offers little protection – even if it costs a company money.
And that's where it all starts to go wrong. Trademark holders inevitably consider themselves to be trademark owners. They don't enforce their marks to protect the public, they do it to protect their profits (this is by design). Trademark starts from the assumption that the public makes an association between a product and a service on the basis of commerce: if I see Gillette on a disposable razor, that's because Gillette is the company that thought of putting the word "Gillette" on a line of products, and its creativity and canny marketing have made the association in the public's mind.
If Gillette becomes a generic synonym for "razor," a competitor that uses the word "gillette" to describe its products might be able to get away with it. After all, I don't assume that your hoover is Hoover, or that the kleenex with which you blow your nose is a Kleenex, or that the search engine you google with is Google. The price of success is that your distinctive marks will get associated with the whole category of goods. Trademark lawyers have a name for this: "genericide" – when a trademark becomes so generic that there's no longer any association with a specific company. At that point, the mark you've been shepherding for years and years becomes a free-for-all that anyone can use.
Genericide is rare, though. Microsoft doesn't advertise "google it on Bing!" and Miele doesn't sell a line of "hoovers."
Genericide is mostly a spectre, and like all spectres, it serves a purpose.
That purpose? Full employment for trademark lawyers.
Trademark lawyers have convinced their clients that they must pay to send a threatening notice to everyone who uses a trademark without permission, even where there is no chance of confusion. They send letters by the lorryload to journalists, website operators, signmakers, schools, dictionary publishers – anyone who might use their marks in a way that weakens the association in the public mind. But weakening an association is not illegal, despite the expansion of doctrines such as "dilution" and "naked licensing."
When called out on policing our language, trademark holders and their lawyers usually shrug their shoulders and say, "Nothing to do with us.
The law requires us to threaten you, or we lose our association, and thus our mark." This is a very perverse way of understanding trademark.
Public interest
The law is there to protect the public interest, and the public interest isn't undermined by the strength or weakness of an association with a specific word or mark with a specific company. The public interest extends to preventing fraud, and trademark uses the motivation of protecting profits to incentivise firms to uphold the public interest.
The firms' interest isn't the public interest, it merely coincides with it … sometimes.
Trademark was not born as a tool to create associations. Trademark is a tool to protect associations. But over the decades, trademark has been perverted into a means of stealing words out of our common language and turning them into something very like property.
Take Games Workshop, a company with a deserved reputation for aggressive use of trademark law. The company asserts a trademark over the term "space marine," as it extends to the figurines in its tabletop games and the products the company has made based on them. Now, "space marine" is a very old term, and has been in wide use in science fiction for most of the past century. It's also very descriptive, which is a no-no in trademark. It's much easier to demonstrate that your mark is uniquely associated with your product when there's no obvious reason it would be used in a generic sense for someone else's – "Waterstones" is a stronger trademark than "The Book Store," for example. In my view, the trademark office should never have issued a trademark in "space marine," because there's very little danger that a random punter would associate the term uniquely with Games Workshop's products, and not with, say, the novels of Robert A Heinlein.
But here's where it gets very ugly. There are two ways to make a mark so famous that it is uniquely associated with one company. The first is the honourable way, by making a product that becomes so popular, so famous, that everyone thinks of you when they think of it.
The other way is the evil way: by making public, baseless, bullying legal threats against anyone who ever uses your mark, in any context, even when there's no possibility of deception or confusion. If you make enough headlines for your sabre-rattling, then you can create a different kind of fame, the kind of fame that attains association thus: "Hmm, that writer used the term 'space marines' in her book, and I know that Games Workshop are colossal jerks who turn your life into a living hell if you even breathe the words 'space marines,' so this must be somehow associated with Games Workshop."
If a trademark holder is legitimately worried about incidental uses of their marks contributing to genericide, it can simply grant retrospective permission to anyone who's used the mark in a way that worries them. "Dear Ms So-and-So, we're delighted to grant you permission to use our mark on your website; would you please add a note to that effect?" attains exactly the same legal protection from dilution and genericisation as a legal threat.
The difference between a threat and permission is that a threat helps you corral the public's vocabulary in your own private preserve. It's time we stopped giving trademark bullies a free pass to tell us what our own words mean. It's time to take trademark back.
One small, practical way you can do this is to look for opportunities to use "space marine" in published materials that aren't referring to Games Workshops' products, and to resist all other illegitimate attempts to police our language by using generic terms generically, even when companies object.
And please do report any trademark threats you receive to ChillingEffects.org, a clearinghouse that amasses evidence about trends in online enforcement that brings a factual underpinning to reform efforts.
• The author gratefully acknowledges the assistance of Wendy Seltzer of the ChillingEffects project in the drafting of this article
© Guardian News and Media 2013
[Woman businesswoman in censorship concept via Shutterstock.com.]
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Global warming: Not reversible, but stoppable
Let's start with two skill-testing questions: 1. If we stop greenhouse gas emissions, won't the climate naturally go back to the way it was before? 2. Isn't there "warming in the pipeline" that will continue to heat up the planet no matter what we do? The correct…
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To protect our children, we must talk to them about rape
Desmond Tutu, Jacob Lief and Sohaila Abdulali: Yes, governments should step up, but so should we. We must not be squeamish about bringing this issue to the dinner table.
What will you discuss with your children this evening? Sports, the weather, celebrity gossip, rape?
We are from three generations (aged 81, 50 and 36), three faiths (Christian, Muslim, Jewish) and three continents (Africa, Asia, North America). One of us is a religious leader, one a writer and rape survivor and one the CEO of a non-profit organisation. We come together in the wake of the recent upheaval around rape in India, South Africa, the US and the UK, because we share a passionate conviction: we must bring the discourse home to the next generation on every continent.
Why did the men in the recent India and South Africa crimes rape, torture, and murder their victims? How could Jimmy Savile of the BBC molest hundreds of people and still die a hero? Why did the gang rapists in Ohio feel safe boasting on camera about what they had done? Why do too many Indians dehumanise women, and too many South Africans believe that men are just intrinsically badly behaved and programmed to rape? Who do we think these sub-human women and out-of-control men are?
They are us and, if we are not careful, they will be our children. We do not have the answers, but we should all be asking the questions, and we should include our sons, daughters and all the young people in our lives in our discussions. We need to stop behaving as if it's all a terrible problem out there, and start talking about it with each other and with our children.
So much ink has been spilt in the media over the past few weeks. Rape has become a ubiquitous global topic, and that is encouraging since it is a global blot on our collective humanity. But hardly anyone has paid attention to how this affects the most important group of all: the next generation, which is poised to inherit our poisonous baggage.
The fact is, rape is utterly commonplace in all our cultures. It is part of the fabric of everyday life, yet we all act as if it's something shocking and extraordinary whenever it hits the headlines. We remain silent, and so we condone it. The three of us deal with this issue in different ways every day of our lives, yet we too are guilty of protesting articulately outside but leaving it on the other side of the door when we sit down to dinner with our families. Until rape, and the structures – sexism, inequality, tradition – that make it possible, are part of our dinner-table conversation with the next generation, it will continue. Is it polite and comfortable to talk about it? No. Must we anyway? Yes.
It seems daunting. But which is more painful: talking sensibly with young people about this issue, the same way we might talk with them about drugs, guns or bullying, or waiting for something terrible to happen so close to home that you have to address it in a time of turmoil?
Children can seem fragile, and adults often have the mistaken notion that telling children about harsh realities will destroy their innocence. But you do not lose innocence when you learn about terrible acts; you lose your innocence when you commit them. An open culture of tolerance, honesty and discussion is the best way to safeguard innocence, not destroy it.
Changing rape culture is family work, but it cannot be only family work. It is a public health issue of gravest concern. The statistics are everywhere, but the evidence is weirdly shadowy: like the one in four girls abused in South Africa, by the one in four men who admit to having raped someone. (But who are these girls, and where are these men? Hardly anyone is talking.) The cost in human suffering, lives decimated, families destroyed, mental anguish, physical trauma … the cost of rape is probably bigger than any of us can comprehend. Rape is expensive. Not just families from China to Canada, but also all the important institutions in young people's lives everywhere – schools from Finland to the Philippines, youth programmes from London to Laos – should spend less energy ignoring the issue and more energy helping children understand the basic concepts of respect and choice.
Yes, governments must step up. But so should we all. Why shouldn't rape be dinner-table conversation? We talk about war, we talk about death, we discuss values with our children. But on the subject of sexual assault, we remain silent and squeamish. We leave them ill-prepared, with whispers of untold horrors and no guidance for our sons on how they should behave if one day they should find themselves in a group of boys with a girl in their power.
Rape does not exist in a vacuum, and we cannot talk about it as if it is removed from the rest of our lives. Let's teach our children that they don't need to live in little boxes defined by their gender or culture. Let's teach them that they are all of equal worth. Let's not favour our boys over our girls. Let's not tolerate bullying or stereotyping. Let's reject utterly the notion that boys will be boys and girls must work around this assumption or pay the price.
Yes, policies should change, laws should be just. But if we want to make a fundamental difference, all of us must bring the conversation home. It is our opportunity to start to create true change. It might not be polite and comfortable, but it is essential. We owe it to our children.
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Politico's wholly sexist narrative of the 'woman in power' at the New York Times
The New York Times executive editor is apparently stubborn and snappy. Why must we focus on women's character traits?
Happy newsrooms are all alike. Every unhappy newsroom is unhappy in its own way. The New York Times newsroom is unhappy because its editor is not very nice. Allegedly. This startling revelation comes from a piece posted on Politico yesterday that instantly lost the internet but gained fans at the NYT.
The litany of complaints against Jill Abramson, the Times's executive editor, is indeed jaw-dropping.
She is apparently, on occasion, stubborn and condescending. She snaps at people in meetings (sometimes). Once, she asked why an editor was still in a meeting instead of leaving to fix a problem that had been identified. Worst of all, she had such a strong disagreement with her managing editor over the direction of the news pages that he slapped the wall and walked out. The fact that he was allowed to walk back in again might mean that the tirelessly unpleasant Abramson was having an off day.
Dean Baquet, the managing editor in question, does admit in the piece that walking out was not perhaps the best thing for a senior editor like him to do. The very popular Baquet also admits to a history of wall-punching. Abramson, though apparently non-violent, is judged "impossible", according to the unsourced Politico hatchet job. Impossible, stubborn, condescending, snappy. Yes, it is undoubtedly the case that Jill Abramson is a newspaper editor. Not just any newspaper editor – a female newspaper editor.
The lame nature of the reporting suggests it might be better just to ignore the piece entirely, but it deserves attention, as it fuels an exasperating and wholly sexist narrative about women in power. The souls of the New York Times who found themselves describing Abramson's shortcomings in terms of her manner and mood should be sentenced to read Sheryl Sandberg's Lean In as punishment. As we know, this manifesto for women in the boardroom tells us that the correlation between women being judged 'likeable' and their position in a hierarchy are inversely proportionate.
For a news organization such as Politico to run a piece focused so tightly on Abramson's personality is disappointing. It might have highlighted the fact she has just had the most successful week of her professional life. Her news organization picked up four Pulitzer Prizes, the third highest haul in the Times's history, and the coverage of the Boston bombings was, by wide acknowledgment, exceptionally good, when others were rocky and error-strewn.
For every anonymous source anxious to talk about Abramson's mood swings, and absences, there could have been a counterbalancing one to talk about how Abramson is more present on the news floor than a number of her predecessors. For every person who talks about the exhausting nature of her management style, there is another who might point out that the news operation is the strongest it has been for a long time. You might even find people who think there is more than a whiff of sexism apparent in the building, and the critiques. None of this, however, feeds the story of a woman in charge who tells people what to do in a manner they don't like.
If one redacts 'Jill' from Politico's piece and replaces it with 'Jack', the absurdity and sexism becomes all the more obvious:
"It's frustrating because he is such a smart person. When Jack is on his game, he is one of the smartest people I've ever met," one staffer said. "But he's not a naturally charismatic person — he's not approachable." You see? When was the last time the approachability of a male editor made for copy?
The issue is not what is going on in the New York Times newsroom, but how we choose to talk and write about it. In Sandberg's book, she references the Howard-Heidi experiment, where students rate a description of a person's accomplishments. When the piece is read with the name of the real author attached (Heidi Roizen), she is described as being 'selfish' and not the kind of person you would want to work for. When a false identity 'Howard' was attached to the piece, students rated him as 'likeable'.
What Byers did not cover was the sense that there is widespread and ingrained sexism in journalism, where a woman's character traits are central to a critique of she does the job. Men, who are equally awful in just as many ways, are judged more on output and success. At no point are we asked to stop and consider whether Abramson's abrasive attitude has actually led to the Times becoming a better newspaper, even though the subjective view suggests it has.
Nice people do not necessarily make good editors, whatever their gender. In fact, the opposite might be true. But fewer women will want to even try if the expectations of them in power are so completely different from men in the same jobs and the public judgment so arbitrary and misogynistic.
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Atrocities such as the Boston bombing are hard to tackle, but gun crime isn't
The greatest threat to US citizens is not one-off terror attacks, but the menace that comes with mass gun-ownership
Nobody knows why he did it. But that hasn't stopped them speculating. In retrospect, from the testimony of those who knew him, there were signs. But nobody could have predicted anything on this scale. What influences came to bear? What motives could there be? What would drive a young man to wilfully murder as many innocents as possible, leaving the country both vulnerable and mournful?
I pose these questions not of Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, the 19-year-old chief surviving suspect in the Boston bombing saga that left three dead and injured more than 170 last week, but of Adam Lanza, who shot 20 children and six teachers in Newtown, Connecticut in December. The contradictions in the political responses to the two tragedies and the issues they raise could not be more glaring or obscene.
On Monday the Boston Marathon was bombed. Within a day of suspects being identified, politicians who defended the status quo on guns were calling for "increased surveillance of Muslims" and addressing "loopholes in the immigration system" (Tsarnaev and his brother, Tamerlan, who was killed in a firefight, grew up in Kyrgyzstan).
On Wednesday the Senate declined to pass even the most anaemic gun control measures in response to the Newtown shootings. Twenty children, aged between six and seven, are slaughtered in school and the American polity takes five months to decide do nothing. Unable to break the filibuster limit, it didn't even come to a vote. Hiding behind the National Rifle Association's (NRA) talking points, gun rights senators cloaked themselves in the constitution, insisting support for gun control would violate the second amendment "right to bear arms".
While the authorities denied the still unconscious Dzhokhar his Miranda rights (informing him that he has the right to remain silent), some Republicans insisted he be tried as "an enemy combatant" – the legal aberration and moral abomination that paved the way to Guantánamo Bay. Their devotion to constitutional rights, it turns out, is partial; their embrace of guns is complete. The NRA even opposes legislation banning gun sales to people on the terrorist watchlist, meaning those who can't board a flight can still lock and load.
As John Oliver, a UK comedian on the Daily Show, noted: "One failed attempt at a shoe bomb and we all have to take off our shoes at the airport. Thirty one school shootings since Columbine and no change in the regulation of guns."
The ramifications of this neglect cannot be overstated. More than 85 people – including eight children – are killed with guns on an average day in America and more than twice that number are injured. Even taking into account the fact that most gun deaths are suicides, that's still several times the death toll of 9/11 every year.
Numbers alone, however, don't quite do the cognitive dissonance justice. The effect of a terrorist attack such as Boston cannot be measured in the number of slain alone. Terrorism creates a culture of fear and suspicion that spreads beyond those immediately affected and impacts upon our understanding of risk. It means no one feels safe, anyone is a potential suspect and danger could be anywhere. "Terror is first of all the terror of the next attack," writes Arjun Appadurai in Fear of Small Numbers. "Terror … opens the possibility that anyone may be a soldier in disguise, a sleeper among us, waiting to strike at the heart of our social slumber."
The trouble is this is precisely the culture that many Americans have lived in for years. It's estimated that in Chicago 20-30% of the children have witnessed a school shooting. Carolyn Murray, whose son was shot dead on his grandmother's lawn in a Chicago suburb, does not enjoy much in the way of "social slumber". She has become so accustomed to gunfire at the weekends she could call the police and tell them what calibre was used and the direction of the shooting, just by listening in bed. Put bluntly, a significant section of America lives in constant terror and Congress just decided they should continue to do so.
In the hierarchy of suffering and security in America there are, in short, places where you are supposed to be safe – marathons, suburban schools, cinemas – and places where you are apparently entitled to no such expectation: particularly poor black and Latino neighbourhoods. Only in a handful of exceptions – when the killers are white, American-born Christians (the media has developed no default anxiety about them), the dead mostly white and the murders in large numbers – do shootings stand a chance of attracting mainstream political attention. Even then, only rarely, and even then, as last week proved, to little tangible effect.
The uncomfortable reality is that there is precious little that can be done to prevent an atrocity such as that in Boston. "We've had a lot of successes in degrading the ability of al-Qaida to launch massive attacks," Democratic congressman Adam Schiff, a former federal prosecutor and member of the house intelligence committee, told the Washington Post. "But we've had a proliferation of one-off, foreign-born plots and self-radicalised individuals … We're going to have to recognise a certain vulnerability, and adopt a determined view that we will go on as we have, taking prudent precautions, but not changing the way we live."
Conversely there is a great deal that can be done to change the way Americans die daily. Gun rights advocates insist the gun-control measure that had the best chance last week, which demanded background checks for guns sold online and at gun shows, would not have prevented Lanza's crime. He used his mother's gun, which had been purchased legally. That's true, although since 90% of Americans and even 74% of gun-owning members of the NRA agreed with it, they should have passed it anyway. But the reason the compromise proposal was so tepid is because they scuppered efforts to ban assault weapons and high-capacity magazines, which enabled Lanza to kill far more children far more quickly.
Expressing frustration at the failure to pass anything, Andrew Goddard, whose son Colin was injured during the 2007 shootings at Virginia Tech, told the New York Times: "It's almost like you can see the finish line, but you just can't get there. It's more annoying to be able to see it and not get to it."
There's many a Boston marathon runner who knows exactly how that feels.
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