September 23, 2016
Nearly 93 percent of respondents to a poll about abuse suffered on Twitter said that the company either didn’t respond to reports of abuse or said, essentially, that the offending tweet(s) was not abusive enough. / BuzzFeed
Related: Twitter’s 10-year failure to prevent abuse created a “honeypot for assholes.” / BuzzFeed
“I thought it sounded like a real jolly good time,” said Palmer Luckey, a member of Facebook’s Board of Directors, in response to questions as to why he is funding a large anti-Clinton “shitposting” meme-creating group (based, naturally, on Reddit). / The Daily Beast
“I don’t mind being recorded. We’re always being recorded.” Affable and insightful conversation between two of the most lovable weirdos in baseball: LSD-popping pitcher Spaceman Lee (now a gubernatorial candidate in Vermont) and beer nerd/sabermetrician Eno Sarris. / hardballtimes.com
The sales team at Abbott, marketer of OxyContin, used to call their boss the “King of Pain”—perhaps too apt a moniker after a “secret trove” of documents came to light about the questionable lengths they went to sell doctors on the drug. / STAT
After noticing a pattern of kidney cancers in their hometown, residents of Hoosick Falls, NY, made a startling, if familiar, discovery: their biggest employer was leaching poison from Teflon into the water. / Fusion
Record storms garner coverage of flooding. What gets less attention is one of the shittier side effects: flooding frequently leads to disastrous sewer overflows that are dangerous to public health and expensive to homes and businesses that have to be restored. / climatecentral.org
Team doctors prescribe addictive painkillers to NFL players by the gobs, but every year some turn to weed instead and wind up suspended. What would it take for the NFL to change its mind on marijuana? / Rolling Stone
The National Archives just released 86 “national treasure” GIFs. / washingtonian.com
Hanjin Shipping has gone bankrupt, stranding $14.5 billion of goods at sea. Basic explanation: Global trade contracted following the financial crisis and never fully recovered, which has sent several shipping companies into the red. Related: Maersk, a global shipping titan, announced today it will split in two. / The Economist, Financial Times
Video may be the only thing that will sate a public hungry for answers, but according to Charlotte’s police chief it doesn’t contain any definitive answers as to whether Keith Lamont Scott was holding a book or a gun. / The Washington Post
Charlotte pastor: If you don’t want black people to riot in your stores, then they need to feel some ownership over them. “Would someone who feels they have a stake in the community consciously try to destroy it? But we don’t own Wal-Mart.” / YouTube
Three years ago, Charlotte police shot black college student and football player Jonathan Ferrell, who had been in a car wreck. Ferrell was unarmed and probably concussed from his wreck, but the policeman who shot him walked. / ibtimes.com
Frustration with police in Charlotte previously centered on the creation of “exclusion zones,” parts of the city that were to be off-limits to ex-cons/returning citizens. / The Charlotte Observer
“The likelihood of climbing out of poverty is lower in Charlotte than in any other big city in the country.” Charlotte and Atlanta stand out as the least likely cities for children who grow up in the bottom fifth income level to rise to the top fifth. / Charlotte Magazine
The division of North Carolina’s communities is real: none of North Carolina’s electoral districts are expected to be competitive, thanks to gerrymandering. / The Charlotte Observer
Violence struck twice in Charlotte this week: On Monday, a policeman shot and killed a middle-aged black man, Keith Lamont Scott, who may have been armed, while serving a warrant for someone totally different. / The Root
North Carolina governor Pat McCrory—formerly mayor of Charlotte—declared a state of emergency in North Carolina on Thursday following the previous day’s protests. / Al Jazeera
Diverging statements arrive from Seattle athletes: Mariners catcher Steve Clevenger tweets that protesters need to be treated like animals while Seahawks receiver Doug Baldwin calls for attorneys general across the country to investigate police training. / sportingnews.com, espn.com
The Trump Foundation has used over $250,000 of other people’s money to pay off settlements from lawsuits against Trump’s other assets. / The Washington Post
“For his humanitarianism and thinking outside the traditional corporate box, [Chobani founder and CEO] Ulukaya now stands at the center of a vicious smear campaign.” It’s not too hard to imagine how Greek yogurt made by a Turkish-American immigrant became an obsession of the paranoid fringe, but it’s startling to read nonetheless. / The Daily Beast
“He clearly experiences the gym as metric-based tyranny, but it seems obvious that other people approach working out with the same near-artistic intent he applies to thinking about them working out.” On the eternal shtick of “existential detective” Mark Grief, founder of n+1, whose slack-jawed wonder at pretty much everything characterizes the publication’s all-comers criticism. / The Village Voice
Another bomb plot: A white Houston man bought explosives from an undercover FBI agent and was promptly arrested. / chron.com
President Obama tells Doris Kearns Goodwin in Vanity Fair that the war in Syria “haunts me constantly.” / Vanity Fair
Perhaps it’s not shocking, given the history of black people and police in America, that many major cities have mutiple police unions or fraternal organizations that are divided along racial lines. / Bloomberg
A review of over 80 big-city police union contracts and 13 state “police bills of rights” by activist group Campaign Zero found that nearly 90 percent contain language barring police officers from true accountability in some way. / checkthepolice.org
Related: Chicago’s police union is particularly bad. The contract includes language making it incredibly difficult to fire officers, even for heinous acts, and hamstrings police oversight agencies. As TMN’s Sam Stecklow reported earlier this year, the Chicago Fraternal Order of Police until recently regularly distributed misinformation about the victims of police shootings from the scene of the crime, to stave off lawsuits from families and charges from prosecutors, and have been at the center of efforts to destroy police misconduct files dating back to 1967. / chicagoreporter.com, Chicago Tribune, Chicago Reader, South Side Weekly
Police unions representing sheriff’s deputies in Florida and California have threatened to stop providing security to football players in retaliation for some of the players peacefully protesting the National Anthem. / miamiherald.com
After the National Fraternal Order of Police, the nation’s largest police union, endorsed Donald Trump, its labor bretheren are publicly pushing back. The FOP “has publicly turned a blind eye to the minority community as a collective,” the president of the Coalition of Black Trade Unionists told BuzzFeed News. / BuzzFeed
An August survey by the National Endowment for the Arts found that in 2015, only 43 percent of American adults had read a work of literature for pleasure in the previous year. / arts.gov
“The neglect of police unions has seriously impeded understanding of American policing, particularly with respect to basic police management, innovation and reform, police-community relations, and police accountability.” In a 2008 study, criminologist Samuel Walker found a wide dearth in any kind of research into police unions and their effects on societies and cities—but found that nearly all of the existing research said they’re a bad thing. / Police Practice and Research
For your Friday entertainment: Alpine Sandwiches, a site featuring photographs of sandwiches in alpine terrain. The above is the “Deep South Sustainer,” of which the maker writes, “This sandwich provided adequate nutritional sustenance on a stunning day ski touring in Antarctica. I let the ice crystals of the frozen tomato and lettuce melt in my mouth as I took in the amazing views of my surroundings. A memorable moment, thanks to this picture, which fueled me up to climb Domier Peak.” / Alpine Sandwiches