Link Roundup! -The Toast

On sexual harassment in the restaurant industry:

“When you file a complaint, you look like a bad guy, because now they have to go through this process and there is a paper trail, and they wind up taking you off the schedule or they’ll ostracise you,” says Kirk.

A third of restaurant workers said that they did not report sexual harassment from their co-workers and their managements because they feared their shifts would get worse. Worse shifts mean worse tips, which means a lower pay check at the end of the week.

While we’re on restaurants, this look at the Chinese immigrants who staff them is really good:

Rain’s friend told him to find a job farther away, “so the boss will treat you better.” Rain found work in South Carolina, where he stayed for two months. “At the beginning, I couldn’t do anything—I could only clean up, do a little frying,” he told me. “Now I can do pretty much anything.” He encountered his first eggroll and his first fortune cookie, and learned how to prepare dishes he had never seen in China. He practiced using cornstarch to make a crispy coating on General Tso’s chicken and to thicken the sauce for beef with broccoli. Like most cooks in busy Chinese restaurants, he figured out how to use a single knife, a heavy cleaver, for everything from cleaning shrimp to mincing garlic. “It’s important that you do it fast,” he said.

The afterlife of your stolen bike:

Sergeant Hall—stout, balding, mellow—says that for years he’d heard rumors about Bicycle Pull Apart. Once he began digging he found that more than half the store’s purchases or pawns last year were from convicted felons—“almost all for property crimes or drug crimes.” Pawnshops and similar used goods stores are required by city law to keep online records of their transactions, including serial numbers and customer ID info. Several of these customers’ names were entered incorrectly, and one entry listed the wrong serial number for a stolen Litespeed Tuscany worth $835. “Upon seeing the imprinted serial number,” Hall wrote in his arrest report, “I can only conclude it was intentionally mistyped as the number was clear.”

Amazing interview with Charles Blow:

And endurance becomes this ambient thing in your life; it becomes your constant. It is not just to play and grow up and fall in love, but it is to endure. It becomes the paramount motivation in your life. The tragedy when you hear young men say, Oh I never thought I’d be 18 or 21 without going to jail or being in the grave. I’ve heard this too much. If that is being drilled into your mind, what kind of psychological damage does that do to you, and to your relationship to society? And in addition to that, whatever damage is being done, society is amplifying the damage by misconstruing the data and concepts so that we overestimate black crime, we overestimate black hostility, we overestimate black aggression. We ascribe it everything dark and negative. In that kind of hostile milieu of black bodies that have been tortured in a way, in a system that is designed to destroy it, these concepts of black being dangerous and wrong, you can have the unfortunate crossing of those wires and you get shootings. I don’t know how to fix that. I don’t know if I’m equipped to answer that.

Incredibly sad.

Want @AP to use “sex worker,” not “prostitute?” MT @APStylebook “Let us hear from you: entries for 2015 Stylebook. http://t.co/uO8RsnSxSz”

— Open Society Health (@OSFHealth) October 7, 2014

This Reason article (and Reason has actually been great on police brutality coverage this summer, so they LULLED US) on consent is the stupidest thing I’ve ever read [about consent] and I’ll link it for you but I’ll also give you a screenshot excerpt in case you want to stick with that (also, the URL is ruining-sex-in-california, for lolz):

Allow me to recommend Nichole Perkins’ awesome piece on being a black female domme looking for white male subs as a palate cleanser:

Nashville has a strong underground D/s and swinging culture, but the more I researched, the more I knew I’d never join any clubs or ask to be invited as a guest to explore my options. Through FetLife, I learned that the local men who were masters or dominants were almost all white and the language in their profiles frequently set off my internal racist alarms. I saw one man with a picture of a Confederate flag belt buckle he used for flogging. The most popular local club, or “professional dungeon,” lists in its code of conduct that “respect should always be accorded to every individual…” but when I’d see the expected attendees for gatherings, I’d cringe at how few people of color seemed to be present. There were some black men who were doms, but based on their profiles, they were masters of primarily white women. If I’d reached out to them, I think I would’ve been ignored or rejected. I didn’t feel like I’d be safe or respected if I tried to attend one of the gatherings — not as someone new to the life and definitely not as a black woman.

Nicole is an Editor of The Toast.