For at least a decade, Toronto’s police force has been quietly building a massive database of the black residents it is supposed to serve. This is not a catalogue of convicted criminals—most black people in the database are not suspected of any crime, at least not in any official sense. Police simply document us in case they ever need to identify us later.
In Toronto we use the term “carding” to describe the police practice of stopping civilians who are not suspected of a crime, and documenting their personal information. For years, this practice was a secret; now we know it exists, and that it has excessively targeted Toronto’s black residents. The retention of information collected in such a dubious and discriminatory manner is an insult to black residents. Yet police plan to not only continue carding, but to keep the information from millions of individual contacts in a database for years to come—just in case.
Teaching evolution at the University of Kentucky:
I was originally reluctant to take my job at the university when offered it twenty years ago. It required teaching three sections of non-majors biology classes, with three hundred students per section, and as many as eighteen hundred students each year. I wasn’t particularly keen on lecturing to an auditorium of students whose interest in biology was questionable given that the class was a freshman requirement.
Then I heard an interview with the renowned evolutionary biologist E. O. Wilson in which he addressed why, as a senior professor—and one of the most famous biologists in the world—he continued to teach non-majors biology at Harvard. Wilson explained that non-majors biology is the most important science class that one could teach.
RIP, Cynthia Lennon. She did not have an easy time of it.
Get it together, cops:
Andy Hort is nearing the end of his rope.
For months, he says, the NYPD — and others apparently connected to the police department — have been taking up all of the available parking spots on the street near Earth Enterprise, Hort’s 100-year-old midtown printing business. His vendors are unable deliver the supplies he needs, and his own trucks have been exiled from the block, forced to double-park or simply circle the block, near Eighth Avenue and 36th Street.
The cars that are giving him trouble aren’t police cruisers or other marked vehicles, but personal cars of members of the NYPD (and, in some cases, their families) as well as retired cops. And Hort says he would understand if the vehicles — almost uniformly parked without paying for metered parking, or with all manner of infractions, like in front of fire hydrants or in clearly marked “no standing” zones — displayed a valid police placard, which allows cops on official business to park where they need to without fear of a summons. But instead there are handwritten notes, reflective NYPD vests, badges that read “family of NYPD,” and, in some cases, just a copy of the NYPD patrol manual sitting on the dash. Fed up, Hort decided to start documenting what he saw.
The Archipelago is coming to an end, but you should really peruse the archives!
Very moving piece in The Lancet by a daughter about her father’s suicide and the Cat Stevens album he loved:
36 minutes 40 seconds is a perfectly respectable amount of time to invoke your father’s death, dwell on details, have a mid-ranging contained breakdown with an appended general existential crisis concerning your own mortality, and then recover yourself like nothing happened. You can even, when you become more adept at it, squeeze one in before going out and no one would ever suspect.
okay I surrender I’m gonna read all the Elena Ferrante books
This is my #1 piece of advice for people having babies: immediately follow a bunch of British people on Twitter so you have someone to talk to in the wee small hours of the morning.
how do dogs have the courage to go down the stairs they are going head first
— robyn (@ucrazyutaraptor) March 31, 2015
