Solitary confinement is torture - and it's not benefitting anyone in society. So, why on earth does it continue to be used?
Paul Krugman: Has Harvard economist Greg Mankiw been living in a cave since 2006?
(Photo: Alex Thompson / Flickr)
"Predictive policing," a new high-tech method by which police crunch crime statistics and other data with algorithms to divine when and where future crimes are most likely to occur, is seen to expand the militarization - including contractor profiteering - and racialization of police work.
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News outlets just couldn't get enough of the spectacle, playing it over and over and over again, salaciously daring us to avert our eyes from the graphic content if we are sensitive viewers ... and above all, to get our precious children out of the room. CNN ran nine separate updates on the story in the space of a week. The shock, the outrage, the defense, the debate ... it was all there. No juicy angle, no pathetic tuft of adorable giraffe fur escaped their discerning journalistic eye. It was euthanasia! It was eugenics! It was so ... ewwww. And boy, did it sell. And the anchors urged us to stay tuned, because there was an unconfirmed rumor that a second giraffe victim was waiting in the wings for our appalled delectation.
In Windfall: The Blooming Business of Global Warming, environmental author McKenzie Funk pulls off the nearly impossible task of covering the most cynical of profiteering (making money off of the Earth's catastrophic reconfiguration because of climate change), while penning a captivating read that avoids being funereal. Even while being aware of the dangers at hand, Funk regularly acknowledges the droll ironies of a society that can even make money off of its own self-destruction. Funk uses wordsmithing finesse to tell a riveting story, anchored in detailed examples.
