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Month: April 2011

  • Grad School Advice

    I always feel like who am I to talk about grad school? I didn’t follow any of the standards Rules to Successful Completion. I liked school, but I wasn’t hanging around the department and I took nine years to finish. I might have been the only Harvard sociology student history to fail the “oral exam” (go ahead and snicker, I would. I know it sounds dirty, but it’s not). Most of my close friends, almost all of my employment (I was the sole worker in a very small library and was a TA to just one class during those nine years), and all of my social life were outside the sociology department. That’s how I stayed calm and sane. I also became a police officer. I recommend that for all grad students (kidding… sort of).

    I just came across this in a comment to this article. It’s damn good advice if you’re in graduate school and anything like me. It’s also contrary to almost all “normal” advice you’ll hear. And don’ forget, “Friend, I don’t know what the hell you do for a living, but damn!” It’s the one time in your life you can spend all day in the library and reading books and consider it work:

    7 Golden Rules for Grad School:

    1. Never agree to live with someone in your program. Go home to someone who is either in a different program or who is a citizen of the “Real World.”

    2. Always try and remember that MANY of your colleagues have the minimal level of social skills required for functioning outside of academia and many of them are feeling, after being star pupils and overachievers for most of their lives, deeply insecure. Knowing this will help alleviate a lot of your stress. So when they say something to you like, “You only got to teach X class because so-and-so/that professor/the department ________________.” Just quote Oprah and what one of my older colleagues said: “Don’t let them steal your joy!”

    3. “Invest your ego somewhere else and find some support system that’s separate from this program—your family, your lover, or whoever.” Truer words were never spoken. Your friends and family are your reality check, your cheerleaders, and they’re the ones who are going to throw you a party post-defense. My best friend is always saying to me, “Friend, I don’t know what the hell you do for a living, but damn!” That’s all I need sometimes to get through a tough day.

    4. “Be kind to yourself.” – one of my professors who I taught for last year.

    5. A little anxiety never hurt anyone, but just be aware of that fine line between knowing that you’re just anxious and knowing that the lines on the bus’s brakes were cut and the bus is barreling towards you.

    6. In the words of Baz Luhrmann: “Don’t waste your time on jealousy. Sometimes you’re ahead, sometimes you’re behind. The race is long and, in the end, it’s only with yourself.”

    7. You’re there because someone, somewhere, on some admissions committee put all the pieces of you together and wanted you to come and earn a graduate degree with them. If you couldn’t do it, you never would’ve been recommended for admission by either your old professors or a bunch of professors who you’ve never even met before you set-foot in the door in August. You CAN do it.

  • Flogging Momentum

    My piece in the Chronicle of Higher Education seemed to make a splash. There’s also a piece out in the Washington Monthly (not yet available online… but why not subscribe?). I haven’t seen it yet. I mean, I’ve seen it. I wrote it…. But I haven’t seen it in print.

    Most people seem to be responding to the book correctly: with thoughtful discussion. That’s a great sign! Also a good sign is the I went up the Amazon sales rank today, which isn’t bad for a book that isn’t out yet. On the subject, my editor at Basic Books said she was holding a copy of the real deal in her hands. So it is starting to come off the presses.

    It almost seems as if if flogging has already gotten more press than Cop in the Hoodever got. That’s good, but also a bit bittersweet.

  • Good Shooting

    Videoof police-involved shooting. Cops 1. Robber 0.

  • Sitting at the Schadenfreude Cafe

    I don’t quite know how else to describe my perusal of right-wing blogs responding to the shocker than Obama was born in Hawaii.

    What’s funny, though not surprising, is I haven’t heard a single person say, “gosh, I guess… I was wrong.” I guess it’s all about that “conviction” thing.

    “Why does it say Barrack and not Barry,” is a good one. And “Why does it say ‘African’ for his father? The term back then was black.” Of course the term back then wasn’t black (the race would have been “colored” or “negro”). And his father wasAfrican.

    And “Why did he wait so long,” is being said a lot. I don’t know, maybe because stupid fridge groups often show their true colors and discredit their cause. And there’s something undignified about the President (seems like “respect the office” only applies when Republicans are in power) getting down in the fray. I mean, it’s like if they said he wasn’t a man, would he have to whip out his presidential schlong?

    Now Trump taking credit? That’s silly. I mean, Trump did push the issue and it may have pushed Obama to say enough is enough. But it’s hardly something to brag about, especially if you were wrong.

    The grandmother video wasn’t convincing. What grandmother wouldn’t remember when her grandson was born, here, where she was when she heard the news? What quashed my doubts was the birth announcement in the local paper. What kind of parents would put a false birth announcement in the papers, in 1961, to help their black son because President of the United States one day?

    Now of course we stillcan’t know for sure. I mean, we didn’t see the birth ourselves. As a Twitter feed said, “Yeah, but where’s the placenta?!”

  • Don’t Get a Crime Scene Tattooed on Your Chest

    Don’t Get a Crime Scene Tattooed on Your Chest

    A former student sent me this link. Good stuff! And good work by LAPD homicide Lt. Dave Dolson. The LA Timesstory is here.

  • We need higher taxes…

    …to pay for police.

    Newark laid off police and murders are up 71percent this year. That’s penny wise and pound foolish. The Newark Star-Ledgerreports.

  • NYPD Stop and Frisks and Marijuana Arrests

    WNYC reporter Ailsa Chang reports on the curious link between stop and frisks and marijuana arrests in New York City. It’s curious because small-scale possession of marijuana in New York State isn’t a crime (it is a non-arrestable ticketable “violation”). Nor do drugs that are “immediately apparent” based on “plain-feel” during a “Terry Frisk” (for weapons) give police justification to search (this is unique to New York State based on People v. Diaz).

    I also did a little research based on the nifty map provided at the above link. There are 76 precincts in New York City. In 2010, 19 police precincts with the highest arrest rates for the lowest level marijuana-possession had 48 percent of the city’s murders and 39 percent of city’s robberies. But I’m not certain what percent of the NYC’s population lives in those 19 precincts. Anybody have data for population by precinct?

    I’m briefly quoted in the story. And you can read what I’ve already written about stop and frisks by clicking on the “stop and frisk” tag below. This story is a bit different because it focuses on illegal searches, which are never OK. Police are given so much leeway within the law that I can’t help but think that cops who conduct illegal searches are, at best, lazy and stupid.

  • Faith and the Badge

    NYPD Sergeant (and Cop in the Hood fan) Martin Browne is interviewed about being Catholic and being a cop. It’s a good interview.

  • An Easter Flogging

    The first article to come from my new book is out in the Chronicle of Higher Education.

    A crazy idea came from a dinner in New Orleans. I had cold-called (or whatever the e-mail equivalent is) a writer and his wife because I was a fan of his work and thought we had much in common. They were gracious enough to arrange a meal and treat me, without much justification, as a professional equal more than a stalker. The conversation turned to corporal punishment in public schools. They were amazed not that such a peculiarity existed in a city ripe with oddities, but that such illegal punishments were administered at the urging of and with the full consent of the students’ parents.

    “Fascinating,” I drolly replied, but I wasn’t shocked. If I’d learned one thing as a police officer patrolling a poor neighborhood, it was the working- and lower-class populations’ great fondness for corporal punishment. No punishment is as easy or seemingly satisfying as a physical beating. I learned this not because I beat people, but because the good citizens I swore to serve and protect often urged me to do so. It wasn’t hard for me to resist (I liked my job, and besides, I wasn’t raised that way), but I agreed that many of the disrespectful hoodlums deserved a beating. Why? Because, as the old-school thinking goes, when people do wrong, they deserve to be punished.

    Read the rest here.

    Happy Easter and Χριστὸς Ἀνέστη. Crack a red egg and eat some lamb. (Rita Wilson, just FYI, was the producer of “My Big Fat Greek Wedding” and is Tom Hank’s wife.)

  • Mexican Poet Against the Drug War

    I’m back from Mexico City, happy to have been there. No, I didn’t get sick (or mugged). Yes, I ate everything (including grasshopper quesadillas, which I can say are tasty, but it’s still best not to lift the tortilla and look at the critters melted in with the cheese). But I’m also happy to be back at low altitude. Seriously, it’s strange and disconcerting to feel out of breath while doing nothing. Also of note: it’s the first trip I’ve ever taken where I didn’t, not even once, hear “Hotel California.”

    Back home, I’m greeting with this BBC headline: “Mexico poet Javier Sicilia leads anger at drug violence.” No, I’ve never heard of him, but he’s taken up the cause following his son’s murder:

    His harsh criticism of what he calls President Felipe Calderon’s “stupid strategy” to fight drug cartels has resounded with large sections of Mexican society who are increasingly frustrated by the rising violence in many parts of the country.
    …
    More and more innocent civilians like his son are being killed as “collateral damage of the drugs war”, Mr Sicilia believes. So he focuses his criticism on President Calderon’s strategy.

    “I think Felipe Calderon is responsible for launching a war in a stupid way,” he says, combining rage with frustration.

    “What this war has done is allow the corruption of institutions which had been taking place for years to emerge, but leaving those institutions completely defenceless to face organised crime.”
    …
    President Calderon – who received Mr Sicilia at the presidential palace after the murders – made an overt reference to the issue in the wake of the demonstrations.

    “Let us not be confused,” said Mr Calderon at a lunch with business leaders earlier this month.

    “We should say ‘Enough!’ to the criminals who kidnap and murder. They are the enemy, not those who fight against them,” he added.

    At what point do people in power ever admit: “Maybe, just maybe, what we’re doing isn’t working.” Remember, when Calderon took office, there were about two deaths each day related to the drug war. Now, after five years of “getting tough” and ramping up the drug war, there are more than 40drug-war deaths each day.