"A study of California prosecutors finds a lack of diversity"

"Prosecutors decide whether to bring a case before a grand jury, how hard to press for an indictment, what charges to request and how punitive a sentence to recommend. Grand juries almost never refuse to file the charges prosecutors request. And mandatory sentencing laws often allow prosecutors to determine the penalty by picking the charges.

Moreover, the vast majority of criminal cases in the United States end in plea bargains, not in trials. So the discretion exercised in our justice system is mostly not by judges but by prosecutors, and typically not by elected district attorneys but by the legions of far less visible lawyers they employ.

Who are they? How representative are assistant district attorneys and deputy district attorneys of the communities they serve? For the most part, the answer is “we don't know.” Race and gender statistics for police officers have been publicly available for decades, but nothing similar has existed for prosecutors."
http://www.latimes.com/opinion/op-ed/la-oe-0729-sklanskymukamal-diversity-prosecutors-california-20150729-story.html

"Empathy Cards For Serious Illness"

"I created this collection of empathy cards for serious illness because I believe we need some better, more authentic ways to communicate about sickness and suffering. “Get well soon” cards don’t make sense when someone might not. Sympathy cards can make people feel like you think they’re already dead. A “fuck cancer” card is a nice sentiment, but when I had cancer, it never really made me feel better. And I never personally connected with jokes about being bald or getting a free boob job, which is what most “cancer cards” focus on.

With Empathy Cards, my goal is to help people connect with each other through truth and insight, which is one of the founding principles of this brand. I want the recipients of these cards to feel seen, understood, and loved."
http://info.emilymcdowell.com/empathy-cards-for-serious-illness/#sthash.SuL7CGjR.dpuf

I love this!

"How Netflix Reverse Engineered Hollywood"

"Through a combination of elbow grease and spam-level repetition, we discovered that Netflix possesses not several hundred genres, or even several thousand, but 76,897 unique ways to describe types of movies...

Using large teams of people specially trained to watch movies, Netflix deconstructed Hollywood. They paid people to watch films and tag them with all kinds of metadata. This process is so sophisticated and precise that taggers receive a 36-page training document that teaches them how to rate movies on their sexually suggestive content, goriness, romance levels, and even narrative elements like plot conclusiveness...

And now, they have a terrific advantage in their efforts to produce their own content: Netflix has created a database of American cinematic predilections. The data can't tell them how to make a TV show, but it can tell them what they should be making. When they create a show like House of Cards, they aren't guessing at what people want...

The human language of the genres helps people identify with the recommendations. "Predicting something is 3.2 stars is kind of fun if you have an engineering sensibility, but it would be more useful to talk about dysfunctional families and viral plagues. We wanted to put in more language," Yellin said. "We wanted to highlight our personalization because we pride ourselves on putting the right title in front of the right person at the right time.""
http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2014/01/how-netflix-reverse-engineered-hollywood/282679/

Ohhhh, that's why their shows are so good.

"The Family That Couldn’t Say Hippopotamus"

"Coming out of an era of rapid advances in computer technology, the idea of a discrete, common origin to human language made intuitive sense. It was also consistent with observations that many languages have similar features, suggesting that the brain contains a limited array of linguistic “switches” that constrain the ways language develops. These narrow paths, according to the theory, give rise to universal language structures. In sentences that contain a verb and object, for instance (“Duane played the piano”), a preposition often precedes a noun (“at the party”).

But over the years, it became clear that the truth about language origins was not quite as simple as a “language gene” or well-defined language module. Further study revealed that the FOXP2 gene is relevant to multiple mental abilities and is not strictly a language gene at all... As Enard points out, the language-as-island idea is also inconsistent with the way evolution typically works. “What I don’t like about the ‘module’ is the idea that it evolved from scratch somehow. In my view, it’s more that existing neural circuits have been adapted for language and speech.”...
Even the advancement of general cognitive skill, however, may be too narrow a picture of the evolution of language. University of Edinburgh computational linguist Simon Kirby argues that, while the human brain may be a necessary foundation for language, it is not sufficient to explain it. The beginnings of language, Kirby says, were profoundly shaped by the dynamic interplay of human culture itself... As hardwired as it is, language is a distributed object, both across the human brain and across generations of people."

http://nautil.us/issue/24/error/the-family-that-couldnt-say-hippopotamus-rp

I feel like there are a lot of human traits that wouldn't exist in isolation.

"I Don't Know What to Do With Good White People"

"This faded report is the type of official document a historian might consult if he were re-constructing the story of my family. The author, this white welfare officer, writes as if she is an objective observer, but she tells a well-worn story of Black women who refuse to work and instead depend on welfare. Occasionally, her clinical tone breaks down. Once, she notes that my mother is pretty. She probably considered herself a good white person...

Most of my white friends have responded to recent events with empathy or outrage. Some have joined protests. Others have posted Criming While White stories, a hashtag that has been criticized for detracting from Black voices. Look at me, the hashtag screams, I know that I am privileged. I am a good white person. Join me and remind others that you are a good white person too.

Over the past two weeks, I've seen good white people congratulate themselves for deleting racist friends or debating family members or performing small acts of kindness to Black people. Sometimes I think I'd prefer racist trolling to this grade of self-aggrandizement. A racist troll is easy to dismiss. He does not think decency is enough. Sometimes I think good white people expect to be rewarded for their decency...

I don't know which is worse, the unrepentant killer or the man who insists to the end that he meant well...

I don't think Darren Wilson or Daniel Pantaleo set out to kill Black men. I'm sure the cops who arrested my father meant well. But what good are your good intentions if they kill us?"

http://jezebel.com/i-dont-know-what-to-do-with-good-white-people-1671201391?utm_campaign=socialflow_jezebel_facebook&utm_source=jezebel_facebook&utm_medium=socialflow

I love when someone summarizes my feelings.

I know that in other ways, I am a good-privileged-person. And I think it helps a lot to be on both sides of this because, really, the issue is remembering that it's not about you. The issue is that people are not acting in recognition of the fact that other people are in pain; they are acting in recognition of the fact that they need to acknowledge certain things in order to keep seeming "good".

The thought process isn't "what does X group need from the systems that I have privilege in? What do individuals in my life need from me?", instead it's "What can I do? How will people see me if I do that?"

FB: "What a privilege, to concern yourself with seeming good while the rest of us want to seem worthy of life...

"You know what? He means well," we say. We lean on this, and the phrase is so condescending, so cloyingly sweet, so hollow, that I'd almost rather anyone say anything else about me than how awful I am despite how good I intend to be."

"My Life as an Ivy League Sugar Baby"

"At a school like Princeton, everyone speaks loudly about their ambitions and accomplishments, while our struggles and insecurities are barely whispered, even to ourselves. I was about to be released from Princeton, after being molded into the proper Ivy League renaissance woman ready for gainful employment. At least, that was the expectation. However, my professional future turned out to be more unorthodox than even I anticipated

My decision to start dating men for money was a surprisingly easy one to make. I'd always been fascinated by stories of escorts and sex workers and had seen them as kindred spirits in the realm of libertinism and debauchery. I dimly understood that sex unlocked parts of us that we keep hidden, and I saw sex work as a foray into therapy. Since I was graduating with a psychology degree and had a reputation as an aggressively sex-positive slut, sex work seemed an obvious choice...

Although, I've finally mastered being a sugar cunt, I wouldn't say that the life is glamorous by any stretch of the imagination. The money's been good, but the pretty jewelry has becomes less enticing the more I realize that it's really a ball and chain. None of the sugar dicks I've dated have stuck, either because they felt too strongly about me and couldn't reconcile the payment with their emotions, or because I felt like they were emotional parasites, eating my orgasms to feed their ego."
http://www.vice.com/read/my-life-as-an-ivy-league-sugarcunt-235

"I'm a Single Black Girl and I Refuse to be Scared by the Statistics Saying I Will Never Get Married"

"Dating While Black is Kinda Like Mario Kart.

I love playing Mario Kart. On paper, Yoshi is a solid bet. He’s a dinosaur, small, and moves pretty fast. But don’t discount Bowser and Donkey Kong. Drive next to one of those guys and your ass will get knocked off Rainbow Road. Despite their size, they still accelerate faster than Mario and Luigi, even though both Mario and Luigi are better at handling and can absolutely outmaneuver Donkey Kong and Bowser off-road. Yes, statistically, Yoshi is the game favorite, but that doesn’t mean Mario or Donkey Kong can’t win the game.

Life brings obstacles but it also brings rainbow boxes of opportunity...

In the words of Maya Angelou, if you can’t change it, change your attitude. Stereotypes, expectations, and other people’s opinions don’t define you as a person unless you let them. A hundred people could tell you they don’t want to date you because you’re black and you can choose to be angry or choose to see it as a hundred people you were able to weed out on your way to Mr. Right. I mean let’s be real, you probably didn’t want to date those dudes anyway."
http://www.xojane.com/sex/im-a-single-black-woman-and-im-not-scared-of-the-dating-statistics