I’ve Been Reporting on MS-13 for a Year. Here Are the 5
There’s one thing everyone can agree with President Donald Trump on about the street gang MS-13: The group specializes in spectacular violence. Its members attack in groups, in the woods, at night, luring teens to their deaths with the promise of girls or weed. One Long Island boy told me he doesn’t go to parties anymore because he worries any invitation could be a trap. A victim’s father showed me a death certificate that said his son’s head had been bashed in, then lowered his voice and added that the boy’s bones had been marked by machete slashes, but he didn’t want the mother to know that.
Abusive relationships: Why it's so hard for women to 'just leave'
“And so I stayed.” In a widely read blog post, Jennifer Willoughby wrote this phrase after each of the many reasons she gave for enduring what she described as her abusive marriage to former White House aide Rob Porter. Willoughby’s reasons are consistent with those that hundreds of abused women report to researchers. These are women often caught in a web made from isolating, confidence-crushing abuse and by realistic fears of greater harm should they leave. They also can feel caught when they meet indifference from others or, worse, insults that add to their injuries. I am a social work scholar whose research focuses on the problems of dating and domestic violence.
How Long-Unpublished Press Photos Bring Life to Chinese History
This is the fourth article in a series on “Old Photos,” a Chinese-language publication that collects images of the country’s modern history. Parts one, two, and three can be found here. In the 1990s, the Xinhua News Agency — China’s state newswire — began opening its photographic archives to the public. It was a paid service: In 1996, for example, a 5-inch black-and-white photograph cost 55 yuan (then around $6.60) to reprint and use. Back then, it was fairly easy to access the archives, as long as you had a letter of introduction from your employer. I visited the Xinhua archives in Beijing several times, sending staff scurrying off to the storeroom to retrieve albums for me to peruse.
Fact-checking an immigration meme that's been circulating for more than a decade
A viral image on social media -- one that’s critical of illegal immigration -- has been circulating for years. The list of claims first circulated in the form of a chain email in 2006, according to Snopes.com. Six years later, we checked several of the claims ourselves. With immigration in the headlines today, these claims are popular again. So we’ll take a fresh look at them here. All told, the list is heavy with claims that are unsupported, misleading, or simply wrong.
The rise of Donald Glover: how he captured America
Try, if you can, to watch This Is America, the new music video from Childish Gambino, while keeping your eyes off the man in the camera’s gaze. It’s not easy. You may have to watch it twice, maybe three times, probably more. In the clip, Childish Gambino is a dancing, running, alternately homicidal and joyous streak of shirtless charisma. Your eyes want to follow him, soak him in.
War, Hardship, and Separation: Portraits of a Changing China
The art of photography was introduced into China in the latter half of the 19th century. Soon afterward, photo studios first popped up in the country’s colonial treaty ports and later in cities further inland. The mysterious new trade allowed many curious Chinese to examine everyday life across the country. Many of us feel self-conscious in front of the camera. As late as the 1970s, many Chinese people, especially those living in remote regions, refused to be photographed out of superstition. Traveling deep into eastern China’s Shandong province at the end of the ’70s, a journalist for the provincial pictorial magazine was surprised to find that his interviewees flatly refused to have their pictures taken, for fear that the camera would bewitch them and suck their blood.
Sorting the Real Sandy Photos From the Fakes
With Hurricane Sandy approaching the New York metro area, the nation's eyes are turning to its largest city. Photos of storms and flooding are popping up all over Twitter, and while many are real, some of them -- especially the really eye-popping ones -- are fake. This post, which will be updated over the next couple of days, is an effort to sort the real from the unreal. It's a photograph verification service, you might say, or a pictorial investigation bureau. If you see a picture that looks fishy, send it to me at alexis.madrigal[at]gmail.com. If you like this sort of thing, you should also visit istwitterwrong.tumblr.com, which is just cataloging the fakes.
A broken idea of sex is flourishing. Blame capitalism
Since the Toronto bloodbath, a lot of pundits have belatedly awoken to the existence of the “incel” (short for involuntary celibate) online subculture and much has been said about it. Too often, it has been treated as some alien, unfamiliar worldview. It’s really just an extreme version of sex under capitalism we’re all familiar with because it’s all around us in everything, everywhere and has been for a very long time. And maybe the problem with sex is capitalism. What’s at the bottom of the incel worldview: sex is a commodity, accumulation of this commodity enhances a man’s status, and every man has a right to accumulation, but women are in some mysterious way obstacles to this, and they are therefore the enemy as well as the commodity. They want high-status women, are furious at their own low status, but don’t question the system that allocates status and commodifies us all in ways that are painful and dehumanizing.
The Foreign Missionaries Who First Turned a Lens on China
This is the second article in a series on “Old Photos,” a Chinese-language publication that collects images of the country’s modern history. The first article can be found here. While soliciting contributions for my publication “Old Photos,” I once received an album from a museum worker. The album was actually a black, hardback accounting book, and on each page were affixed two or three photographs of varying sizes. There must have been around 200 in total, the vast majority of which were taken in and around Yantai, a port city in eastern China’s Shandong province, in the early 20th century. A note the size of my palm was stuck to the other side of the hardback cover, explaining that the photos were confiscated from a foreign missionary working in the area when the Communist Party reunified China in 1949.
Truth, truthiness, triangulation: A news literacy toolkit for a “post-truth” world
We were guaranteed a free press, We were not guaranteed a neutral or a true press. We can celebrate the journalistic freedom to publish without interference from the state. We can also celebrate our freedom to share multiple stories through multiple lenses. But it has always been up to the reader or viewer to make the reliability and credibility decisions. It is up to the reader or viewer to negotiate truth. News literacy is complicated.
The US is stingier with child care and maternity leave than the rest of the world
In most American families led by couples, both parents are in the workforce. At the same time, nearly 1 in 4 U.S. children are being raised by single moms. Yet child care is generally unaffordable and paid leave is not available to most U.S. parents.
Seeing Red: China’s Communist Revolution Captured on Camera
This is the third article in a series on “Old Photos,” a Chinese-language publication that collects images of the country’s modern history. Parts one and two can be found here. After three years of civil war, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) finally defeated the Kuomintang (KMT) in 1949.
