The Scars of Stop-and-Frisk – The New York Times

Last year, police officers in New York City stopped and frisked people 685,724 times. Eighty-seven percent of those searches involved blacks or Latinos, many of them young men, according to the New York Civil Liberties Union.

The practice of stop-and-frisk has become increasingly controversial, but what is often absent from the debate are the voices of young people affected by such aggressive policing on a daily basis. To better understand the human impact of this practice, we made this film about Tyquan Brehon, a young man who lives in one of the most heavily policed neighborhoods in Brooklyn.

By his count, before his 18th birthday, he had been unjustifiably stopped by the police more than 60 times. On several occasions, merely because he asked why he had been stopped, he was handcuffed, placed in a cell and detained for hours before being released without charges. These experiences were scarring; Mr. Brehon did whatever he could to avoid the police, often feeling as if he were a prisoner in his home.

His fear of the police also set back his education. At one high school he attended, he recoiled at the heavy presence of armed officers and school security agents. “I would do stuff that would get me suspended so I could be, like, completely away from the cops,” he recalled. He would arrive late, cut classes and refuse to wear the school uniform. Eventually, he was expelled.

The Scars of Stop-and-Frisk – The New York Times

Life after extreme weight loss | Life and style | The Guardian

The opening photo in Half, Julia Kozerski’s series of naked self-portraits, is actually the bookend to a sequence of earlier photos. In those, she appeared unhappily in her wedding dress in a changing room cubicle, more than 300lb (21 stone) and mortified. Here, she appears in the dress again, standing sideways on to the camera, to show how much of the dress is unoccupied. Over the course of a year, Kozerski lost half her body weight, and you might expect the resulting photos to conform to the glib narrative of before and after. Instead, the 28-year-old took pains to show “what real is, what raw is” – in this case stretchmarks, skin folds, contours like sand dunes. Raw is Kozerski naked, and frequently crying.

Nudity is an overused gesture in photography, particularly when it purports to “celebrate” the “ordinary”. You can’t turn on the TV (Lena Dunham), go to a gallery (Spencer Tunick) or, if you’re in San Francisco, enter a civic building these days without tripping over someone getting their kit off in the name of corporeal democracy. That Kozerski still manages to be shocking and interesting is testament to her ideas and her courage. The question most people ask on seeing the photos – after “Why don’t you get surgery to remove the extra skin?” – is “How did you get the weight off?” which she thinks misses the point. Losing the weight was tough, she says: “I had no idea who I was, and while I went through all that I was lost.” But what came after was tougher. Contrary to media everywhere, being thin isn’t enough of an identity to go on. “This is it!” she thought, when she finally got her weight down, and then: “Now what do I do?”

Life after extreme weight loss | Life and style | The Guardian

Has Daryl Kelly Spent Twenty Years in Prison for a Crime That Never Happened? | The New Yorker

For the past twenty years, Daryl Kelly has been imprisoned in New York State for a crime that may never have happened. He was living with his wife and five children in Newburgh, New York, in the fall of 1997, when he was arrested for rape and sexual abuse. The supposed victim was his oldest child, Chaneya, who was then eight years old. Chaneya testified against her father at trial; the jury convicted him; a judge sentenced him to twenty-to-forty years in prison. At the time, Chaneya’s mother was addicted to crack cocaine, among other drugs, and Chaneya and her siblings went to live with her grandmother. The following year, when her grandmother asked her what exactly had happened with her father, Chaneya told her that, in fact, there had been no rape or sexual abuse.

In the fall of 1999, the judge ordered a hearing, and Chaneya returned to the witness stand. This time, Chaneya testified that she had lied during the trial. The judge did not believe her, however, and Kelly has remained in prison ever since. An attorney named Peter Cross agreed to represent Kelly, pro bono, five years ago, but he has been unable to get him out of prison. I wrote about Kelly’s case for New York, in 2013, and in January, for the first time, Kelly will appear before the state Board of Parole.

His attorney has sent the parole board a packet on his behalf, which includes a letter that Chaneya wrote to her father in prison in 2002, when she was thirteen years old. Her schoolgirl handwriting fills each line of a page of three-ring-notebook paper. “Dear Daddy,” she wrote. “I do feel bad about telling a lie. All I want to do is put it all behind. You want the truth. I’ll tell you the truth.”

Has Daryl Kelly Spent Twenty Years in Prison for a Crime That Never Happened? | The New Yorker

Losing It in the Anti-Dieting Age – The New York Times

Weight Watchers saw all this happening and concluded that people didn’t have faith in diets. The company decided that what it offered was not a diet program but a lifestyle program. It was a behavior-modification program. (For the sake of expediency here, I will call its program a diet because it prescribes amounts of food.) When Deb Benovitz returned from her travels with news of dieting’s new language changes, the company realized that something had to change more than its marketing approach.

Weight Watchers’ chief science officer is Gary Foster, a psychologist — the first in that position, which previously had been held by dietitians. What he and his team realized from Benovitz’s research was that dieters wanted a holistic approach to eating, one that helped really change their bodies, yes, but in a way that was sustainable and positive. He got to work creating a new approach that would become known as Beyond the Scale: He used all available mind-body research to try to figure out a way for members to appreciate benefits of the program besides weight loss. This would help them stay on the program during setbacks and beyond their weight-loss period and allow the program to infiltrate their lives beyond mealtime and beyond plain old eating suggestions.

The company would move away from giving its members goal weights. It expanded its cognitive-behavioral strategies, which taught members to challenge unhelpful thinking and to respond to their emotions with reason, as opposed to with food or despair. It developed workshops that used meditation and qigong and didn’t once mention food or weight. It updated its apps and introduced a social-media program, Connect. It became as holistic-minded as the people told Benovitz they wanted a program to be.

But Weight Watchers was still a company called Weight Watchers, and it had to figure out a way to communicate all of this change to the public. People had too many associations with the brand. It needed someone other than the usual celebrity spokesdieter, a fat famous person who could be paid somewhere between $250,000 and $2 million to do the talk show circuit and People covers for a year. It needed someone who could fast-track the message that it was worth taking a new look at Weight Watchers.

Losing It in the Anti-Dieting Age – The New York Times

How to view coworkers with empathy — Quartz at Work

Quietly judging people is something of a pastime for me, wherever I am. But there’s something different about the way I judge, and see, my therapy waiting-room cohort. I have nothing to forgive them for, but I forgive them—for tapping their feet; for turning their earphones up too loud; for being genuinely happy; for being unapologetically sad. I do not know their lives, but I have true empathy for them—for their broken relationships; for their loneliness; for the harm they’ve endured; for their fears, anxieties, and attempts to feel better, all communicated through that glance we share as they exit the room, and I enter.

Lately I’ve been trying to bring a similar approach to how I see people at work.

How to view coworkers with empathy — Quartz at Work

The changing reasons why women cheat on their husbands – CNN

One of the more interesting facts in Esther Perel’s new book, State of Affairs: Rethinking Infidelity, comes near the beginning.

Since 1990, notes the psychoanalyst and writer, the rate of married women who report they’ve been unfaithful has increased by 40 percent, while the rate among men has remained the same.

More women than ever are cheating, she tells us, or are willing to admit that they are cheating — and while Perel spends much of her book examining the psychological meaning, motivation, and impact of these affairs, she offers little insight into the significance of the rise itself.

So what exactly is happening inside marriages to shift the numbers? What has changed about monogamy or family life in the past 27 years to account for the closing gap? And why have so many women begun to feel entitled to the kind of behavior long accepted (albeit disapprovingly) as a male prerogative?

The changing reasons why women cheat on their husbands – CNN

Male rape in America: A new study reveals that men are sexually assaulted almost as often as women.

Last year the National Crime Victimization Survey turned up a remarkable statistic. In asking 40,000 households about rape and sexual violence, the survey uncovered that 38 percent of incidents were against men. The number seemed so high that it prompted researcher Lara Stemple to call the Bureau of Justice Statistics to see if it maybe it had made a mistake, or changed its terminology. After all, in years past men had accounted for somewhere between 5 and 14 percent of rape and sexual violence victims. But no, it wasn’t a mistake, officials told her, although they couldn’t explain the rise beyond guessing that maybe it had something to do with the publicity surrounding former football coach Jerry Sandusky and the Penn State sex abuse scandal.

Stemple, who works with the Health and Human Rights Project at UCLA, had often wondered whether incidents of sexual violence against men were under-reported. She had once worked on prison reform and knew that jail is a place where sexual violence against men is routine but not counted in the general national statistics. Stemple began digging through existing surveys and discovered that her hunch was correct. The experience of men and women is “a lot closer than any of us would expect,” she says. For some kinds of victimization, men and women have roughly equal experiences. Stemple concluded that we need to “completely rethink our assumptions about sexual victimization,” and especially our fallback model that men are always the perpetrators and women the victims.

Male rape in America: A new study reveals that men are sexually assaulted almost as often as women.

How has the internet changed sex work? — Quartz

“Elle” is a 63-year-old sex worker. She’s been at it for decades, and what makes her extraordinary isn’t just her longevity in the business, but her ability to adapt to a changing market. Sex work is as old as civilization, but in the past 20 years the market for illegal sex services has undergone a radical transformation thanks to the internet, upending how it is sold and priced. There are now more women selling sex, more overall encounters, and—unlike in many other industries disrupted by the web—higher wages for workers.

Gregory DeAngelo, an economist at the University of West Virginia, scraped 17 years’ worth of data from The Erotic Review, a website that is like the Yelp for illegal sex services. The dataset features about 1.1 million reviews, which contain extremely detailed descriptions of encounters, time spent, features of the sex worker, and price. According to data on the site, average inflation-adjusted hourly rates increased 38% between 2000 and 2015. Elle’s reviews have appeared since 2000 and her prices—now around $270 per hour—almost exactly track the national average each year.

How has the internet changed sex work? — Quartz

Some Parentified Kids Grow Up to Be Compulsive Caretakers – The Atlantic

While there is a large body of literature that focuses on the neglect children experience from their parents, there’s less examination of how this neglect puts kids in roles of parenting each other. And there is virtually no empirical research on how this affects relationship dynamics later in life—both with siblings and others. Scholars agree that there are gaps in sibling research—primarily an incomplete understanding of how these relationships and roles are affected by abusive family environments. Hooper noted that “the literature is very scarce in this area.”

Some Parentified Kids Grow Up to Be Compulsive Caretakers – The Atlantic

Annabella Sciorra and Daryl Hannah Discuss Weighing the Costs of Speaking Out About Harvey Weinstein | The New Yorker

In March, Annabella Sciorra, who received an Emmy nomination for her role in “The Sopranos,” agreed to talk with me for a story I was reporting about Harvey Weinstein. Speaking by phone, I explained that two sources had told me that she had a serious allegation regarding the producer. Sciorra, however, told me that Weinstein had never done anything inappropriate. Perhaps she just wasn’t his type, she said, with an air of what seemed to be studied nonchalance. But, two weeks ago, after The New Yorker published the story, in which thirteen women accused Weinstein of sexual assault and harassment, Sciorra called me. The truth, she said, was that she had been struggling to speak about Weinstein for more than twenty years. She was still living in fear of him, and slept with a baseball bat by her bed. Weinstein, she told me, had violently raped her in the early nineteen-nineties, and, over the next several years, sexually harassed her repeatedly.

“I was so scared. I was looking out the window of my living room, and I faced the water of the East River,” she said, recalling our initial conversation. “I really wanted to tell you. I was like, ‘This is the moment you’ve been waiting for your whole life. . . .’ ” she said. “I really, really panicked,” she added. “I was shaking. And I just wanted to get off the phone.”

Annabella Sciorra and Daryl Hannah Discuss Weighing the Costs of Speaking Out About Harvey Weinstein | The New Yorker