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In Plain View

How child molesters get away with it.

In a 2001 book, “Identifying Child Molesters,” the psychologist Carla van Dam tells the story of a young Canadian elementary-school teacher she calls Jeffrey Clay. Clay taught physical education. He was well liked by his students, and often he asked boys in his class to stay after school, to do homework and help him with chores. One day, just before winter break, three of the boys made a confession to their parents. Mr. Clay had touched them under their pants.

The parents went to the principal. He confronted Clay, who denied everything. The principal knew Clay and was convinced by him. In his mind, what it boiled down to, van Dam writes, “is some wild imaginations and the three boys being really close.”

The parents were at a loss. Mr. Clay was beloved. He had started a popular gym club at the school. He was married and was a role model to the boys. He would come to their after-school games. Could he really have abused them? Perhaps he was just overly physical in the way that young men often are. He had a habit, for example, of grabbing boys in the hallway and pulling them toward him, placing his arms over their shoulders and chest. At the gym club, he would pick boys up and turn them upside down, holding them by the legs. Lots of people—especially gym teachers—like to engage in a little horseplay with young boys. It wasn’t until the allegations about Clay emerged that it occurred to anyone to wonder whether he might have been trying to look down the boys’ shorts.

“We weren’t really prepared to call the police and make it into a police investigation,” one of the mothers told van Dam. “It was an indiscretion, as far as we were concerned at this point. It was all vague: ‘Well, he put his hands down there.’ And, ‘Well, it was inside the pants, but fingers went to here.’ We were all still trying to protect Mr. Clay’s reputation, and the possibility this was all blown up out of proportion and there was a mistake.”

The families then learned that there had been a previous complaint by a child against Clay, and they took their case to the school superintendent. He, too, advised caution. “If allegations do not clearly indicate sexual abuse, a gray area exists,” he wrote to them. “The very act of overt investigation carries with it a charge, a conviction, and a sentence, a situation which is repugnant to fair-minded people.” He was responsible not just to the children but also to the professional integrity of his teachers. What did they have? Just the story of three young boys, and young boys do, after all, have wild imaginations.

Clay was kept on. Two months later, after prodding from a couple of social workers, the parents asked the police to investigate. One of the mothers recalls an officer interviewing her son: “He was gentle, but to the point, and he wanted to be shown exactly where Mr. Clay had touched him.” The three boys named other boys who they said had been subjected to Mr. Clay’s advances. Those boys, however, denied everything. A new, more specific allegation against Clay surfaced. He resigned, and went to see a therapist. But still the prosecutor’s office didn’t feel that it had enough evidence to press charges. And within the school there were teachers who felt that Clay was innocent. “I was running into my colleagues who were saying, ‘Did you know that some rotten parents trumped up these charges against this poor man?’ ” one teacher told van Dam. The teacher added, “Not just one person. Many teachers said this.” A psychologist working at the school thought that the community was in the grip of hysteria. The allegations against Clay, he thought, were simply the result of the fact that he was “young and energetic.” Clay threatened to sue. The parents dropped their case.

Clay was a man repeatedly accused of putting his hands down the pants of young boys. Parents complained. Superiors investigated. And what happened? The school psychologist called him a victim of hysteria.

When monsters roam free, we assume that people in positions of authority ought to be able to catch them if only they did their jobs. But that might be wishful thinking. A pedophile, van Dam’s story of Mr. Clay reminds us, is someone adept not just at preying on children but at confusing, deceiving, and charming the adults responsible for those children—which is something to keep in mind in the case of the scandal at Penn State and the conviction, earlier this year, of the former assistant football coach Jerry Sandusky on child-molestation charges.

by Malcolm Gladwell, New Yorker | Read more:
Illustration: A. J. Frackattack; Photo: Gene J. Puskar/AP

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by HORITOSHI-I scan from Takagi Akimitsu’s Japanese tattooed ladies vol.1

Takagi Akimitsu was a book publisher that worked with Horiyoshi II to create keibunsha, an organisation devoted to preserving and encouraging the traditional Japanese art of hand-tattooing know as tebori.

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Too Big to Fail and Too Risky to Exist

In 1989, the CEOs of our seven largest banks earned an average of $2.6 million. In 2007, the average CEO income had risen to $26 million. The ordinary citizen might believe that this is grotesque overcompensation, but the financial sector found the pay perfectly reasonable. A year later, this sort of thinking led us to the brink of complete financial collapse. The financial crisis of 2008 now looks more and more like a defining moment, a crisis of capitalism. Globally, it has produced, in addition to a crippling recession, an unending debt crisis. Our own escalating, unpayable debt makes the future of U.S. power increasingly uncertain. Government borrowing and spending policies have failed to stimulate growth in the economy.

The crisis is, at its heart, a cultural failure combined with a political collapse. Behavior by bank executives that once was discouraged by a lifted eyebrow created complex structures abetted by an aggressive reading of the statutes—anything not explicitly prohibited was considered permissible. As Mervyn King, governor of the Bank of England, put it, “There was a cultural tendency to be always on one side and always to be pushing the limits.” The crisis almost immediately destroyed the rule of law. Secretary of the Treasury Henry Paulson told The Washington Post in November 2008: “Even if you don’t have the authorities—and frankly I didn’t have the authorities for anything—if you take charge, people will follow. Someone has to pull it all together.” In 2011, Phil Angelides, chairman of the U.S. Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission, summarized the problem: “These banks are too big to fail. They’re too big to manage. They’re too big to regulate. They’re too complex to understand and they’re too risky to exist. And the bottom line is they offer very little benefit.”

Four years after the crisis began, another election is upon us. What have we learned? Where are we now? What are the prospects for meaningful reform of the financial system? Will our debt crush us? Should we let it? Is it legitimate? What comes next? An open discussion of these questions needs to take place now. The health of the financial system, and of our republic, depends on it.

Yet for the bankers, it is still business as usual. In his book, Bailout, Neil Barofsky, the former special inspector general in charge of oversight of TARP (the $700 billion Troubled Asset Relief Program), writes that a major cost of the bailout is the perpetuation of the existing financial system: Paulson and his successor, Timothy Geithner,“hadn’t just saved the banks, they’d also preserved a status quo that was dangerously broken, and in so doing they might have actually increased the danger lurking in our financial architecture.”

Nick Carraway, the narrator of The Great Gatsby, says that when Jay Gatsby tells him their luncheon companion, Meyer Wolfsheim, fixed the World Series in 1919, “the idea staggered me.” Nick says he knew that the Series had been fixed, but he had thought of it as a thing that just happened, the end of some inevitable chain of events. “It never occurred to me that one man could start to play with the faith of fifty million people—with the single-mindedness of a burglar blowing a safe.”

Like Wolfsheim, the big banks have since 2005 fixed a benchmark thought by millions to be beyond manipulation or reproach—the London interbank offered rate. The LIBOR is an average reported by 16 big banks of what they estimate it would cost them to borrow from another bank. It is used to set rates on mortgages, credit cards, and many other personal and commercial loans. The amount of money affected by the rate, at any given time, is estimated at $800 trillion. The British bank Barclays routinely altered its submitted rates to push the LIBOR high or low to benefit bets it had made on interest rate derivatives. That is, it was fixing the result of its outstanding bets. One Barclays executive was recorded as saying, “We’re clean but we’re dirty-clean, rather than clean-clean.” Barclays derivatives traders made at least 257 requests to the bank’s London rate submitters over a four-year period. The emails between Barclays New York derivatives traders and its London rate submitters are stark: “For Monday we are very long $3 m cash here in NY and would like the setting to be set as low as possible … thanks”; “Always happy to help, leave it to me, Sir”; “Done for you big boy”; and “Dude. I owe you big time! … I’m opening a bottle of Bollinger.” Lord Turner, chair of the British regulator, the Financial Services Authority, expressed disbelief at the blatant behavior on the New York and London trading floors: “One of the shocking things about this,” he said, “is that on some occasions, the derivatives trader is not asking the submitter to change his submission on the basis of a hidden phone call or a note that he believes is hidden, but by shouting it across the trading floor.”

A single bank could not have that much effect on a 16-bank average, and sure enough, the scandal has spread. British regulators found that Barclays colluded with other big banks, among them JPMorgan Chase, Citigroup, UBS, Deutsche Bank, and HSBC. The banks seem to have a huge potential liability to those on the losing side of the fixed bets and to those who paid too much interest when the LIBOR was fixed too high. According to the July 7 Economist, “This could well be global finance’s ‘tobacco moment.’ ” Even now, the problems may persist. Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke told the Senate on July 17 that he “lack[s] full confidence in the rate-setting procedure.” Moreover, “it’s clear beyond these disclosures that the LIBOR structure is structurally flawed.” Andrew Tyrie, chair of the British parliamentary committee investigating the LIBOR, asked Paul Tucker, the deputy governor of the Bank of England, whether he was confident that it was now working normally. Tucker replied, “We can’t be confident of anything after learning of this cesspit.” Lord Turner added, “We would be fooling ourselves” to assume that trading manipulation was limited to trades. “There is a degree of cynicism and greed which is really quite shocking … and that does suggest that there are some very wide cultural issues that need to be strongly addressed.” In June, Barclays agreed to pay $450 million to British and American regulators, and arrests in connection with the LIBOR are thought to be imminent.

by William J. Quirk, American Scholar |  Read more:

Photo by Josh Hallett

Detail of Van Gogh’s “Starry Night”
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To Build or Not to Build a Road

Every summer, my husband and I roll back the canvas roof of our small Cit­roen 2CV and head out to explore small towns, farming communities, forests, and parkland along beautiful, picturesque rural roads that are untraveled by most Ontarians. Leaving highways behind, we meander through landscapes that open up unique visual and ol­factory experiences that enrich our days and be­come a staple in our store of happiest memories together.

Roads open up inimitable vistas and opportunities but, of course, they also have their costs, particularly when they take the form of large-scale highways that often infringe upon agricultural and wildlife commu­nities or exacerbate urban stress

What constitutes a good road? And how do we decide when it is appropriate to build a new road? As urbanist Jane Jacobs puts it, “how to accommodate transportation without destroying the related intricate and concentrated land use?—this is the question.”

Presumably, decision making in such a case ought to be driven by more than mere sentimentality. In the words of the National Research Council, “practical decision making begins by identifying the elements of a responsible and competent decision-making pro­cess.”

At the same time, it is important to recognize that complex environmental decisions—from how to tackle global climate change to planning megalopolitan set­tlements—often must be made in the face of scientific uncertainty. In such cases, judgment calls are made, and, therefore, we need to better understand both the nature and the significance of taken-for-granted val­ues, attitudes, and perceptions.

I begin this paper by identifying some essential el­ements of what might typically be described as a “ra­tional” process of decision making. I then proceed to describe how such a rational environmental decision procedure must reflect not only narrowly logical rea­soning processes but also essential elements of moral virtue, wisdom, and, ultimately, a respect for sense of place.

FROM IDENTIFYING OBJECTIVES TO VIABLE ALTERNATIVES: THE PLACE OF VALUES

From engineering consulting firms to governmen­tal environmental impact assessments, technical mod­els are utilized to ensure that complex problems are addressed in a comprehensive manner. Decision trees, cost-benefit analyses, and decision-making matrices that employ sensitivity analysis or analyze expected monetary value are examples of such tools.

While each model incorporates distinct strategies, it is feasible to draw from these examples six major ge­neric steps that are typically reflected in such models, despite their variations. These include:

• Identify the project objectives, problem, and opportunities.
• Identify constraints that possible solutions must respect.
• Identify viable alternative solutions.
• Select evaluation criteria of alternatives.
• Evaluate alternatives and select the preferred option.
• Monitor and adjust the strategy, as necessary, documenting lessons learned. 

Like the technical models listed above as well as other similar decision-making procedures, this six-step decision-making process aspires to be rational, logical, and, thereby, comprehensive. Yet I would contend that genuine thoughtfulness is not necessar­ily achieved simply by virtue of such sequential logic.

Embedded in such apparently “objective” models are personal biases, value judgments, hidden para­digms, and different worldviews. Genuinely rational choices—those that aim for wisdom over mere techni­cal efficiency—are made only if these taken-for-grant­ed values and assumptions are explicitly addressed. The fact is that “value choices are often hidden in the simplifying assumptions of analytic techniques, and the assumed values may not be universally shared.”

It is important to recognize that values and as­sumptions impact every phase of decision making, no matter how logical, linear, and “objective” that process appears. For instance, value judgments very much shape the first step in the decision-making process, where project objectives, problems, and opportunities are identified and bounded. The fact is, as energy sci­entist Amory Lovins points out, that “the answers you get depend on the questions you ask.”

So, despite the title of this paper, it is important to note that the problem to be addressed here may not be properly scoped in the form of the engineering ques­tion whether to build a road. Rather, the problem may actually be that travel times are currently too long; or perhaps, as in the case of some First Nations com­munities in Northern Canada, there may be a lack of easy access. Maybe the issue may be as broadly scoped as to ask the question about how to build a healthier, more sustainable community overall. The opportuni­ties identified may certainly include the construction of a road, but, alternatively, a preferred option may consist of improvements to public transport or rail systems instead. After all, in the words of Jane Jacobs, “The more space that is provided for cars in cities, the greater becomes the need for use of cars”—which, in an era of global climate change, is hardly a wise course of action. Unless one scopes the problem sufficiently broadly, productive alternatives may simply be missed.

by Ingrid Leman Stefanovic, Center for Humans and Nature |  Read more:

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On Web, a Fine Line on Free Speech Across the Globe

For Google last week, the decision was clear. An anti-Islamic video that provoked violence worldwide was not hate speech under its rules because it did not specifically incite violence against Muslims, even if it mocked their faith.

The White House was not so sure, and it asked Google to reconsider the determination, a request the company rebuffed.

Although the administration’s request was unusual, for Google, it represented the kind of delicate balancing act that Internet companies confront every day.

These companies, which include communications media like Facebook and Twitter, write their own edicts about what kind of expression is allowed, things as diverse as pointed political criticism, nudity and notions as murky as hate speech. And their employees work around the clock to check when users run afoul of their rules.

Google is not the only Internet company to grapple in recent days with questions involving the anti-Islamic video, which appeared on YouTube, which Google owns. Facebook on Friday confirmed that it had blocked links to the video in Pakistan, where it violates the country’s blasphemy law. A spokeswoman said Facebook had also removed a post that contained a threat to a United States ambassador, after receiving a report from the State Department; Facebook has declined to say in which country the ambassador worked.

“Because these speech platforms are so important, the decisions they take become jurisprudence,” said Andrew McLaughlin, who has worked for both Google and the White House. Most vexing among those decisions are ones that involve whether a form of expression is hate speech. Hate speech has no universally accepted definition, legal experts say. And countries, including democratic ones, have widely divergent legal approaches to regulating speech they consider to be offensive or inflammatory. (...)

Every company, in order to do business globally, makes a point of obeying the laws of every country in which it operates. Google has already said that it took down links to the incendiary video in India and Indonesia, because it violates local statutes.

But even as a company sets its own rules, capriciously sometimes and without the due process that binds most countries, legal experts say they must be flexible to strike the right balance between democratic values and law.

“Companies are benevolent rulers trying to approximate the kinds of decisions they think would be respectful of free speech as a value and also human safety,” said Jonathan Zittrain, a law professor at Harvard.

by Somini Sengupta, NY Times |  Read more:

Photo: Mohammad Ismail/Reuters

Why Can't We Sell Charity Like We Sell Perfume?

The early Puritan settlers in the New World were pulled in opposite directions by competing value systems. They were extremely aggressive capitalists, but they were also strict Calvinists, taught that self-interest was a sure path to eternal damnation. How could they negotiate this psychological tension? Charity became a big part of the answer—an economic sanctuary in which they could do penance for their profit-making tendencies, at five cents on the dollar.

Today, Americans are the world's most generous contributors to philanthropic causes. Each year, we give about 2% of our GDP to nonprofit organizations, nearly twice as much as the U.K., the next closest nation, according to the Chronicle of Philanthropy. Some 65% of all American households with an income of less than $100,000 donate to some type of charity, according to the Center on Philanthropy at Indiana University, as does nearly every household with an income greater than $100,000. These contributions average out to about $732 a year for every man, woman and child in America.

Yet we cling to a puritan approach to how those donations are spent: Self-deprivation is our strategy for social change. The dysfunction at the heart of our approach is neatly captured by our narrow, negative label for the charitable sector: "not-for-profit."

It's time to change how society thinks about charity and social reform. The donating public is obsessed with restrictions—nonprofits shouldn't pay executives too much, or spend a lot on overhead or take risks with donated dollars. It should be asking whether these organizations have what they need to actually solve problems. The conventional wisdom is that low costs serve the higher good. But this view is killing the ability of nonprofits to make progress against our most pressing problems. Long-term solutions require investment in things that don't show results in the short term.

We have two separate rule books: one for charity and one for the rest of the economic world. The result is discrimination against charities in five critical areas.

First, we allow the for-profit sector to pay people competitive wages based on the value they produce. But we have a visceral reaction to the idea of anyone making very much money helping other people. Want to pay someone $5 million to develop a blockbuster videogame filled with violence? Go for it. Want to pay someone a half-million dollars to try to find a cure for pediatric leukemia? You're considered a parasite.

Two years ago, a group of senators raised questions about the compensation of the CEO of the Boys & Girls Clubs of America, which totaled $998,591 for 2008, nearly half of which consisted of catch-up obligations for her retirement. The critics ignored the fact that over the previous eight years, the CEO had tripled the Clubs' network-wide revenue to $1.5 billion. Would the Clubs have been better off hiring a less talented CEO for $100,000 and leaving revenue stagnant, at a loss of $1 billion?

We tend to think that policing salaries of charitable groups is an ethical imperative, but for would-be leaders, it results in a mutually exclusive choice between doing well for yourself and doing good for the world—and it causes many of the brightest kids coming out of college to march directly into the corporate world.

by Dan Palotta, WSJ |  Read more:

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A Love Story In 22 Pictures

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The Perfectly Fried Egg

José Andrés, the best-known Spanish chef working in the United States today, is the new dean of Spanish Studies at the International Culinary Center in Manhattan. On a recent afternoon in the Culinary Center’s kitchen, Mr. Andrés held forth on the essential Spanishness of the fried egg.

“My whole life, I have been trying to cook an egg in the right way,” he said. “It is the humbleness of the dish. Why do you need to do anything more complex?”

To cook an egg, Mr. Andrés uses a method that begins with a sauté pan in which four tablespoons of olive oil had been brought to medium-high heat. He then tips the pan at a steep angle, so that the oil collects in a small bath, and slides the egg into the oil.

by Glenn Collins, NY Times |  Read more:

Photos: Richard Petty

The Champs-Élysées, a Mall of America

PARIS -- André Malraux, the novelist and minister of culture under Charles de Gaulle, told a French-American journalist in the 1960s that the Champs-Élysées — then considered the most beautiful avenue in the world — had “an American basement.” Today, American business and its brands are prominently aboveground on a Champs-Élysées that has largely lost its distinctive character and has become far less French.

In a movement that has only accelerated in recent years, a large part of the broad street has become overrun with outlets for clothing brands that most Americans would hardly consider haute couture or even exclusive. Banana Republic has just opened a store, and Levi’s has a massive new space, not far from the new H&M. They are joining, and competing with, the Gap, Nike, Tommy Hilfiger and Abercrombie & Fitch. At least Tiffany & Company is coming, replacing a burger joint.

The movie glamour that brought a young Jean Seberg to the Champs-Élysées to meet Jean-Paul Belmondo, her handsome gangster “dragueur,” or skirt chaser, is long gone, as are most of the sights in Jean-Luc Godard’s famous film of 1960, “Breathless,” a kind of French hymn to American culture and cool.

The cool has faded amid the most recent mass-market invasion. Few Parisians who do not work in the neighborhood go to the Champs-Élysées anymore, regarding it as a place for suburbanites and tourists, many of them rich Arabs who seek out the nightclubs.

“It’s an avenue that doesn’t exist in the minds of Parisians, in any case in their everyday lives,” said Céline Orjubin, 31, a writer who came to Paris from Brittany. “I don’t get an exotic feel out of the Champs-Élysées. It feels more like nowhere, because we find the same things as everywhere.”

The Champs-Élysées — the name means the Elysian Fields, a reference to its origins as fields and market gardens — has long played a central role in France. It began in the early 17th century, when the royal gardens of the Tuileries were extended by an avenue of trees. By the late 18th century, as Paris grew, it became a fashionable street, and the city took control of it in 1828.

Connecting the Place de la Concorde, where Marie Antoinette and many others died at the guillotine set up during the French Revolution, to the Arc de Triomphe, which was inaugurated in 1836 to honor the dead of the Revolution and the Napoleonic wars, the avenue became the site of military parades by both French troops and their conquerors. That included the Germans in both 1871 and 1940, and the Free French and the Allies after World War II. In some sense, it remains the symbol of a liberated France, for foreigners and the French themselves.

“In the 1950s and ’60s, the Champs-Élysées was the place to be,” said Jacques Hubert-Rodier, 58, an editorial writer at Les Echos, which used to have its headquarters on the avenue.

But “it’s no longer a Parisian place,” he said, adding, a touch sadly, “It’s no longer a place for lovers.”

by Steven Erlanger, NY Times |  Read more:

Painting: Antoine Blanchard

Daryl Hall

Never Let Me Go.  Kazuo Ishiguro.
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Hip Hop Roots & Bebo Valdes

Numbers About My Mother

It’s August and it’s San Francisco so it’s cold. While I’m walking home from work there’s a call from a Portland number I don’t recognize. I answer. It’s a friend of my mother’s, phoning to let me know that my mother has tried to kill herself, that she’s at a hospital in an induced coma. I slump onto a cement car stop in a parking lot and listen to the details, dig in my purse for a pen, turn the phone away from the wind, write down the hospital’s name and the room number, watch people walk down Polk Street on their way home or to happy hour, thinking how normal they all look, how careless they act while my mother is in a coma. Her friend says she’s not sure how bad it is. I try to figure out how to phrase my question correctly, politely: “You mean she might die?” but I can’t think of how it’s supposed to be said, how a person asks this of a near-stranger regarding her own mother, so I don’t ask it.

My mother is 57 and I am 32. This isn’t the first time she has tried to kill herself. The other time was when she was 32 and I was seven. Back then, she was a single mother of four kids — my three brothers and me. She’d been married twice, divorced twice. We lived in a little house that my brothers and I came into and went out of with impunity while she slept days, worked at a bar nights. The house had two bedrooms and one attic. One of my brothers was still a baby, not yet two years old. That’s a lot of numbers for one paragraph. Here are some more:

Number of brothers I didn’t get to see anymore when my mother gave up custody of all of us and we went into foster care: two.

Number of families, total, my brother and I lived with before graduating high school: seven.

Number of years old I was when I re-met my mother: nineteen.

Average number of times my mother and I talk on the phone per week: three. We’re close, like best friends sometimes. We talk about everything, almost. But then. We’ll never be close enough. We don’t talk about the difficult things. We don’t talk about the days when we were a family of five. I don’t ask her what number of times she had to put her signature on what number of lines, what number of forms she had to fill out to let go of all four of her children. One? Five? Twelve? How does that work?

The mother I know now is a very small, mellow person who wears feather earrings and three or four rings on each hand and gauzy scarves and a denim jacket with a big peace sign on the back, and sometimes when we talk she seems very old and wise, and sometimes she seems very young and simple. Her cell phone ring tone is “All You Need Is Love.”

I don’t call her Mom. I don’t remember what it felt like to call her that. I write it in cards, but when we’re together I can’t think of a comfortable way to address her, so I don’t call her anything.

Although. She is a lot of things. I look just like her, and sometimes when I’m leaving a friend a voicemail or giving a stranger directions on the street, I have to stop, startled for a second, because I’m intonating my words in the exact same way she does.

All these years later, and now she's tried it again. It comes as a shock, because I hadn’t thought ... I don’t know what I hadn’t thought. I try to pinpoint it. I’m still sitting on the car stop in the parking lot, and it seems important to decide, before I get up and continue my walk home and call the hospital, why exactly my mother doing this has come as a shock. I come up with: I guess I just thought she was happy. Well, not in an ecstatic-to-be-living-in-the-world sort of way, but in a regular way — she crochets barefoot sandals, she has a garden — that just-enough sort of happy that prevents people from wanting to die. That’s the kind of happiness I had been envisioning in my mother’s life, I guess. Tomato-and-corn-garden happy.

by Melissa Chandler, The Hairpin |  Read more:

Collective Soul Cat