All posts tagged: Southern California

California police force asked to stop using Lego on mugshots

California police force asked to stop using Lego on mugshots

Published by skeptic

But experts increasingly point to the harmful effects of putting such images online. For people awaiting trial, mugshots can carry a presumption of guilt. And for anyone seeking to move past a criminal conviction, the images can make it hard to get a job and haunt them for the rest of their lives. Under California’s new law, police departments and sheriff’s offices are now required to remove any booking photo they shared on social media — including of people arrested for violent offenses — within 14 days unless specific circumstances exist, like the person remains a fugitive and an imminent threat to public safety. It builds on a previous version that took effect in 2022. The prior law prohibited posting mugshots of all non-violent offenders unless those circumstances exist. It also said departments should remove mugshots already posted to social media identifying any defendant who requests it if they can prove their record was sealed, their conviction was expunged or they were found not guilty, among a handful of other reasons. Murrieta police had an internal discussion about posting photos …

The Shohei Ohtani Betting Scandal Won’t Be the Last

The Shohei Ohtani Betting Scandal Won’t Be the Last

Published by Sam

Major League Baseball officials will tell anyone who listens that the integrity of the sport is safer than ever. Despite the widespread legalization of sports gambling, despite MLB’s lucrative partnerships with the gambling platforms, despite Americans legally wagering about $120 billion on sports last year alone, and despite in-game advertisements that encourage fans to place bets right now—despite all that, everything’s fine. Third-party security companies, baseball officials point out, are monitoring traffic on DraftKings, FanDuel, BetMGM, and other legal apps, and can see wagers in real time. They can flag curious activity in a matter of minutes and then trace the activity all the way to an IP address, usually someone’s computer or phone. But, as I learned while reporting my book Charlie Hustle, about the rise and fall of Pete Rose, illegal bookies are still out there. They won’t be found in back alleys or smoky rooms like they once were; many bookies in 2024 have their own glossy websites. Some, just like the legal platforms, allow gamblers to place bets online. It’s easy …

Living Through the End of California

Living Through the End of California

Published by skeptic

In his 1998 book, Ecology of Fear, Mike Davis, the late California muckraker and self-proclaimed Marxist environmentalist, made the case for “letting Malibu burn.” He pointed out that the city of Los Angeles devoted more resources to dealing with the wildfires that rage in the wealthy enclave of Malibu than to the ones that break out in downtown tenements. And yet, Malibu’s very design ensures the return of fire. “The Malibu nouveaux riches built higher and higher in the mountain chamise with scant regard for the inevitable fiery consequences,” he writes. Why not return to the wisdom of native Californians, who knew that small, controlled fires were necessary for preventing bigger ones? I was in Los Angeles on one of the occasions when Malibu burned, in the 2018 Woolsey Fire. More than 30 miles away, in West Hollywood, not knowing any better, I went about my day, like everybody else, walking, shopping, doing errands, even as white ash fell onto our heads, as gently as snow. I thought about that day as I read Manjula …

America’s spam-call scourge – The Atlantic

America’s spam-call scourge – The Atlantic

Published by skeptic

This is an edition of The Atlantic Daily, a newsletter that guides you through the biggest stories of the day, helps you discover new ideas, and recommends the best in culture. Sign up for it here. Any person with a phone knows that spam calls are a real problem in the United States. But fighting them is like playing whack-a-mole. First, here are four new stories from The Atlantic: Robocall Whack-a-Mole In a classic Seinfeld scene, Jerry answers a phone call from a telemarketer, says he’s busy, and asks if he can call them back at home later. “I’m sorry, we’re not allowed to do that,” the marketer replies. “Oh,” Jerry says, “I guess you don’t want people calling you at home.” “No.” “Well, now you know how I feel,” Jerry says, before hanging up to the sound of studio laughter. It’s a quintessential Seinfeld joke, trenchant about the peeves of everyday life in America. Calls from telemarketers were already a well-known annoyance in the 1990s, but both telemarketing and spam calls have morphed into …

The ‘Permanently Orphaned’ – The Atlantic

The ‘Permanently Orphaned’ – The Atlantic

Published by skeptic

On Friday, a federal judge in Southern California certified a settlement between the government and thousands of migrant children and parents who were rent from one another by the Trump administration as part of its immigration crackdown. Judge Dana Sabraw’s decision ended a years-long legal battle, ultimately giving the families almost everything they’d asked for: The settlement bars U.S. immigration authorities from taking children away from their parents under almost any circumstance for eight years and provides the families who were separated the right to return and seek asylum in the U.S., as well as government-funded legal representation, and temporary housing and health care. The ACLU, which litigated the case on behalf of separated families, called it the most important settlement in the organization’s 103-year history. But Sabraw underscored in his decision that family separations never should have happened, and that no number of resources can undo the harm they caused. As with most of the hearings in the case over the past six years, the gathering on Friday began with an eerie counting of …

Chase Hall’s ‘Post-Victimhood’ Storytelling – The Atlantic

Chase Hall’s ‘Post-Victimhood’ Storytelling – The Atlantic

Published by skeptic

In his Surrealist Manifesto of 1924, André Breton wrote, “The marvelous is always beautiful, anything marvelous is beautiful, in fact only the marvelous is beautiful.” That line came to mind when I stood before Mother Nature, a giant canvas depicting a killer whale lifting a naked man into the air, eye level with a flock of gulls. The image was a highlight of “The Bathers,” Chase Hall’s standout debut at the David Kordansky Gallery in Chelsea this fall. The show, of mostly immense paintings priced from $60,000 to $120,000, was billed as an investigation into “nature, leisure, public space, and Black adventurism.” The playful and enigmatic scenes involved men swimming, surfing, and sometimes levitating, in solitude or among a living bounty of fish and birds. They were at once beautiful and formally striking meditations on the richness and versatility of a single color: brown. At the time of the exhibition, Hall was on the cusp of turning 30. He floated through the gallery in a white tank and loose gray slacks that broke over a …

The Problem With Political Art

The Problem With Political Art

Published by skeptic

When artists turn to activism or introduce politics into a work of art, it’s usually taken as something virtuous, an act of conscience on behalf of justice. But artistic and political values are not the same; in some ways they’re opposed, and mixing them can corrupt both. Politics is almost never a choice between good and evil but rather between two evils, and anyone who engages in political action will end up with dirty hands, distorting the truth if not peddling propaganda; whereas an artist has to aspire to an intellectual and emotional honesty that will drive creative work away from any political line. Art that tries to give political satisfaction is unlikely to be very good as either politics or art. Last month, 92NY, a Jewish cultural center in New York, canceled a long-scheduled event with the novelist Viet Thanh Nguyen after he and 750 other writers and artists signed an open letter in the London Review of Books calling for “an end to the violence and destruction of Palestine.” The organizers insist that …

A Book That Changed How I Think

A Book That Changed How I Think

Published by skeptic

The right book read at the right time can alter not just what you think, but how. The effect can feel like putting on a new set of glasses: Everything remains the same, but you view reality with sudden clarity. It can also be more unsettling—great writing may make the ordinary utterly unfamiliar, so that the reader experiences it unmoored from prior assumptions. Many books can pull off this life-altering trick, depending on how we encounter them; the timing is as important as the subject. The transformation can happen in childhood, when transcendent writing has the power to let loose imagination. Sometimes the book in question might look deceptively simple—an author reconsidering something as automatic as sleeping or breathing. The information may not be news to everyone: A revolution in one’s thinking can be both obvious and meaningful. You may find a writer who deploys language in unfamiliar, thrilling ways, or who changes your philosophy on raising children. The books below, selected by The Atlantic’s staff, demonstrate how writing can take a person apart and …

The Origins of the AR-15

The Origins of the AR-15

Published by skeptic

Eugene Stoner was an unassuming family man in postwar America. He wore glasses and had a fondness for bow ties. His figure was slightly round; his colleagues called him a teddy bear. He refused to swear or spank his children. “Boy, that frosts me,” he’d say when he was upset. He liked to tweak self-important people with a dry sense of humor. He hated attention. A lifelong tinkerer and a Marine veteran, he was also fascinated by the question of how to make guns shoot better. When an idea came to him, he scribbled it down on anything he could find—a pad of paper, a napkin, the tablecloth at a restaurant. He had no formal training in engineering or in firearms design. Yet it was inside Stoner’s detached garage in Los Angeles, during the 1950s, that the amateur gunsmith, surrounded by piles of sketches and prototypes, came up with the idea for a rifle that would change American history. Today, this weapon is the most popular rifle in America—and the most hated. The AR-15 is …

The Website Surfers Love to Hate

The Website Surfers Love to Hate

Published by skeptic

Matt Warshaw still remembers the jolt of horror he felt when the camera went up. It was September 2000, a decade since he quit his job as the editor of Surfing magazine and fled the crowded breaks of Southern California for the cold, isolated waves of San Francisco’s Ocean Beach. When he saw the cam on the flagpole at a beachfront house his friend was renting, he was livid, certain that the website it broadcast to, Surfline, would bring crowds to his favorite spot. He wrote his friend’s landlord a letter. “Tom, how could you do this to us?” he recalls writing. “You don’t really know what you’ve done here.” Within a month, Warshaw ate his words. He was using the camera to check out the waves himself. Decades later, Surfline continues to take flak from surfers. “Surfline is full bullshit,” one recent comment on the company’s Instagram reads. Last year, in Venice Beach, California, someone spray-painted Fuck Surfline in bright green within view of one of the company’s cameras. All this griping can seem …