A study of one-thousand shootings in ten major police departments found that black people experience more violence, in general, at the hands of the police than white people do: blacks are more likely to be manhandled, handcuffed, pushed to the ground, and pepper-sprayed. But they are no more likely to be shot. “It is the most surprising result of my career,” the study’s author Roland G. Fryer Jr., a professor of economics at Harvard, told the New York Times. He emphasized that the results offered a partial view—more data would be necessary to compile an accurate picture of the country as a whole, and the study looked at what happened after police stopped civilians, but not the risk of being stopped (other studies have shown that blacks are more likely to be stopped by the police).
The podcast Beaks and Geeks features Calvin Trillin, longtime New Yorker staff writer and the author of a new collection of reportage, Jackson, 1964: And Other Dispatches from Fifty Years of Reporting on Race in America. In the podcast, Trillin describes how he updated each piece with a postscript; meeting the civil-rights activist and South Carolina congressional candidate Victoria DeLee; and interviewing survivors of last year’s Charleston church shooting.
Lawyers brought a $1 billion lawsuit against Facebook, accusing the company of fomenting terrorism by permitting Hamas to use its social media platform to organize attacks that killed four Americans in Israel and the West Bank. The suit, filed on behalf of the families of a sixteen-year-old and a three-year-old who were both killed, was submitted to the US District Court for the Southern District of New York. “Gabriel Weimann, an expert on terrorism on the internet at Haifa University, said technology would be more effective than litigation,” reports Bloomberg. “‘Facebook isn’t the only platform,’ he said. ‘There are plenty of others. What will you do? Sue them all?’”
Google has deleted Dennis Cooper’s blog and Gmail account. “There remains no indication of whether Cooper’s account has been entirely deleted or whether some form of recovery is possible—or, for that matter, of why Google felt the need to delete Cooper’s email account and blog to begin with,” reports Volume 1 Brooklyn.
Robert Worth reads from A Rage for Order: The Middle East in Turmoil, from Tahrir Square to ISISat 192 Books tonight.
“I am very sorry to interrupt your work, but I have an announcement that requires your immediate attention,” writes Matt Powers in the New Yorker’s Daily Shouts humor column. Click through—it’s important.