Categories
News

South Africa with (and without) the Internet

Sunset in South Africa's Midlands
Sunset in South Africa’s Midlands

At around 4:00 p.m. on Sunday the power went out here in the part of South Africa’s Kwa-Zulu Natal province that we live, one in a series of rolling blackouts by the republic’s main utility, which struggles to meet demand.

The weather outside was 75 degrees with a light breeze that carried a trace of smoke. My significant other and I heard a beep that signaled the shutdown, then the appliances kicked off.

The outage seemed like a good time to get out of the house. We resolved to bicycle around the village, a circuit that takes about an hour.

Others had similar thoughts. On our road, a neighbor walked her beagle. A couple from the cul-de-sac at the end were out with their two retrievers. Our ridgebacks, Tala and Juma, raced to them. The wife, who happens to be the vet who cares for our dogs, pushed their infant daughter in a stroller.

Later the sun set and the stars appeared. One burned a bright yellow.

That’s how it’s been here the past 10 days, when a combination of power cuts and spotty Internet conspired to connect me more closely with the days and nights.

Internet in the village comes from Telkom, a state-owned monopoly that serves most of the republic. Our house receives Internet via so-called ADSL, a pre-broadband era technology that, in theory, delivers Internet over copper telephone lines at speeds of around 5 gigabytes per second on a good day.

The ADSL here gives out at sundown sometimes. The house receives about one bar of cellphone service, which means you can’t use your phone as a hotspot.

Service delivery can be spotty in South Africa. Of course, we’re well off compared with most people. Nearly 65% of households in South Africa have no access to the Internet, according to the latest census.

Our spotty Internet connection feels like a throwback to the mid-1990s in the U.S., when the World Wide Web had just appeared and most of us dialed into the Internet via modems.

You connect when you can.

That leaves plenty to discover when you can’t connect. A week ago we biked along the beach in Durban, from the city front to the Blue Lagoon, where on Sundays Indian families, three and four generations strong, gather. We read a book of drawings by Jean-Michel Basquiat and watched a documentary about the artist in downtown Manhattan in the 1990s. We hooked up the speakers to the stereo that had been unconnected for years and listened to jazz. I began reading “The Fear,” a chronicle by the journalist Peter Godwin about Zimbabwe under Robert Mugabe.

Most days the dogs and I walk together at a farm nearby. They wake me in the morning.

Internet and more
Internet and more

If I want to work with an Internet connection, I head to the village library, where I can pick up a cellphone signal from Vodacom that registers four or five bars.

The library, which occupies a low-slung building, has sections in English, Zulu and Afrikaans. It also displays the latest local newspapers and periodicals. One day recently, I read the Mercury, a daily from Durban, flipped through an issue of GQ’s South Africa edition, and lost myself in an collection of essays by Nadine Gordimer, the South African writer who died last year.

The place is pin quiet. Sometimes the librarians chat softly in Zulu.

Categories
News

Rolling Stone’s failure and the lapses that led to it

Had Rolling Stone adhered to some basics of journalism the magazine might have avoided publishing the story of a student at the University of Virginia whose account of being raped at a fraternity on campus proved to be unreliable.

That’s the conclusion of a report published Sunday by Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism. Rolling Stone commissioned the school to investigate its handling of the story, which the magazine published in Nov. 2014.

“Rolling Stone’s repudiation of the main narrative in ‘A Rape on Campus’ is a story of journalistic failure that was avoidable,” write Sheila Coronel, Steve Coll and Derek Kravitz, the report’s authors. “The failure encompassed reporting, editing, editorial supervision and fact-checking. The magazine set aside or rationalized as unnecessary essential practices of reporting that, if pursued, would likely have led the magazine’s editors to reconsider publishing [the woman’s] narrative so prominently, if at all.”

“The published story glossed over the gaps in the magazine’s reporting by using pseudonyms and by failing to state where important information had come from,” they add.

The report is illuminative for anyone who performs acts of journalism. Over the course of nearly 13,000 words, the authors recount the process by which Rolling Stone reported, edited and checked — or failed to check — the story, which details an assault on a woman named Jackie that she charged took place in Sept. 2012.

According to the report, Jackie told the reporter, Sabrina Rubin Erdeley, that she was assaulted by a group of men at the Phi Kappa Psi fraternity. Jackie told Erdeley that she was invited to the fraternity by a co-worker named Drew, who according to Jackie coached seven others as they raped her one by one. Like Jackie, Drew is a pseudonym. Jackie became unresponsive to Erdeley when the latter asked Jackie about Drew’s identity. Eventually, Erdeley and her editors stopped trying to find him.

A similar reliance on pseudonyms undermined Rolling Stone’s failure to contact three friends of Jackie’s who Jackie claimed found her in the early hours of the morning immediately following the rape. For the story, Erdeley attributed quotes to each of the friends that Jackie had supplied. Erdeley noted as much in a draft of the story she filed with her editors.

Despite discussions between Erdeley and her editor about the need to confirm the account with the friends, the editor eventually approved the pseudonyms, not wanting, he told the Columbia reporters, to protect the friends from being identified with the “self-involved patter” that Jackie said they engaged in.

The Columbia report ends with a series of recommendations that, while specific to Rolling Stone and the story at issue, underscore practices that make sense for journalists everywhere.

They include an obligation to provide the subjects of our reporting with sufficient details that allow them to respond fully to charges, to surface and address inconsistencies, and to forbear from using pseudonyms, which can relieve reporters from asking questions that accuracy demands and distance readers from the identity of a source.

More generally, the report recommends that news outlets balance the sensitivity to alleged victims of sexual assault with the demand to verify information. In the end, verification aids survivors. According to the authors:

Because questioning a victim’s account can be traumatic, counselors have cautioned journalists to allow survivors some control over their own stories. This is good advice. Yet it does survivors no good if reporters documenting their cases avoid rigorous practices of verification. That may only subject the victim to greater scrutiny and skepticism.

None of the above is to suggest there’s anything intuitive or easy about the story that Rolling Stone set out to report. Or that the magazine doesn’t have journalists who work hard to report stories accurately and who, in most instances, report them well. As the investigators at Columbia write, “the pattern of [Rolling Stone’s] failure draws a map of how to do better.”

Though the lapses may belong to Rolling Stone, the lessons seem like a reminder for all of us.

Categories
Life

Monday

Brush teeth. Headlines, Trevor Noah to host “The Daily Show.” Shower; 3 train. Dentist – teeth cleaning; follow-up April 23 to repair two fillings. Pinkberry – original with blueberries and strawberries. New York Public Library – Jefferson Market, read about U.S. immigration law. Buy newspaper. Dermatologist. Pick up boots at shoe repair. Coffee. 3 train. Read newspaper. See photo of U.S. soldier in Europe showing off an M16 rifle to a girl in Poland, who’s holding rifle, mock firing, all as part of a promotional tour by military. Wonder about the image. Weary. Home. Laundry.

Categories
Home New York City

Palm Sunday

“It’s nice out here,” said a man in a navy down vest and Yankees cap as he swung through the lobby door of his building out onto Frederick Douglass.

“Yeah,” I replied, agreeing.

“I thought it would be chilly,” he said.

It was about 31 degrees but the sunshine felt warm.

At corner of 147th and Eighth, a man and woman hailed a car. Though I saw them from behind – they looked sharp, she in a long coat with a pattern of flowers, her Afro catching the sunlight. He wore a gray flannel suit.

“It’s Palm Sunday,” the cashier at Pathmark told me.

The beginning of Holy Week.

Along Eighth, a deli prepares to open. “Mo’s Gourmet,” says the red sign with yellow letters. Brown butcher paper held in place by blue painter’s tape fills the windows right now.

Back at my building, the sound of Drake drifts through a second-floor window.

 

 

Categories
Law

Standardized Test

Good to go?
Good to go

Government-issued ID that is current and contains a recent, recognizable photo, as well as our date of birth

Clear plastic bag (maximum size 1 gallon)

Non-mechanical pencils with erasers

Pencil sharpener

Hygiene product

Unwrapped cough drops

Off we went this morning, bag in tow, to take the Multistate Professional Responsibility Exam. We left the house nearly two hours early, flagged a car driven by a nice man from Nigeria, and headed down the FDR to the 70s, where we asked the driver to deposit us at a Starbucks near the test center.

Without a smartphone or watch to guide us – both items grounds for dismissal from the test center and cancellation of our scores – we asked others for the time. “It’s 7:45,” said a woman of about 60 with shaggy hair and a service dog — a yellow retriever — without looking up from her phone. Minutes later we spied a clock – with hands and a big dial – atop a post at the corner of 75th St. and First Ave., in case you’re on the Upper East Side and want to know the time and have neither a watch nor a phone nor a woman with a service dog.

At what felt like the right moment – not too early and not too late – we headed to the test center, which doubles as a high school named for Eleanor Roosevelt. We thought that might improve our fortunes because we would have voted for her husband for president had we been alive and at least 21 years old in 1932, 1936, 1940 or 1944.

Alas, we weren’t, which may explain what happened next. The lesson, if you read no further, is to thank your proctor the next time one does right by you and your fellow examinees. Ours didn’t.

“Once time has been called, all pencils are to be put down and no more marks are to made on the answer sheet,” according to the instructions set forth in the test day summary, which runs four pages.

The reverse side of the answer sheet contains, among other fields, a paragraph that examinees must transcribe, sign and date, all in our handwriting. Transcribing the paragraph takes about three or four minutes, depending on one’s handwriting and how carefully one transcribes. We thought we should try to write legibly.

We imagined that the proctor might instruct examinees to complete the paragraph at the start of the session, as part of filling in fields for biographical information on the answer sheet. Though the proctor provided about three minutes to fill in the biographical fields, he failed to state clearly that we should complete the fields on the reverse side of the answer sheet too.

Though we intuited a responsibility to fill in the fields, when we looked up from filling in our name, the last four digits of our Social Security number and other information on the front of the answer sheet – and we affirm that we filled in the information promptly, as instructed – we saw that a student to our right who holds a Brazilian passport had opened his booklet and started the test.

We asked the proctor, aloud, whether time had begun. He answered that it had, much to the surprise of everyone but the Brazilian, judging by the gasps from a majority of students in the room, who, like us, had yet to open their test books. Of course, as soon as the proctor told us that we could start the exam, we did.

That meant that we had yet to finish transcribing the paragraph. Thus, with about four minutes remaining in the 120 minutes allotted for the test, we stopped reviewing our answers so that we might finish transcribing. We thought, based on the instructions quoted above, when the proctor called time that no more marks would be permitted on the answer sheet. That pencils down means pencils down.

Nevertheless, after calling time, the proctor announced that we could continue to transcribe the paragraph on the reverse side of the answer sheet.

Had we known the proctor would allot the time, we could have devoted at least four more minutes to reviewing answers that we might have doubted on the first pass. Sometimes we return to answer choices later and the correct answer seems clear. Thus, in a test where time is of the essence, four minutes may mean the difference between a correct or incorrect answer, which in turn may determine whether we pass and become attorneys-at-law.

The failure by the proctor to administer time as laid out in the rules of the test contravened the instructions provided to examinees. We found the experience to be maddening.

Bookish
Bookish

We suppose we’re sad because the day was supposed to culminate a year of study. On Friday, we took photographs, like the one above, in the library, to memorialize the time we spent in the stacks.

The time had its charms. Besides drinking coffee, we browsed whole shelves on the history of colonialism in Africa, the rise of Mao and the founding of the People’s Republic of China. We learned that Mao purged some of his fellow revolutionaries. We skimmed a history of the East India Company that included something about pepper merchants in Antwerp.

We made outlines. Though the better term might be built outlines because we layer them in over time. With successive rounds of study, the outline starts to feel comfortable in the hand. It acquires a weight, markings and wear that eventually become part of us. That stands in contrast with the start of the process, when every entry feels awkward and difficult to set down on the page.

Item in our outline: “For purposes of the attorney-client privilege, the relationship between and attorney and client starts when someone seeks legal services.” The rule is plain enough, but the process of arriving at that sentence took weeks. The words told us, finally, what we needed to know.

We hoped that Friday might conclude this latest stretch in the stacks, where we’ve been regulars the past year. “Welcome back,” the guard at the entrance to the library greeted us, smiling, when we arrived Friday. “Thank you, sir,” we answered, smiling back.

Depending on the outcome of the test, we may be reprising that greeting in the months to come.

Categories
News

News quiz, week ending March 27

1. Italy’s highest criminal court acquitted whom Friday in the death of British student Meredith Kercher in 2007?

2. American astronaut Scott Kelly and Russian cosmonaut Mikhail Kornienko blasted off Friday to spend 350 days aboard the International Space Station – about twice as long as visitors usually stay. What do scientists hope to study from the duration of the trip?

3. Who left “One Direction” this week?

a) Niall Horan, b) Harry Styles, c) Liam Payne, d) Zayn Malik

4. Which two giants of the food industry announced plans to merge?

5. The man who led Singapore’s transition to self-rule and later became the republic’s first prime minister – a post he held for 31 years – died Monday at age 91. Who was he?

6. The remains of which British monarch were reinterred this week, more than 500 years after he was killed in battle?

7. What was the intended route of the Germanwings flight that crashed Tuesday in a mountainous region of southern France?

8. This app, which is less than a month old and lets users share live videos with their Twitter followers, said Thursday it has raised $14 million in funding. What is the name of the app?

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Answers

1) Amanda Knox and Raffaele Sollecito, her Italian former boyfriend; 2) The effect of spaceflight on the human body; 3) d; 4) H.J. Heinz and Kraft Foods; 5) Lee Kuan Yew; 6) Richard III; 7) Barcelona to Düsseldorf; 8) Meerkat

 

Categories
Sports

Sneakerheads

I follow the NCAA Tournament only loosely but Notre Dame’s win against Butler on Saturday caught my attention both for the blocked shot that sent the game into overtime and a story in the Times about the footwear the Irish favor.

The shoes, which carry the name Curry One, after Stephen Curry, who plays guard for the Golden State Warriors in the NBA, are the color of yellow highlighter. As the Times’ Ben Shpigel describes them:

“It was as if they had been marinated in pureed Skittles, coated with ectoplasm and then dunked in Citrus Cooler-flavored Gatorade. They come with a free pair of sunglasses and are particularly useful for when Notre Dame plays its games in subway tunnels.”

The Irish have won seven straight games since some of the team’s players put on the Curry Ones.

I later took to Twitter, where I discovered a series of shoes that evoke such images as paisley breakfast cereal, roses and the flag of Jordan, which happens to share a name with a certain former NBA superstar whose collaboration with Nike belongs to the annals of shoemaking.

Of course, none of this would be news to many 13-year-old boys.

Under Armour, which supplies the Curry Ones to Notre Dame and five other schools in the tournament, stands to garner as much as $83 million in exposure if the teams win every game – that is, until they lose to one another.

The Curry Ones may be yellow but they mean green for the Irish too. According to Bloomberg, Notre Dame’s deal with Under Armour will pay the school $90 million over a decade.

Categories
Writing

Dispatch from SXSW, by Maureen Dowd

Sometimes we come across writing that fills us with admiration. Here’s a sentence that grabbed me today. It’s by Maureen Dowd, in a dispatch from South by Southwest:

I needed someone like Toby to help me cut through the verbal clutter and Panglossian spin in a world where celebrities are “influencers,” people are “users,” news is “content,” “platforms” are not shoes, the “Deep Web” is no place for Charlotte, and virtual reality trumps plain old reality.

Categories
News

News quiz, week ending March 20

1. What Pacific nation was devastated by Cyclone Pam?

a) Nauru, b) Palau, c) Vanuatu, d) Maluku

2. Millions of people took to the streets in what country to air their frustration with a faltering economy and a corruption scandal involving the state-run oil company?

3. Investigators in Spain said they might have located the remains of what writer?

4. Microsoft said Wednesday that its Windows 10 operating system, which is due later this year, would mark the end of what product that was first launched in 1995?

5. “Just because we removed the word patient from the statement doesn’t mean we are going to be impatient,” Janet Yellen, chairwoman of the U.S. Federal Reserve, told reporters. To what was she referring?

6. What threat from the U.S. may have prompted Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel to backtrack from comments, made on the eve of Tuesday’s election, in which he ruled out the establishment of a Palestinian state?

7. What evidence emerged this week that shows the Arctic is being impacted by climate change?

8. Affiliates of the Islamic State claimed responsibility for attacks that left dozens of people dead in what two countries?

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Answers

1) c; 2) Brazil; 3) Miguel de Cervantes; 4) Internet Explorer; 5) The Fed’s thinking about whether and when to raise interest rates; 6) That the U.S. might stop siding with Israel at the U.N. and in other international institutions; 7) At its peak, ice covered about 14.5 million kilometers of the northern oceans this winter, about 130,000 square kilometers less than the previous lowest maximum in 2011; 8) Tunisia and Yemen

Categories
Law

Press for advantage, act ethically, avoid spinachy

For the second time in a year I’m studying for a test that constitutes part of admission to the New York bar.

This one goes by the name of Multistate Professional Responsibility Exam (MPRE). It has 60 multiple-choice questions and tests knowledge of the rules of professional and judicial conduct.

Alert: reading about the bar exam may feel, to borrow a word from the novelist (and lawyer) Ayelet Waldman, “spinachy.”

I had forgotten about the MPRE when I set out a year ago to pass the bar exam and apply for a law license here in the Empire State. Last fall, I received a letter advising me that I passed, but the letter went on to say that the examiners would hold off on certifying me for admission until I passed the MPRE too.

Oh. That.

Thus, I’m studying for the MPRE, which takes place on March 28. Spinachy. Still, the material illuminates something about the law that appeals to me.

For example, you may have heard it said that a lawyer should represent his or her client zealously. That matters in our adversary system, which assumes that opposing sides, represented zealously within the bounds of law, will produce justice.

However, a lawyer also owes a duty of candor to the court. According to the rules, an attorney is subject to discipline for knowingly failing “to disclose to the tribunal legal authority in the controlling jurisdiction known to the lawyer to be directly adverse to the position of the client and not disclosed by opposing counsel.”

Suppose you represent a client in a New York court, and your opponent fails to call the court’s attention to a case from the state’s Court of Appeals that directly counters a position taken by your client. You must cite the case.

That doesn’t mean that you have an obligation to volunteer facts that are harmful to your client – we trust the opposing side to handle that – or that you have to cite a case from Virginia, for example, here in New York. But it does mean that you have a responsibility to the tribunal that transcends even your duty to your client.

In short, press for advantage but remember that you have a responsibility to act ethically.