by Mark Bibbins, Editor

Attack List 2014

Woman jammed between two doors this morning
3 men held for gang-raping a mentally disabled woman for 3 days

Sicko rapes disabled woman at the racetrack
‘Faulty stair lift has left me a prisoner for almost 10 years’
Accusation doctor sexually assaulted patient could have been
a ‘ghastly misunderstanding’
Brief: Disabled woman to share her story
Disabled woman gang-raped in Cuddalore
Torture killer Melvin Knight again appeals sentence
Obstacles facing the disabled
Disabled woman so scared she hid in wardrobe
State-run residential facility sued over death of patient
‘Betrayed’ couple face new battle on bedroom tax
Disabled woman in all night sex ordeal
Disabled woman’s car set on fire twice
Mom pleads guilty in disabled daughter’s death
Woman’s mobility scooter stolen as she attends funeral
‘I’ve been left to live in a jungle!’

Court grants new trial in sadomasochistic sex case
Former driver arrested for molesting disabled woman
NYC developer accused in disabled-access suit
Paralyzed ex-gymnast, new son doing well
Silver band official jailed for sexual assaults
Disabled woman dies in Peterborough house fire
Disabled woman rolled off platform into path of train
European court awards payout to disabled woman
Disabled woman loses appeal of court decision
Bed handles recalled due to entrapment and strangulation
4-year sentence for Springfield mall sex assault
Police look into abuse incident at Gosport
Disabled woman prostituted by family members
Intellectually disabled woman paid $1.25 an hour wins
landmark case
Disabled woman angry at treatment by KMB
Disabled woman kidnapped and raped by Bahraini man
Disabled woman allowed to extend village home
Drug dealer assaults disabled woman in Leominster
Man is charged with beating a disabled woman
Man accused of sex slavery too ill for court
Social care fees legal victory for disabled woman
Disabled woman wins top award
Change your doctor, disabled woman told
Fugitive rapist sparks police safety warning
‘We have beaten the hated bedroom tax’
Disabled woman ‘trapped’ in home on Christmas Eve
Man admits sex assault on disabled woman
Missing disabled woman found safe in Lake Tahoe
Disabled woman attacked from behind by robber
Staff at NY facility for disabled sued over rape
Are you disabled? Now your boss wants to know
3 plead guilty to raping disabled Alabama woman
Cyclist steals phone from disabled woman in Sibley
Man accused of assaulting disabled woman in apartment lobby
I help a disabled blonde woman back to hotel and tabloids salivate
Thieves swap disabled woman’s trike for bike
Woman shocked by random attack
Pope washes feet of disabled
Cleaner stole £3000 from disabled woman
My hellevators: wheel-chair bound Eilean gets stuck
Mouth, nose of disabled patient was taped
Louisiana pastor arrested for allegedly raping disabled woman
Down memory lane
Former guard denies assaulting disabled woman
‘Rape victim’ sues over botched police probe
Sudanese man gets 19 years in prison for rape
‘I’ve had enough,’ says disabled woman
Woman missing from Paradise care home found dead
Disabled woman left shaken and bruised
Man assaulted disabled wife in Holton le Clay
Disabled lovers’ plight touches the soul
Woman took her life over care concerns
Disabled woman sexually assaulted at railway station
Disabled woman to risk life in swimming challenge
Woman in wheelchair assaulted
‘Horrific’ beating of disabled woman
Why did courts free my ex? I said he’d rape
Disabled woman ‘overwhelmed’ by kindness
Great expectations
Disabled woman needs more help
Pittsburgh parking meters too tall
Disabled woman killed after ‘rape’
Support worker cleared of ill-treating disabled woman
Random acts of kindness
Parents rejected disabled daughter, says surrogate
Guard guilty in second sex assault
Disabled woman is scared of city center
Carer fleeced $116,000 from disabled woman
U.S. says rapes ignored in Montana
Give intellectually disabled people a chance
Disabled woman ‘wanted to strangle’ rape accused
Sunday school teacher
Fear over fees for blue badge holders
Intellectually disabled woman sexually assaulted
Another disabled woman raped and murdered in Ferozabad
Man sexually assaulted disabled woman, police say
Search continues for missing woman in Paradise
Disney is sued over rules for disabled
Disabled woman ‘raped’ in Parsa
Pope stops his Ford Focus and gets out so he can bless
disabled woman
Warwick woman thanks lightning Jack for help during storm
My disability helped me understand Blanche DuBois
Iowa woman overheated at group home
Disabled woman who kicked PC makes complaint
Disabled woman sues top priest
Thieves in Istanbul return stash to crippled woman
Burmese army rapes disabled woman
Patient says she tried to ‘block out’ sex attack
Nurse throttled brain-damaged amputee in hospital
Couple deny imprisoning disabled woman for 8 years
Pension eludes disabled woman for years
Doctors given permission not to provide life-saving care
Teacher ‘hacks disabled daughter to death and burns her
remains on BBQ’
Disabled woman escapes pipe-bomb attack in Ireland
Lowell man charged in assault on disabled woman
The death no one cares about
Man held for alleged rape of neighbor
1 dead, 2 hurt in Sumter County hammer attack
Rape charge in case of disabled Washington woman
‘Boys will be boys’
Sex assaults net 5-year sentence
Fitness club ordered to pay disabled woman $3,000
Disabled woman climbs Mt. Kilimanjaro
Fraudster took £31,000 from disabled woman
Teen sex beast jailed for raping disabled woman
Paralyzed 22-year-old ‘raped’ by peon in home for disabled
‘I feel so isolated’
Pope Francis gives thumbs-up as disabled children perform
Passenger beaten up by conductor
Lord Mayor’s limo forces disabled woman into road
Huge scope for recruiting the disabled

Jillian Weise’s work includes The Amputee’s Guide to Sex, The Colony, and The Book of Goodbyes.

You will find more poems here. You may contact the editor at poems@theawl.com.

How to Outsmart Mice

by Awl Sponsors

Brought to you by TOMCAT

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An update from the most powerful website in the world:

A year after Facebook last changed its privacy policies, the company is proposing another round of changes to its rules. This time, the focus is on explaining how the service works in simpler, clearer language, including a new animated dashboard that attempts to answer common questions like how to delete a post or who can see the comments you make on someone else’s post.

If Facebook really wanted to get your attention it would make the new privacy policy into an interactive quiz. Anyway, however: “But.”

But as with previous moves by the company on privacy, there is an unstated business goal: to sell more advertising based on the vast quantities of personal data that the social network has on its 1.35 billion users, both from their activities on Facebook and increasingly, their wanderings on the web and inside other mobile applications.

Do you have an internet-using friend for whom this “but” would unspool as an actual “but?” Is there anyone in your life who you think would read this story, get to this paragraph, and then turn to you and say, “wait, did you know that Facebook’s business goal is to use our personal data to sell advertising? Why was this left unstated?” Your bank has motives other than helping you buy a house; your data brokers are interested in more than your constant gratification.

Or maybe this is still a fascinating piece of trivia, unknown to many people, that free internet services are intended to make money. In which case: What happens when everyone finally finds out?

by Jay Caspian Kang

Serial, the hit crime podcast from the hit podcast makers at This American Life, is an immigrant story. Adnan Syed, the man currently serving a life sentence for the murder of Hae-Min Lee, comes from a Muslim family; the deceased is the daughter of Korean immigrants. Sarah Koenig, the journalist telling their story, is white. This, on its face, is not a problem. If Serial were a newspaper story or even a traditional magazine feature, the identities of all three could exist alone as facts; the reader could decide how much weight to place upon them. But Serial is an experiment in two old forms: the weekly radio crime show, and the confessional true-crime narrative, wherein the journalist plays the role of the protagonist. The pretense of objectivity is stripped away: Koenig emerges as the subject as the show’s drama revolves not so much around the crime, but rather, her obsessions with it. Syed and Lee’s lives, then, are presented through Koenig’s translations of two distinct cultures.

To borrow a This American Life-ism: What happens when a white journalist stomps around in a cold case involving people from two distinctly separate immigrant communities? Does she get it right? (Spoilers ahead.)

On Tuesday, I called Rabia Chaudry, one of the prominent voices in Serial. Chaudry, a civil rights attorney, grew up in the same circles as Syed; it was she who initially reached out to Koenig to see if she might be interested in the story. Chaudry said that while Koenig had spent upwards of a year talking to people in the community, she has faced significant stumbling blocks in her understanding of it. “Initially she was kind of confused by the dynamics, especially that dating was such a difficult thing and the extremes people take to cover it up,” Chaudry told me. “I could sense when she was telling the story, the parts where she was confused.”

An example: In the show’s second episode, Koenig says, “Since [Syed] and Hae both had immigrant parents, they understood the expectations, and the constraints: Do well in school, go to college, take care of your younger brother, and for Adnan, no girls.”

Koenig follows up with this statement from Syed:

“You know, it was really easy to date someone that kind of lived within the same parameters that I did with regards to, you know, she didn’t have the expectation to me coming to her house for dinner with her family, you know, she understood that if she was to call my house and speak to my mother or father, I would get in trouble, and vice versa.”

At first blush, Koenig has done her job as a journalist. She has supported her statement about immigrant parents with a quote from the source. The problem is that Syed never says the word “immigrant.” Instead, he says “parameters,” which is about as neutral and clinical of a word as one could come up with in that situation. It’s possible that there are other parts, not heard, in which Syed explains the point further, but if they exist, they have been excised, meaning that all we’re left with is Koenig’s inference that those “parameters” necessarily mean “immigrant culture.” In a startling omission, the Lee family has not yet appeared in Serial. Without their presence, and Koenig’s insistence on directing the reader towards the typical immigrant family who raised the typical American teenager, the Lees and the Syeds have been rendered as Tiger Parents — overbearing and out-of-touch. The problem isn’t just the leap itself — that we would hear about strict parents and assume they were all similar — but Koenig’s confidence that we will make it with her.

It gets worse. Also in the second episode of Serial, Koenig reads passages from Hae’s diary. Koenig notes, “Her diary, by the way — well I’m not exactly sure what I expected her diary to be like but — it’s such a teenage girls diary.” (My emphasis added.) This statement seems to suggest a colorblind ideal: In Koenig’s Baltimore, kids will be kids, regardless of race or background. But I imagine there are many listeners — especially amongst people of color — who pause and ask, “Wait, what did you expect her diary to be like?” or “Why do you feel the need to point out that a Korean teenage girl’s diary is just like a teenage girl’s diary?” and perhaps, most importantly, “Where does your model for ‘such a teenage girl’s diary’ come from?” These are annoying questions, not only to those who would prefer to mute the nuances of race and identity for the sake of a clean, “relatable” narrative, but also for those of us who have to ask them because Koenig is talking about our communities, and, in large part, getting it wrong.

The accumulation of Koenig’s little judgments throughout the show — and there are many more examples — should feel familiar to anyone who has spent much of her life around well-intentioned white people who believe that equality and empathy can only be achieved through a full, but ultimately bankrupt, understanding of one another’s cultures. Who among us (and here, I’m talking to fellow people of color) hasn’t felt that subtle, discomforting burn whenever the very nice white person across the table expresses fascination with every detail about our families that strays outside of the expected narrative? Who hasn’t said a word like “parameters” and watched, with grim annoyance, as it turns into “immigrant parents?” These are usually silent, cringing moments — it never quite feels worth it to call out the offender because you’ll never convince them that their intentions might not be as good as they think they are.

Koenig does ultimately address Syed’s Muslim faith in Serial, but only to debunk the state’s claim that Syed’s murderous rage came out of cultural factors. The discussion feels remarkably perfunctory — Koenig quickly dispenses with Syed’s race and religion. She seems to want Syed and Lee, by way of her diary, to be, in the words of Ira Glass, “relatable,” which, sadly, in this case, reads “white.” As a result, Chaudry believes Koenig has left out an essential part of Syed’s story — that his arrest, his indictment and his conviction were all influenced by his faith and the color of his skin. “You have an urban jury in Baltimore city, mostly African American, maybe people who identify with Jay [an African-American friend of Syed’s who is the state’s seemingly unreliable star witness] more than Adnan, who is represented by a community in headscarves and men in beards,” Chaudry said. “The visuals of the courtroom itself leaves an impression and there’s no escaping the racial implications there.”

“I don’t know to what extent someone who hasn’t grown up in a culture can really understand that culture,” Chaudry added. “I think Sarah tried to get it, but I don’t know if she ever really did. I explained to her that anti-Muslim sentiment was involved in framing the motive in this case, and that Muslims can pick up on it, whereas someone like her, who hasn’t experienced this kind of bigotry doesn’t quite get it. Until you’ve experienced it, you don’t really know it or pick up on it”

Koenig and Serial are hardly alone. The staffs of radio stations, newspapers, and magazines tend to be overwhelmingly white, which leaves reporters and writers with a set of equally troubling options: either ignore stories from communities of color, or report them in the same sort of shorthand that Koenig uses throughout Serial. In loftier media outlets, the second choice usually goes unnoticed because the writer comes from the same demographic as the intended audience. Even the best works of journalism produced by white journalists about minority communities, which includes The Last Shot, Darcy Frey’s chronicle of high school basketball in Coney Island, have the same problem: The writer can feel like an interloper, someone who will stay long enough to write a story and then leave.

This certainly doesn’t mean that people should only write and report about the communities they know or are born into, but if we judge lengthy narratives by their thoughtfulness, the depth of their inquiry and their care, Serial lacks the hard-earned and moving reflections on race found in Frey’s book, or, in, say, Adrian Nicole LeBlanc’s Random Family. Instead, the listener is asked to simply trust Koenig’s translation of two distinct immigrant cultures. I can think of no better definition of white privilege in journalism than that.

There’s a reading of Serial that’s a bit more sympathetic, one in which Koenig has been intentionally presented as a quixotic narrator with Dana, her occasional sidekick on the show, playing the role of Sancho Panza. There’s ample evidence that this is what’s the show is striving for — from the unexpected asides where Dana interrupts one of Sarah’s obsessive rants with a roadside observation (“There’s a shrimp sale at the Crab Crib!”) to the reporting blunders to the callous way in which Koenig sometimes talks to Syed, as if he should be eminently grateful that she, a journalist, has decided to dig into his life. But if Serial is not so much a story of a murder, but rather, the story of how a journalist goes about reporting a story that has grabbed her; and if Koenig is a flawed, unreliable narrator, we should add “cultural tourist” to the list of flaws. That Koenig keeps in the bad, impolitic parts is a testament to the integrity and ambition of the project. But while I am willing to cut “Serial” enough slack to regard it as an experiment in form, I am still disturbed by the thought of Koenig stomping around communities that she clearly does not understand, digging up small, generally inconsequential details about the people inside of them, and subjecting it all to that inimitable “This American Life” process of tirelessly, and sometimes gleefully, expressing her neuroses over what she has found.

In a recent interview with Vulture, Koenig admitted that she was mostly making Serial up as she went along. “Yes, I could say, there was a point where I thought I knew the truth,” she says. “And then I found out that I didn’t know as much as I thought I did, and I did more reporting, and now I don’t know what I don’t know again! Are you mad at me? Don’t be mad at me!”

When one considers the full extent of what Koenig does not know, this tone, which runs throughout the show, becomes particularly frustrating. Sarah, we’re not mad at you for accomplishing the difficult feat of both whitewashing and stereotyping Hae and Adnan. We’re just cringing, silently, every time you talk about them.

★★ Gray haze reached up toward gray cloud, both of them pale and inconclusive. The clouds wavered and cracked to admit some blue. Hosed-down sidewalks stayed wet, and the air in the subway was close. Someone put on sunglasses against a glare that was only incipient; now and then a gust of breeze came up and went down again. The sky of clouds split by blue became one of blue full of clouds. Then by midafternoon it was altogether clear blue, and the sunlight was arriving with a little warmth on it, through a scattering whiteness downtown. Enough clouds reappeared to decorate the sunset. In the night, on the plaza outside the opera, a mist was coming down onto the building tops, boxing in the glow of the electric lights.

Military analysts like Mr. Scharre argue that automated weapons like these should be embraced because they may result in fewer mass killings and civilian casualties. Autonomous weapons, they say, do not commit war crimes.

He forgot to mention that code cannot kill; software does not discriminate; data does not lie.

A good listening order for your first run through this EP: Four, two, three, one. Start quiet and easy, then get settled for a couple songs, and then finish on the strongest track, where the band guiltlessly releases its inner Joy Division. It’s excellent.

by Eve Asher

Podcasts: they’re not just for nerds anymore! Now podcasts are cool, smart, and sophisticated, and so are the people who listen to them. But with all the great podcasts out there, from Serial to Pop Culture Happy Hour, where do you start? These eleven podcasts will make you laugh, cry, and go, “Huh, I never knew,” which is kind of like the public radio version of laughing.

People

There are people everywhere. But how much do we really know about them? Sometimes, they surprise you. Each episode we bring you stories about people and who they really are. We are people. You are a person. We are all People.

Murder, She Podcasted

It seems like every week there’s a new murder in the news. But what is murder? And what drives people to commit it? When a murder happens, is there more to the story? Each week, a serious person with a microphone explores these issues.

The Jake Project

Inside the twisted, offbeat mind of Jake, a 32-year-old white guy with a unique way of looking at the world, and some provocative opinions about hip hop.

Grisly

You all live your comfortable lives with your laptops and your quinoa. When was the last time you touched a dead body? When was the last time you cleaned human intestine off your windshield? Each week on Grisly, the host interviews someone with a really gross job, like cremating babies or something. You’ll only hear his voice max once per episode, but you can definitely tell he’s not grossed out.

It’s Dangerous To Go Alone, Take This Podcast

Three guys with identical voices, one of whom is being Skyped in, bring you the latest in web technologies, programming tips, and hacker culture. Sometimes they say things that could be jokes. It’s difficult to tell.

Beautiful Oblivion

Forty-three minutes of sparse electronic music. Twelve minutes into the episode, a digitally altered voice confesses to a crime. The voice expresses no remorse.

The Amusement Show

Recorded live at a mid-sized venue in Brooklyn, The Amusement Show brings you a more or less enjoyable hour of unobjectionable music and comedy. Each week, a genial host welcomes a celebrity guest — but a smart celebrity, like John Hodgman — and laughs at all of their jokes. Then a band whose CD you should probably get your dad for Hanukkah plays a humorously pointed cover. By the end of the episode, you won’t remember who the guests were, but you’ll be pleasantly numb to the horrors of existence.

Storygasm

Sex. Everybody’s having it, but do we ever really talk about it? Storygasm features intimate, sound-rich stories of erotic adventures from ordinary people who all happen to be sex educators in San Francisco. Come explore that most taboo of topics: young, velvety-voiced people having sex.

Interesting

Some people are just so interesting. Writers, for example: how do they do it? Or musicians: how do they just get on stage and play? The host of Interesting is not himself interesting, but he manages to get interesting people from all walks of life — writers, musicians — to come to his apartment to talk about their creative process. He talks about himself too, but only a little.

Not Science

It’s a plant, but it’s not a plant. It’s the ocean, but it’s also the stock market. It’s billions of neurons in billions of brains, and it’s as simple as flipping a coin. It’s everywhere. It’s nothing. It’s Not Science.

I’m Not Here To Make Friends

Two comedians and reality show junkies work their way through every episode of every English-language incarnation of the Big Brother. Each week, they watch an episode and mock its shifting alliances, obviously contrived fights, and regrettable fashion choices. With over 60 seasons to get through, the pair estimate that the project will take them about 30 years, and if you listen closely you can hear the exhaustion in their voices. But they carry on, because when all this is over, they might be able to get a show on IFC.

Photo by Literalis via Flickr.

Where do babies come from? How were my genes mixed up with my husband’s to create this being — this person who is so clearly not like me, so clearly not like her father, but is in fact, her own original work?

Her looks are a smokescreen and a lie. They prove that she is ours, that no switching at the hospital took place, which is reassuring. But it’s also confusing. I have heard that we are “twins” more than once, and I agree that we look very much alike. But that isn’t a whole, undiluted truth, either: I don’t pride myself on my beauty, and when I think about my face at all, I accept it ambiguously. “Yes, yes this is my face,” I say to the mirror. An everyday, generic looking face. But Zelda is terrifically beautiful to my eye, and I don’t think that it’s bias. I think that I would be willing and able to accept and admit if my daughter were less of a looker, but out she came, the most beautiful face I’d ever seen. But if we look so much alike, and I am not, by my own standards, “a looker,” while she is… what does that even mean? And who cares what she looks like, anyway?

But the thing that makes me ask, “Where do babies come from?” more than twenty years after my sex ed class is this: No one told me she would seem to have nothing in common with me, despite looking just like me. No one told me that a quiet, withdrawn and laid back person would mother a baby who my friend Lisa described as the Mayor McCheese of Greenpoint. Recently, we were on the East River Ferry, making the trip from DUMBO back home. Zelda was chilling in her stroller at the foot of the stairs, where the upper level of the ferry meets the lower. Without fail, every time the ferry stopped to let people off, Zelda would begin waving and smiling at the people as they came down the stairs to leave the boat, as if it were her job to greet them.

She waves at little kids on the subway and cashiers at the grocery store. She makes new friends wherever she goes. She charms even the most cantankerous strangers, babbling away at them. Since she learned to crawl, setting her free inevitably results in her making the acquaintance of everyone within a fifty-foot radius. She’s happy to sit and play on her rug with her books alone, or bang on her little piano for a few minutes, but what she lives for, and craves, is interaction. Not affection or attention, but back and forth constant conversation. Movement. Changes of scene and crowds. Museums full of people, airport security lines where she has a captive audience desperate for cheer. She is a social being who is happiest when surrounded by people — an audience.

I love this about her. It’s not just that she is full of life, a happy or smiley baby. She is overflowing with an energy that is original and funny and good humored. She is aggressively outgoing, relentlessly disarming. She is living her best life, a hundred percent of the time.

Early in the morning, every day, I wake and listen to her on the baby monitor. She is working things out down there. She sits in her crib for half an hour every day, alone, in the dark, talking to herself. There are no words but there are sentences. There are questions. Declarations. She whispers to herself sometimes now. Controlling the level of her voice is one of the things she is working on, a recently acquired, though not-yet refined, skill. She is the busiest person I have ever known.

I don’t know where this came from, this relentless positivity, this zest for life which seems to come from deep within her and seep from her pores. Certainly not from her parents. I’m a classic hater, and though her father can perform for a room and captivate an audience, I wouldn’t say he enjoys it. Internally, we’re both anxious homebodies. I’ve got about five close friends, most of whom I’ve known since I was a child, and that’s only if I include one who died three years ago. If I don’t, I have just four. It’s not that I don’t have flashes of enthusiasm; I do. An errant laugh, an accidental moment of brilliant “anything is possibleism.” But I can’t recall a day of my life where I wasn’t at least somewhat over the whole show, born old and shaking my head. Part of me is simply… unimpressed and unsocial. I need time to myself. Lots of it, and I did even when I was a small child. It’s how I was made.

And though it seems late in the day for me to be acquiring better social skills, Zelda is forcing me to: She can’t talk, so I’m often left to fill the gaps between her smiles and advances, making friends with moms and subway riders, cashiers and passersby. In a few months she’s accomplished what I hadn’t in four years: I now know all of my neighbors; I say “hello” when I see them and often stop for a few minutes to chat. She has made me more social, too, despite myself.

I hope this lasts. I hope she persists. That her enthusiasm isn’t squeezed out of her, that she is consistently this impressed, this engaged and this smitten with the planet and its human offerings. I hope she never learns to shrug. I hope she never learns to say “meh.” I hope she keeps waking up, toothily grinning at herself in the dark every morning.

THE PARENT RAP is an endearing new column about the fucked up and cruel world of parenting.