In 1983, shortly after Harold Washington was elected mayor of Chicago, Richard Mell, a white alderman, approached the African-American mayor with this plea: “Don’t make this city suffer for 300 years of injustice against your people.
There are times when Mark Twain was right, that numbers are lies and damn lies and all that, but there are others times when the numbers line up so pointedly that they connect the dots in a way that no verbal argument ever could.
Like most of Ohio, or at least those of us with any interest in American sports or a distant tie to the colleges involved, I spent Monday night in front of the television, watching the Buckeyes take on the Ducks.
The extended video of the Tamir Rice shooting is jumpy, grainy, and 30 minutes long. That doesn't matter. I've watched it twice. I couldn't let it run uninterrupted. I stopped and scrolled, leaning into my computer to get a close-up view.
Recent studies suggest that 73% of media stories are based on numerical ratings derived from third-party data sets. Indeed, 94% of Forbes.com online stories are top-10 charts ...
I regularly read Slate. I regularly read a raft of publications that are based in D.C., New York, San Francisco and other coastal cities. I have written for Slate and many national publications as well.
Picture the toy gun, abandoned beneath a gazebo. Just some found object with no identifiable owner. Scan the sidewalk, and see if you can spot the loose cigarettes scattered in front of a Staten Island storefront.
For me, the details surfaced Sunday morning, over coffee, nearly eighteen hours after it happened: Twelve-year-old boy Tamir Rice shot dead by a Cleveland police officer at Cudell Recreation Center Saturday, November 22, 2014, at 3:30 in the afternoon.
I’m a news junkie. While my bandwidth for online news consumption exceeds that for print, I still receive two daily newspapers, three if you count the four days of the week that The Plain Dealer is home-delivered.
I am watching Twitter and TV, where rage spills onto the streets of Missouri like gasoline. But my heart is not in Ferguson tonight.
Last week, a spokesman for Mayor Jackson brushed off the idea that Cleveland had anything to learn from Ferguson, MO, where the killing of an unarmed young black man, Michael Brown, by police has caused massive protests and civil unrest.
In 2013, the number of law enforcement officers killed in this country in the line of duty by firearms (33) was the lowest since 1887, when the U.S. population was about 240 million less than it is now.