Lily Salter's Blog, page 954

November 14, 2015

Your brain cells can now be turned on and off like a bedside lamp: A new discovery in optogenics

Optogenetics is probably the biggest buzzword in neuroscience today. It refers to techniques that use genetic modification of cells so they can be manipulated with light. The net result is a switch that can turn brain cells off and on like a bedside lamp. The technique has enabled neuroscientists to achieve previously unimagined feats and two of its inventors—Karl Deisseroth of Stanford University and the Howard Hughes Medical Institute and Ed Boyden of Massachusetts Institute of Technology—received a Breakthrough Prize in the life sciences on November 8 in recognition of their efforts. The technology is able to remotely control motor circuits—one example is having an animal run in circles at the flick of a switch. It can even label and alter memories that form as a mouse explores different environments. These types of studies allow researchers to firmly establish a cause-and-effect relationship between electrical activity in specific neural circuits and various aspects of behavior and cognition, making optogenetics one of the most widely used methods in neuroscience today. As its popularity soars, new tricks are continually added to the optogenetic arsenal. The latest breakthroughs, promise to deliver the biggest step forward for the technology since its inception. Researchers have devised ways of broadening optogenetics to enter into a dynamic dialogue with the signals moving about inside functioning brains. The term optogenetics usually refers to the control of neurons. Researchers insert a gene for a light-sensitive protein into cells. The cells then produce that protein on their surfaces. When these cells are later exposed to light, channels open and charged particles (positive sodium ions) rush inside, causing the cell to “fire” a “spike,” sending an electrical signal to other cells. The most commonly used proteins are “channelrhodopsins,” originally discovered in algae, but there is also a protein from a bacterium found in Egyptian salt lakes that has the opposite effect. Negative, rather than positive (chlorine) ions, rush into the cell, which prevents it from firing. Researchers can thus use these two actuator proteins to switch neurons on and off, using light. This can be achieved via fiber-optic cables, so researchers can manipulate neurons in freely moving animals and observe the effects on behavior. The genes are delivered by various forms of genetic manipulation. Different genes are turned on, or expressed in different types of cell, so the gene is accompanied by a special genetic sequence, called a promoter, which is only active in specific cell types, thus ensuring the protein is only produced in the desired target. More generally, optogenetics refers to any method for communicating with cells using genetics plus optics—and that can mean observing cell activity, not just turning a neuron on or off. Nongenetic approaches, such as fluorescent dyes that increase cell illumination in response to activity, have been used previously, but lack the precision of targeting a particular type of cell. A new way to watch what’s happening with cells utilizes the same genetic targeting methods used to switch circuits off and on, Except now indicator proteins are integrated into selected cells via genetic tweaks. The indicators generally consist of a protein sensitive to cell activity, linked to a fluorescent protein, so they light up in response to a cell’s firing. Combining these genetically targeted optical readouts with the standard armamentarium of tools for controlling cell activity unlocks the full potential of optogenetics. The combined technique allows researchers to hold two-way conversations with populations of selected neurons, using only pulses of light. Once various technical difficulties are overcome, researchers will be able to carry out this dialogue with single neurons, in real-time, allowing a level of interaction with awake, functioning brains, that has not been possible before now. At the recent Society for Neuroscience meeting in Chicago, several leading researchers spoke about “all-optical interrogation of neural circuits” and co-wrote an accompanying review in The Journal of Neuroscience. They outlined the challenges involved and described pioneering work to overcome these obstacles. The approach has the potential to shed light, in literal terms, on the relationship between brain activity, on one hand, and cognition, behavior and emotion, on the other. This goal fits well with the U.S. BRAIN initiative, which aims to encourage the development of new tools for exploring the link between neural signals and cognition. One of the speakers and co-authors was neuroscientist and practicing psychiatrist Deisseroth of Stanford University, whose work developing the original channelrhodopsin-based photosensitive actuator cells together with colleague Boyden was what earned the pair their recent Breakthrough Prize. Deisseroth's research has always been conducted with an eye on psychiatry. This new work focuses on overcoming limitations of existing technical methods. Two main types of genetically inserted indicators are commonly used for these all-optical apparatuses. Calcium indicators exploit the fact that when neurons fire, calcium channels on cells open, causing levels of calcium to rise. Indicators make use of this to deform a calcium-sensitive protein, which is linked to a fluorescent protein that emits light. The main problem is speed. “Calcium signals are slow, they last one second or so, and the brain is a little faster than that,” says Thomas Knöpfel, chair of Optogenetics and Circuit Neurosciences at Imperial College London, who didn't speak at the session. Furthermore, calcium levels can also change without neurons firing, and some important changes that don't actually cause neurons to fire don't alter calcium levels. This is because calcium is a proxy for the signal researchers are really interested in—voltage. Knöpfel has been developing genetically encoded voltage indicators (GEVIs) for 20 years. The main problem, compared with calcium indicators, is the signals are weaker and are harder to detect. The problems are only exacerbated by the faster signals, which require shorter exposure times. The signals also tend to be noisier. Another challenge is observing or stimulating cells deep inside the brain. Traditional one-photon microscopy suffers from poor depth penetration and image quality—photons are absorbed and scattered by tissue. Two-photon microscopy overcomes this using near-infrared light. The longer wavelength light penetrates tissue, but because the photons have less energy, two must strike a protein to excite it, hence the name. This has the advantage that only proteins in the tiny focus-spot of the beam are stimulated, but it also means that, when trying to stimulate a neuron, few channels are activated, which may not be enough to trigger a spike. There are two ways to solve this issue: One is by using scanning lasers, which quickly scan a laser-beam across a target (whether one or multiple cells), activating many channels sequentially. The other involves parallel approaches, which use holographic techniques to shape a beam into the required pattern, illuminating the whole target at once. This method can even produce three-dimensional illumination patterns that stimulate cells at different depths. The main advantage though, is speed. “Applications that require precise control over spike timing are better using parallel approaches,” says Valentina Emiliani of the neurophotonics laboratory at Paris Descartes University, lead review author who presented her group's holographic work at the conference. The biggest obstacle though, is that both stimulating and recording activity with light causes problems if wavelengths overlap. This is especially challenging because the proteins used as indicators need to be excited by light in order to emit light. “The compounds used for imaging and photo-stimulation have very overlapping spectra,” Emiliani says. “It's difficult to illuminate your preparation to do imaging, while making sure you don't also photo-stimulate.” Likewise, researchers must be careful the indicator signals they record are not corrupted by wavelengths used for stimulation. Much work in the field is therefore now focused on finding proteins whose wavelengths don't overlap. For instance, Harvard University biophysicist Adam Cohen and his team presented work, together with Ed Boyden's group at M.I.T., which combines a channelrhodopsin shifted toward blue wavelengths with a voltage-indicator that emits near-infrared. The groups have used the indicator called QuasAr in live mice, and stimulated neurons with blue light while monitoring in red, in stem-cell cultures derived from people with Lou Gehrig's disease. They plan to test the combination in live animals next. Once these challenges are overcome, all-optical techniques could revolutionize neuroscience by allowing researchers to simultaneously control and monitor precisely even single spikes from either single neurons or large ensembles of neurons as experimental animals move freely about. "This approach will open a whole new range of experiments," says Michael Hausser, a neuroscientist at University College London, who co-chaired the conference session alongside Emiliani. “Unlocking the full potential of optogenetics requires going beyond targeting genetically-defined cell-types, to targeting cells according to functional properties, rather than just genetic identity.” In other words, rather than just passively monitoring, or observing the results of an experiment in which the level of stimulation of neurons must be carefully planned beforehand, these innovations will enable researchers to adapt how they stimulate cells depending on how cells are behaving. “If you can tailor stimulation to activity patterns, you can do the manipulation on the fly,” Hausser explains. “For instance, during a decision-making experiment, if you can track the activity of ensembles of neurons in real time, you can influence behavior more effectively by manipulating ensembles as they form.” “These are two game-changing advances, compared to what we could do before: targeting functional ensembles and manipulating activity in real time,” Hausser says. “Ultimately these approaches could help define the neural codes used in the brain to drive behavior.”

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Published on November 14, 2015 12:00

Our terrorism double standard: After Paris, let’s stop blaming Muslims and take a hard look at ourselves

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Published on November 14, 2015 11:48

Bill Maher’s moral superiority: Grandstanding on Islam and political correctness while tragedy in Paris unfolds

“I’m not demonizing, I’m characterizing,” Bill Maher said of the entire religion of Islam on Friday evening, in what appeared to be complete sincerity. Maher is a professed liberal comedian with a show called “Real Time” on HBO, and yesterday, the first live major political reaction to the coordinate terrorist attacks in Paris was on his show. At the time "Real Time" was filmed—10 p.m. on the East Coast—the identities or affiliations of the terrorists that killed over 120 civilians in Paris were not known. Rumor had it that they were acting on the behalf of the Islamic State, commonly known as ISIS — Wolf Blitzer was saying "if it's ISIS" early in CNN's breaking news coverage. In spite of chaos and terror, France 24, the primary source of French news for those of us outside of France, was incredibly restrained. Speculation was ruthlessly curtailed; assumptions and confabulations were sidelined. Other discussions may have been happening elsewhere, but the primary feed of French news to English-speaking networks—so primary, indeed, that CNN, CBS, and the BBC were simulcasting from it—was a deliberate and calm livestream of reportage. Maher nodded to the ambiguity, but added, due to the use of AK-47s and suicide vests, "It's probably not the Amish." Later this morning, it was reported that ISIS claimed responsibility for the attacks. Once again, Bill Maher was right. It is the rightness of Bill Maher that, to anyone with a more developed sense of compassion, ends up being the most frustrating. Anyone that morally superior should be wrong all the time, just so the wide grin of their unflappable arrogance might be rightfully deflated. But Maher's show—caught up in the semantics between demonizing and characterizing—reflects exactly what is happening in the rest of the world right now. Bill Maher may sound entirely reductive when he dismisses the existence of moderate Muslims, or conflates ISIS and very extreme practices of Islam like female genital mutilation with the entirety of the religion. But he is vocalizing the same dismissal and conflation that has characterized all of Western media since 2001—albeit, not always in quite so many words. His on-going cross-examination of Islam is also the same kind of prolonged trial that the media subjects to Muslims around the world. Within mere minutes of the reported attacks, grandstanding conservatives on Twitter were shouting about refugees, immigration, Hillary Clinton's culpability, and how complaining college students should stop complaining, because the only time anyone is really infringing on your rights is when an Islamic terrorist is wearing a suicide vest. Maher puts Islam on trial because everyone else is doing it. He's right; he's just, in the immortal words of "The Big Lebowski," also an asshole. The comedian didn’t deviate too much from his pre-written set to address the events in Paris—which were still unfolding as the taping went on, a tricky line to walk for any showman. (He sang a few bars of "La Marseillaise" to open the show.) But in the sit-down interview, with Daily Beast writer Asra Nomani, Paris came up again and again. Nomani is an activist who was raised Muslim and now campaigns for radical reform within the religion; her angle, specifically, is to raise the status of women in Islam. With Maher, Nomani ended up repeating and verifying all of his talking points, in what read like an exercise of ego. Following yesterday's terrorist attacks—in Beirut as well as Paris—it felt painfully insensitive, a dismissal of the real human tragedy of the terrorists' actions in favor of proving to each other who was more right about it. And being right is a weird and complicated thing to be, in the aftermath of inexplicable, unimaginable horror. There is something laudable, to a degree, about the way that Maher identifies the most corrosive issues in liberal politics and shapes them into some kind of progressive agenda; jokes aside, he manages to identify and confirm the worst fears of the audience, bleeding out the righteous indignation and turning it into some semblance of talking points. What's scary is that those talking points—that agenda—exist mostly to allow Maher and his audience to be freed from culpability for the ills of the world. Only idiots would take religion so seriously; only idiots would kowtow to political correctness; only idiots would vote Republican. Maher is obsessed with being right, and sure, he often is. Maybe we would all be better off if none of us, for example, believed in a higher power and/or subscribed to organized religion. But here, in this universe, many of us do. In a line of thinking that, it turns out, dovetails rather well with what ISIS wants to happen, Nomani and Maher repeatedly posited that there are no moderate Muslims. Maher recounted a letter he received from a man in Saudi Arabia, who told him that all moderate Muslims are now in jail. "I don't understand liberals who don't understand this man," he said. Maher's closing statements expressed similar bafflement at his chosen audience. After six minutes of telling white people they have things really good—in terms of incarceration rates, personal wealth, and standard of living—he made a quip about black women, joking that the reason they have less individual savings than white women is because they went and spent it all on a weave. The audience gasped more than laughed. “Fuck you, you politically correct assholes,” Maher said, laughing. “One joke! One joke about the blacks." I think Maher confuses compassion with idiocy. Compassion is a quality that has nothing to do with how smart or how right you are. It's a quality that is at the root of not wanting to make generalizations, and at the root of wanting to say things that do not horrifically offend other systematically oppressed people. I fully believe that Maher doesn't understand those well-meaning liberals, those politically correct assholes. I would just rather be one of them, I think, than to merely be right; I would like to be able to understand another point of view, from time to time. And especially on a day like yesterday, I would like to be able to feel compassion.“I’m not demonizing, I’m characterizing,” Bill Maher said of the entire religion of Islam on Friday evening, in what appeared to be complete sincerity. Maher is a professed liberal comedian with a show called “Real Time” on HBO, and yesterday, the first live major political reaction to the coordinate terrorist attacks in Paris was on his show. At the time "Real Time" was filmed—10 p.m. on the East Coast—the identities or affiliations of the terrorists that killed over 120 civilians in Paris were not known. Rumor had it that they were acting on the behalf of the Islamic State, commonly known as ISIS — Wolf Blitzer was saying "if it's ISIS" early in CNN's breaking news coverage. In spite of chaos and terror, France 24, the primary source of French news for those of us outside of France, was incredibly restrained. Speculation was ruthlessly curtailed; assumptions and confabulations were sidelined. Other discussions may have been happening elsewhere, but the primary feed of French news to English-speaking networks—so primary, indeed, that CNN, CBS, and the BBC were simulcasting from it—was a deliberate and calm livestream of reportage. Maher nodded to the ambiguity, but added, due to the use of AK-47s and suicide vests, "It's probably not the Amish." Later this morning, it was reported that ISIS claimed responsibility for the attacks. Once again, Bill Maher was right. It is the rightness of Bill Maher that, to anyone with a more developed sense of compassion, ends up being the most frustrating. Anyone that morally superior should be wrong all the time, just so the wide grin of their unflappable arrogance might be rightfully deflated. But Maher's show—caught up in the semantics between demonizing and characterizing—reflects exactly what is happening in the rest of the world right now. Bill Maher may sound entirely reductive when he dismisses the existence of moderate Muslims, or conflates ISIS and very extreme practices of Islam like female genital mutilation with the entirety of the religion. But he is vocalizing the same dismissal and conflation that has characterized all of Western media since 2001—albeit, not always in quite so many words. His on-going cross-examination of Islam is also the same kind of prolonged trial that the media subjects to Muslims around the world. Within mere minutes of the reported attacks, grandstanding conservatives on Twitter were shouting about refugees, immigration, Hillary Clinton's culpability, and how complaining college students should stop complaining, because the only time anyone is really infringing on your rights is when an Islamic terrorist is wearing a suicide vest. Maher puts Islam on trial because everyone else is doing it. He's right; he's just, in the immortal words of "The Big Lebowski," also an asshole. The comedian didn’t deviate too much from his pre-written set to address the events in Paris—which were still unfolding as the taping went on, a tricky line to walk for any showman. (He sang a few bars of "La Marseillaise" to open the show.) But in the sit-down interview, with Daily Beast writer Asra Nomani, Paris came up again and again. Nomani is an activist who was raised Muslim and now campaigns for radical reform within the religion; her angle, specifically, is to raise the status of women in Islam. With Maher, Nomani ended up repeating and verifying all of his talking points, in what read like an exercise of ego. Following yesterday's terrorist attacks—in Beirut as well as Paris—it felt painfully insensitive, a dismissal of the real human tragedy of the terrorists' actions in favor of proving to each other who was more right about it. And being right is a weird and complicated thing to be, in the aftermath of inexplicable, unimaginable horror. There is something laudable, to a degree, about the way that Maher identifies the most corrosive issues in liberal politics and shapes them into some kind of progressive agenda; jokes aside, he manages to identify and confirm the worst fears of the audience, bleeding out the righteous indignation and turning it into some semblance of talking points. What's scary is that those talking points—that agenda—exist mostly to allow Maher and his audience to be freed from culpability for the ills of the world. Only idiots would take religion so seriously; only idiots would kowtow to political correctness; only idiots would vote Republican. Maher is obsessed with being right, and sure, he often is. Maybe we would all be better off if none of us, for example, believed in a higher power and/or subscribed to organized religion. But here, in this universe, many of us do. In a line of thinking that, it turns out, dovetails rather well with what ISIS wants to happen, Nomani and Maher repeatedly posited that there are no moderate Muslims. Maher recounted a letter he received from a man in Saudi Arabia, who told him that all moderate Muslims are now in jail. "I don't understand liberals who don't understand this man," he said. Maher's closing statements expressed similar bafflement at his chosen audience. After six minutes of telling white people they have things really good—in terms of incarceration rates, personal wealth, and standard of living—he made a quip about black women, joking that the reason they have less individual savings than white women is because they went and spent it all on a weave. The audience gasped more than laughed. “Fuck you, you politically correct assholes,” Maher said, laughing. “One joke! One joke about the blacks." I think Maher confuses compassion with idiocy. Compassion is a quality that has nothing to do with how smart or how right you are. It's a quality that is at the root of not wanting to make generalizations, and at the root of wanting to say things that do not horrifically offend other systematically oppressed people. I fully believe that Maher doesn't understand those well-meaning liberals, those politically correct assholes. I would just rather be one of them, I think, than to merely be right; I would like to be able to understand another point of view, from time to time. And especially on a day like yesterday, I would like to be able to feel compassion.

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Published on November 14, 2015 11:45

The wackiest art heist ever: Hardly a “Thomas Crown Affair,” this real theft of a masterpiece was a little bit 007 and a whole lot Monty Python

The heist was daring, the ransom negotiations bizarre, and the trial surreal—part Monty Python, part Perry Mason, part Ally McBeal, and yet critical to legal history. The only successful theft ever from London’s National Gallery took place on August 21, 1961, when a brazen thief stole Goya’s 1812 "Portrait of the Duke of Wellington." Someone had somehow snuck into the National Gallery through an unlocked men’s room window, evaded security guards and made off with a painting which had just been saved from sale to an American tycoon by the British government. The newly saved portrait of the English war hero went on display at the National Gallery in London on August 3—less than three weeks later, it was stolen. The press had a field day, and the theft infected the popular imagination. In the first James Bond film, filmed soon after the crime, you can see a copy of the missing Goya portrait decorating Dr. No’s villainous hideout. Police were baffled, thinking that some suitably Bondian criminal mastermind was behind the heist. But 10 days after the theft, the London police received the first of many bizarre ransom notes, promising the safe return of the painting in exchange for a ransom payment equal to the amount the country paid for the Goya: £140,000. The notes insisted that the thief or thieves wanted the money solely for charity. A joke, right? Not so. The ransomer identified marks visible only on the back of the painting, proving that it was in his possession. The ransom notes were theatrical and flamboyantly written: “The 'Duke' is safe. His temperature cared for--his future uncertain. … We ask that some nonconformist type of person with the fearless fortitude of a Montgomery start the fund for £140,000. No law can touch him. Propriety may frown--but God must smile.” The notes made it clear that the criminal thought it nuts that the British government would spend a large sum on a painting when such money could be put to better use. There seemed to be no personal motivation for the theft, only a desire to raise money for charity, but the police refused to negotiate with the ransomer and a merry dance ensued: part true-crime, part farce, all fascinating and set against the backdrop of Swinging Sixties London. With such a cinematic tale, you’d think that someone would make a movie out of it, or at least write a book. Turns out someone finally has. Meet Alan Hirsch, American lawyer and author, who has been fascinated with the case for years. (Full disclosure: as a specialist in art crime, I was asked to pen the introduction to this forthcoming book, "The Duke of Wellington, Kidnapped.") “I know ‘truth is stranger than fiction’ is a cliché,” Hirsch told me, “but if John Grisham wrote a novel based on this case, people would tell him he’d gone too far. The lead character, the plot, the outcome of the trial--I still can’t believe it and I’ve spent years poring over the documents and talking to people who were there.” This November marks the 50th anniversary of the trial of Kempton Bunton, a 252-pound Alfred Hitchcock look-alike who confessed to stealing the Goya and returning it in a suitably melodramatic manner. In March 1965, someone calling himself “Mister Bloxham” (an apparent reference to "The Importance of Being Earnest") dropped the painting off at the luggage check of a rail station. A few months later, Bunton dropped in on the police and calmly announced that “I am turning myself in for the Goya.” Bunton didn’t appear to be the sort of man to steal a famous painting, much less do so by shimmying through a small men’s room window. Though he looked a far cry from Cary Grant and Pierce Brosnan, our paradigm elegant art thieves, this flamboyant, lovable oddball—a retired cab driver and bookie who had several times been jailed for a weird form of conscientious objection (refusal to pay his BBC TV license)--starred in a courtroom drama that had a vein of comedy running through it. He was a working-class hero, claiming not even to have known who this “Wellington fellow” was in Goya’s painting, which he referred to as “Spanish firewood.” He’d swiped it to make a point--the elderly should not have to pay to watch television. Bunton’s foil was the judge, Carl Aarvold, who Hirsch introduces as “a former professional rugby player once oddly described by a journalist as ‘not only gracious in defeat but fluent in French, a rare combination.’” Aarvold made the odd judicial decision to instruct the jurors that they must acquit Bunton if they believed that he always intended to return the painting. “The judge was actually following the letter of Britain’s exceedingly odd larceny statute,” Hirsch says. “Bunton’s defense team wisely latched on to the wording of the law, which said you are guilty of theft only if you intend to ‘permanently deprive’ the owner of his possession. The problem for the defense was that while Bunton returned the painting, he did not return the frame. All of this tied the judge up in knots during his instruction to the jury.” Even so, the jury managed to follow his instructions--finding Bunton not guilty of stealing the painting, but guilty of stealing the frame. Judge Aarvold, for his part, is almost as quotable as Bunton (whose colorful unpublished memoirs Hirsch managed to get hold of, and quotes from liberally, to great effect). In his summing up, the judge said: “Motives, even if they are good, cannot justify theft, and creeping into public galleries in order to extract pictures of value so that you can use them for your own purposes has got to be discouraged.” He then sentenced Bunton to three months. There are a pair of punchlines to this oddball crime and trial. In 1968, as part of England’s new Theft Act, Parliament included a clause that made it illegal to “remove without authority any object displayed or kept for display to the public in a building to which the public have access,” thereby making Bunton’s “borrowing” of the Goya a criminal offense. Television licenses were eventually revoked for old age pensioners, satisfying, long after the fact, the unusual ransom demands of Kempton Bunton. Floating on his cloud up in Heaven, Bunton must be looking down upon us with a satisfied smile. For not only was his motive for the theft fulfilled (eventually), but for decades the police believed what he wanted them to: that he was, in fact, the thief. Turns out he may have been cleverer than everyone thought and taken the fall for someone else. How else to explain his size, the bathroom window, and his apparent lack of interest in the painting itself? “Was Bunton innocent?” Hirsch asks. “It sure looks like it. But just when I thought I had the crime solved and everything figured out. . . .” He pauses. “Can we leave it at that?”The heist was daring, the ransom negotiations bizarre, and the trial surreal—part Monty Python, part Perry Mason, part Ally McBeal, and yet critical to legal history. The only successful theft ever from London’s National Gallery took place on August 21, 1961, when a brazen thief stole Goya’s 1812 "Portrait of the Duke of Wellington." Someone had somehow snuck into the National Gallery through an unlocked men’s room window, evaded security guards and made off with a painting which had just been saved from sale to an American tycoon by the British government. The newly saved portrait of the English war hero went on display at the National Gallery in London on August 3—less than three weeks later, it was stolen. The press had a field day, and the theft infected the popular imagination. In the first James Bond film, filmed soon after the crime, you can see a copy of the missing Goya portrait decorating Dr. No’s villainous hideout. Police were baffled, thinking that some suitably Bondian criminal mastermind was behind the heist. But 10 days after the theft, the London police received the first of many bizarre ransom notes, promising the safe return of the painting in exchange for a ransom payment equal to the amount the country paid for the Goya: £140,000. The notes insisted that the thief or thieves wanted the money solely for charity. A joke, right? Not so. The ransomer identified marks visible only on the back of the painting, proving that it was in his possession. The ransom notes were theatrical and flamboyantly written: “The 'Duke' is safe. His temperature cared for--his future uncertain. … We ask that some nonconformist type of person with the fearless fortitude of a Montgomery start the fund for £140,000. No law can touch him. Propriety may frown--but God must smile.” The notes made it clear that the criminal thought it nuts that the British government would spend a large sum on a painting when such money could be put to better use. There seemed to be no personal motivation for the theft, only a desire to raise money for charity, but the police refused to negotiate with the ransomer and a merry dance ensued: part true-crime, part farce, all fascinating and set against the backdrop of Swinging Sixties London. With such a cinematic tale, you’d think that someone would make a movie out of it, or at least write a book. Turns out someone finally has. Meet Alan Hirsch, American lawyer and author, who has been fascinated with the case for years. (Full disclosure: as a specialist in art crime, I was asked to pen the introduction to this forthcoming book, "The Duke of Wellington, Kidnapped.") “I know ‘truth is stranger than fiction’ is a cliché,” Hirsch told me, “but if John Grisham wrote a novel based on this case, people would tell him he’d gone too far. The lead character, the plot, the outcome of the trial--I still can’t believe it and I’ve spent years poring over the documents and talking to people who were there.” This November marks the 50th anniversary of the trial of Kempton Bunton, a 252-pound Alfred Hitchcock look-alike who confessed to stealing the Goya and returning it in a suitably melodramatic manner. In March 1965, someone calling himself “Mister Bloxham” (an apparent reference to "The Importance of Being Earnest") dropped the painting off at the luggage check of a rail station. A few months later, Bunton dropped in on the police and calmly announced that “I am turning myself in for the Goya.” Bunton didn’t appear to be the sort of man to steal a famous painting, much less do so by shimmying through a small men’s room window. Though he looked a far cry from Cary Grant and Pierce Brosnan, our paradigm elegant art thieves, this flamboyant, lovable oddball—a retired cab driver and bookie who had several times been jailed for a weird form of conscientious objection (refusal to pay his BBC TV license)--starred in a courtroom drama that had a vein of comedy running through it. He was a working-class hero, claiming not even to have known who this “Wellington fellow” was in Goya’s painting, which he referred to as “Spanish firewood.” He’d swiped it to make a point--the elderly should not have to pay to watch television. Bunton’s foil was the judge, Carl Aarvold, who Hirsch introduces as “a former professional rugby player once oddly described by a journalist as ‘not only gracious in defeat but fluent in French, a rare combination.’” Aarvold made the odd judicial decision to instruct the jurors that they must acquit Bunton if they believed that he always intended to return the painting. “The judge was actually following the letter of Britain’s exceedingly odd larceny statute,” Hirsch says. “Bunton’s defense team wisely latched on to the wording of the law, which said you are guilty of theft only if you intend to ‘permanently deprive’ the owner of his possession. The problem for the defense was that while Bunton returned the painting, he did not return the frame. All of this tied the judge up in knots during his instruction to the jury.” Even so, the jury managed to follow his instructions--finding Bunton not guilty of stealing the painting, but guilty of stealing the frame. Judge Aarvold, for his part, is almost as quotable as Bunton (whose colorful unpublished memoirs Hirsch managed to get hold of, and quotes from liberally, to great effect). In his summing up, the judge said: “Motives, even if they are good, cannot justify theft, and creeping into public galleries in order to extract pictures of value so that you can use them for your own purposes has got to be discouraged.” He then sentenced Bunton to three months. There are a pair of punchlines to this oddball crime and trial. In 1968, as part of England’s new Theft Act, Parliament included a clause that made it illegal to “remove without authority any object displayed or kept for display to the public in a building to which the public have access,” thereby making Bunton’s “borrowing” of the Goya a criminal offense. Television licenses were eventually revoked for old age pensioners, satisfying, long after the fact, the unusual ransom demands of Kempton Bunton. Floating on his cloud up in Heaven, Bunton must be looking down upon us with a satisfied smile. For not only was his motive for the theft fulfilled (eventually), but for decades the police believed what he wanted them to: that he was, in fact, the thief. Turns out he may have been cleverer than everyone thought and taken the fall for someone else. How else to explain his size, the bathroom window, and his apparent lack of interest in the painting itself? “Was Bunton innocent?” Hirsch asks. “It sure looks like it. But just when I thought I had the crime solved and everything figured out. . . .” He pauses. “Can we leave it at that?”

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Published on November 14, 2015 11:00

3 simple words can help America put a stop to sexism in government

Meet the Internet’s newest social justice darling: Canadian prime minister Justin Trudeau. The newly-elected leader’s continues receiving praise for his first political move, because of how bold it is, even if it’s how government should always operate—with equal gender representation. When announcing the selection of his new cabinet, made up of 15 men and 15 women (a 50-50 split), one reporter asked Trudeau why he felt it was important to build his team with gender equity in mind. His short, sweet response urged everyone to get comfortable with a new reality: “Because, it’s 2015.” More from The Daily Dot: "Parisians use a hashtag to offer safe places to stay in wake of terror attack" Those three words took a life of their own on Twitter, where his quick, off-cuff response set off a number of inspired hashtags like #BecauseIts2015, affirming the need for governments to ensure that the people in power represent the population they’ve sworn to serve. The move was simple, but the impact was profound—and it sends a message to other countries, including the United States, about an easy way to address gender disparities in government, starting at the highest executive levels. It’s all about political will—and the decisive, affirmative action to make it happen. [embedtweet id="662075231612362752"] [embedtweet id="662266329727012864"] [embedtweet id="662038688319324160"] The U.S. could stand to learn a thing or two from Trudeau’s leadership, given presidents’ storied history with keeping the cabinet chocked full of men. Although President Obama’s administration is arguably the most diverse in American history, men still make up the wide majority of his cabinet. According toWhiteHouse.gov, Obama’s current 23-member cabinet (including members out of the presidential succession line, but who have cabinet-level rank) includes 16 men but only 7 women, who are outnumbered by about a 2-to-1 ratio. In contrast,women comprise a slight majority of the U.S. population, representing somewhere close to 51 percent of Americans. And in the prior administration, President George W. Bush’s cabinet looked even worse. Of the 21 cabinet and cabinet-level officials advising Bush on vital national interests, only five women—at most—served at the same time during his presidency. With an abysmal 4-to-1 ratio, women were even more outnumbered in the Executive Branch during the early 2000s. And as for Bill Clinton, during his time in office, he too only had (at most) five women working alongside each other—with men primarily running the show. This is why Trudeau’s move in Canada is a step in the right direction: It’s not only the right thing to do, it’s also not that hard. If the United States really wanted to follow suit, it easily could. But for the past 16 years, and then some, it’s chosen not to. More from The Daily Dot: "Paris attacks crash Periscope, test Twitter moments" There’s a reason for all the Internet’s excitement about Trudeau and his approach—so far—to being a world leader. Just because a politician enters the highest office in their land, it doesn’t mean they have to follow the established norms and practices of their predecessors, let alone replicate the institutional problems that make it hard to govern well. Even if previous administrations didn’t have gender equity in their cabinets or other appointed positions, change can happen when leaders accept their mandates from the people and approach their duties with a fearlessness that engenders good faith with the public. Far too often, voting constituents head to the ballot box either with good faith that their preferred candidate will bring the sea change they’ve longed for—or they despair exercising their civic duty because it’s a vote for just another cog in the machine. Even worse, constituents can get easily disillusioned when the “reform” candidate takes office, only to become the politician they promised they wouldn’t be. More from The Daily Dot: "Neil Gaiman reflects on 'Sandman' as he closes the loop on the beloved series" But Trudeau, in the early days of his time as Prime Minister, seems to be building that trust, and making decisions that move closer to creating equity and justice for women in Canada. Given that many of his contemporaries still struggle to achieve gender equity at the executive levels of government, his cabinet could serve as a global model for what politics and lawmaking can look like when the people in power reflect the people they serve. That’s why the Internet buzzes with excitement about Trudeau. Gender equity in his cabinet isn’t only good news for Canada—it’s a beacon of hope for the rest of the free world.

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Published on November 14, 2015 10:00

November 13, 2015

They’re mad for a reason: Campus activists are yelling because too many of us still won’t listen

I am not the first person to observe that the way mainstream America talks and thinks about its youth is disjointed, strange and rife with neurosis. But the conversation that kicked off last week in response to student protests at Yale University and the University of Missouri has placed the bizarre mix of envy and resentment with which so many regard college students in especially sharp relief. Thanks to that new clarity, two aspects of the “debate” over free speech and campus activism are now easier to recognize. First, that much of the conversation happening on the national level is, at least so far, not really about anything. It’s divorced from the specifics and context of the respective campuses, and, like so much online discourse, it’s little more than cultural signaling. (With the Op-Ed as the pundit equivalent of a peacock spreading his wings.) Second, that while there are people on every side of this issue — and there are more than two sides, here — who would benefit from talking less and listening more, the worst behavior, by far, is coming from the student protesters’ harshest critics. And I’m not just talking about the reactionaries at National Review, who are always eager to cosplay the 1968 Columbia University student uprisings. In fact, one of the most wrongheaded takes has come from the center-right. Let’s look at one example in particular, from the Atlantic’s Conor Friedersdorf. The essay has been widely shared and praised; yet its failures of both logic and empathy are glaring. Friedersdorf is appalled by the goings on at Yale, and he presents himself as a defender of what he imagines to be the Enlightenment tradition. But rather than expose those at Yale who have participated in and backed the protests as authoritarian prigs, Friedersdorf’s piece helps explain why students at Yale and Mizzou erupted to begin with. Friedersdorf’s argument is undoubtedly offered with sincerity. That said, his treatment of the students’ concerns is by turns obtuse and dismissive. And the piece is thus little more than a long attempt at special pleading for one Erika Christakis, who is an “associate master” at one of Yale’s dozen “residential communities,” and for one Nicholas Christakis, her husband, who is that same community’s “master” as well as a professor of sociology. (“Masters” are professors who live in these communities and are responsible for their social and intellectual health.) The reason Friedersdorf is talking about the Christakises in the first place is complicated. And to a significant degree, a point of contention is where, exactly, to place the start-point of the story; the students describe their uprising as something that was a long time in coming, while their critics prefer to begin the narrative in late October. The short version, though, is that after receiving an email from Yale’s Intercultural Affairs Committee (ICA), which asked students to be mindful that their Halloween costumes are not offensive, Erika Christakis sent one of her own. It was not entirely well-received. (You can read the emails here and here, via the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education, a “free speech” advocacy group headed by the civil liberties* activist Greg Lukianoff. Disclosure: I “debated” Lukianoff once on the radio. I did not find him remotely persuasive, but he seemed nice.) Friedersdorf immediately makes clear where his sympathies lie. First he describes advice along the lines offered by the ICA as “heavy-handed”; this, despite the fact that college kids dress in blackface or as racial stereotypes for Halloween so often that it’s become an annual viral tradition. Then, he attempts to link the ICA with the administrative inflation currently plaguing academia by remarking that “no fewer than 13 administrators took scarce time to compose, circulate and co-sign” the letter. More strikingly, Friedersdorf goes on to describe students’ concerns over offensive and alienating costumes as “misguided,” and argues that seeing the issue through a “social justice” lens is a “mistake.” Dismissing or diminishing concerns specific to those unfortunate enough to not have been born white and male is a time-honored practice of guys like Friedersdorf (and me), of course. Still, Friedersdorf’s hand-waving is unusually blatant. By this point, most white elites at least feign sympathy for those who don’t think their skin color should be a source for white kids’ amusement. It’s when Friedersdorf turns his attention to Erika Christakis’ letter, though, that things start to really get ugly. Again, you should read her email for yourself; but I can say that I found his description of it as “a model of relevant, thoughtful, civil engagement” to be obtuse in the extreme. Christakis’ email was surely not sent from a place of malice; but any real attempt to understand and appreciate the concerns of those who disagreed with her was similarly missing. And in the specific context of ICA’s missive, her implicit defense of some costumes as “subversive” — rather than, y’know, bigoted — is concerning. At one point, in fact, Christakis decides to use the ICA’s letter — which, remember, was nothing more than a reminder to students to appreciate the feelings of those in the community who come from minority backgrounds — as an excuse to wax philosophic about the mystery of subjectivity and the nature of youth. Assuming we can “agree on how to avoid offense,” she writes, “[i]s there no room anymore for a child or young person to be a little bit obnoxious… a little bit inappropriate or provocative or, yes, offensive?” (Won’t somebody please think of the children?) As a white person, and as a rule of thumb, I try not to treat discussions of racism and cultural appropriation as a springboard for the kind of musings that come to me post-bong rip. But my more substantial quibble with Christakis isn’t to do with her etiquette so much as her understanding of “offense.” Right before she expounds on letting kids be kids, she offers a brief aside about what it means to be offensive. And it’s telling. “I’ll note,” she writes, “that no one around campus seems overly concerned about the offense taken by religiously conservative folks to skin-revealing costumes.” If this is the portion of her letter that got students at Yale’s blood boiling, I could not blame them. She’s implying that the “offense” a conservative evangelical Christian might take to an exposed midriff is equivalent to the offense an African-American might take to a white woman putting on blackface, stuffing a pillow into her pants, and calling herself Nicki Minaj. But these offenses are not equivalent. And Christakis’ still needing that to be explained to her, in 2015, is proof that she has not been paying attention. Unfortunately, she is far from the only one with this blindspot. It seems to be, in fact, lodged quite firmly in Friedersdorf’s eyes, too. Take a look at what he writes in the beginning of his essay, for example, about diversity and discrimination on college campuses. He not only echoes Christakis’ conflation of social conservatism with race, but takes it a few steps further (emphasis mine):

Those who purport to speak for marginalized students at elite colleges sometimes expose serious shortcomings in the way that their black, brown, or Asian classmates are treated, and would expose flaws in the way that religious students and ideological conservatives are treated too if they cared to speak up for those groups. I’ve known many Californians who found it hard to adjust to life in the Ivy League, where a faction of highly privileged kids acculturated at elite prep schools still set the tone of a decidedly East Coast culture.

To his credit, Friedersdorft writes that “outsiders who also feel like racial or ethnic ‘others’ typically walk the roughest road of all.” (Out of generosity, let’s give him a pass for that “typically” hedge.) But it’s still remarkable — jaw-droppingly so, even — that he’s comfortable making a comparison between people of color and people who grew up on the West Coast. And it helps explain why students at Yale blew up the way they did. It wasn’t because they like to yell; it was because too many well-meaning people, like Christakis and Friedersdorf, still aren’t listening. *I originally described Lukianoff as a conservative, a description a FIRE employee has told me is incorrect. I apologize for the error.I am not the first person to observe that the way mainstream America talks and thinks about its youth is disjointed, strange and rife with neurosis. But the conversation that kicked off last week in response to student protests at Yale University and the University of Missouri has placed the bizarre mix of envy and resentment with which so many regard college students in especially sharp relief. Thanks to that new clarity, two aspects of the “debate” over free speech and campus activism are now easier to recognize. First, that much of the conversation happening on the national level is, at least so far, not really about anything. It’s divorced from the specifics and context of the respective campuses, and, like so much online discourse, it’s little more than cultural signaling. (With the Op-Ed as the pundit equivalent of a peacock spreading his wings.) Second, that while there are people on every side of this issue — and there are more than two sides, here — who would benefit from talking less and listening more, the worst behavior, by far, is coming from the student protesters’ harshest critics. And I’m not just talking about the reactionaries at National Review, who are always eager to cosplay the 1968 Columbia University student uprisings. In fact, one of the most wrongheaded takes has come from the center-right. Let’s look at one example in particular, from the Atlantic’s Conor Friedersdorf. The essay has been widely shared and praised; yet its failures of both logic and empathy are glaring. Friedersdorf is appalled by the goings on at Yale, and he presents himself as a defender of what he imagines to be the Enlightenment tradition. But rather than expose those at Yale who have participated in and backed the protests as authoritarian prigs, Friedersdorf’s piece helps explain why students at Yale and Mizzou erupted to begin with. Friedersdorf’s argument is undoubtedly offered with sincerity. That said, his treatment of the students’ concerns is by turns obtuse and dismissive. And the piece is thus little more than a long attempt at special pleading for one Erika Christakis, who is an “associate master” at one of Yale’s dozen “residential communities,” and for one Nicholas Christakis, her husband, who is that same community’s “master” as well as a professor of sociology. (“Masters” are professors who live in these communities and are responsible for their social and intellectual health.) The reason Friedersdorf is talking about the Christakises in the first place is complicated. And to a significant degree, a point of contention is where, exactly, to place the start-point of the story; the students describe their uprising as something that was a long time in coming, while their critics prefer to begin the narrative in late October. The short version, though, is that after receiving an email from Yale’s Intercultural Affairs Committee (ICA), which asked students to be mindful that their Halloween costumes are not offensive, Erika Christakis sent one of her own. It was not entirely well-received. (You can read the emails here and here, via the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education, a “free speech” advocacy group headed by the civil liberties* activist Greg Lukianoff. Disclosure: I “debated” Lukianoff once on the radio. I did not find him remotely persuasive, but he seemed nice.) Friedersdorf immediately makes clear where his sympathies lie. First he describes advice along the lines offered by the ICA as “heavy-handed”; this, despite the fact that college kids dress in blackface or as racial stereotypes for Halloween so often that it’s become an annual viral tradition. Then, he attempts to link the ICA with the administrative inflation currently plaguing academia by remarking that “no fewer than 13 administrators took scarce time to compose, circulate and co-sign” the letter. More strikingly, Friedersdorf goes on to describe students’ concerns over offensive and alienating costumes as “misguided,” and argues that seeing the issue through a “social justice” lens is a “mistake.” Dismissing or diminishing concerns specific to those unfortunate enough to not have been born white and male is a time-honored practice of guys like Friedersdorf (and me), of course. Still, Friedersdorf’s hand-waving is unusually blatant. By this point, most white elites at least feign sympathy for those who don’t think their skin color should be a source for white kids’ amusement. It’s when Friedersdorf turns his attention to Erika Christakis’ letter, though, that things start to really get ugly. Again, you should read her email for yourself; but I can say that I found his description of it as “a model of relevant, thoughtful, civil engagement” to be obtuse in the extreme. Christakis’ email was surely not sent from a place of malice; but any real attempt to understand and appreciate the concerns of those who disagreed with her was similarly missing. And in the specific context of ICA’s missive, her implicit defense of some costumes as “subversive” — rather than, y’know, bigoted — is concerning. At one point, in fact, Christakis decides to use the ICA’s letter — which, remember, was nothing more than a reminder to students to appreciate the feelings of those in the community who come from minority backgrounds — as an excuse to wax philosophic about the mystery of subjectivity and the nature of youth. Assuming we can “agree on how to avoid offense,” she writes, “[i]s there no room anymore for a child or young person to be a little bit obnoxious… a little bit inappropriate or provocative or, yes, offensive?” (Won’t somebody please think of the children?) As a white person, and as a rule of thumb, I try not to treat discussions of racism and cultural appropriation as a springboard for the kind of musings that come to me post-bong rip. But my more substantial quibble with Christakis isn’t to do with her etiquette so much as her understanding of “offense.” Right before she expounds on letting kids be kids, she offers a brief aside about what it means to be offensive. And it’s telling. “I’ll note,” she writes, “that no one around campus seems overly concerned about the offense taken by religiously conservative folks to skin-revealing costumes.” If this is the portion of her letter that got students at Yale’s blood boiling, I could not blame them. She’s implying that the “offense” a conservative evangelical Christian might take to an exposed midriff is equivalent to the offense an African-American might take to a white woman putting on blackface, stuffing a pillow into her pants, and calling herself Nicki Minaj. But these offenses are not equivalent. And Christakis’ still needing that to be explained to her, in 2015, is proof that she has not been paying attention. Unfortunately, she is far from the only one with this blindspot. It seems to be, in fact, lodged quite firmly in Friedersdorf’s eyes, too. Take a look at what he writes in the beginning of his essay, for example, about diversity and discrimination on college campuses. He not only echoes Christakis’ conflation of social conservatism with race, but takes it a few steps further (emphasis mine):

Those who purport to speak for marginalized students at elite colleges sometimes expose serious shortcomings in the way that their black, brown, or Asian classmates are treated, and would expose flaws in the way that religious students and ideological conservatives are treated too if they cared to speak up for those groups. I’ve known many Californians who found it hard to adjust to life in the Ivy League, where a faction of highly privileged kids acculturated at elite prep schools still set the tone of a decidedly East Coast culture.

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Published on November 13, 2015 15:28

The latest from Paris: At least 35 reported dead, dozens more being held hostage

PARIS (AP) — At least 35 people were killed Friday in shootings and explosions around Paris, many of them in a popular concert hall where patrons were taken hostage, police and medical officials said. The series of attacks gripped the city in fear and recalled the horrors of the Charlie Hebdo carnage just 10 months ago. A police official said 11 people were killed in a Paris restaurant in the 10th arrondissement, and others said at least twice that number died elsewhere, primarily in the Bataclan concert hall, where the hostages were taken. It was unclear how many people were in the hall; one official said there were around 100, while another said there were far fewer. The officials spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to be publicly named in the quickly moving investigation. There was no immediate claim of responsibility for the series of attacks. Also late Friday, two explosions were heard outside the Stade de France stadium north of Paris during a France-Germany friendly football match. A police official confirmed one explosion in a bar near the stadium. It was not known if there were casualties. An Associated Press reporter in the stadium Friday night heard two explosions loud enough to penetrate the sounds of cheering fans. Sirens were immediately heard, and a helicopter was circling overhead. French President Francois Hollande, who was in the stadium, was evacuated and immediately held an emergency meeting. The attack comes as France has heightened security measures ahead of a major global climate conference that starts in two weeks, out of fear of violent protests and potential terrorist attacks. Emilioi Macchio, from Ravenna, Italy, was at the Carillon bar near the restaurant that was targeted, having a beer on the sidewalk, when the shooting started. He said he didn't see any gunmen or victims, but hid behind a corner, then ran away. "It sounded like fireworks," he said. France has been on edge since deadly attacks by Islamic extremists in January on satirical newspaper Charlie Hebdo and a kosher grocery that left 20 dead, including the three attackers. The restaurant targeted Friday, Le Carillon, is in the same general neighborhood as the Charlie Hebdo offices, as is the Bataclan, among the best-known venues in eastern Paris, near the trendy Oberkampf area known for a vibrant nightlife. The band Eagles of Death Metal was scheduled to play there Friday night. The country remains on edge after January attacks on satirical newspaper Charlie Hebdo, which had caricatured the Prophet Muhammad, and a kosher grocery. The Charlie Hebdo attackers claimed links to extremists in Yemen, while the kosher market attacker claimed ties to the Islamic State group. The country has seen several smaller-scale attacks or attempts since, including an incident on a high-speed train in August in which American travelers thwarted an attempted attack by a heavily armed man. France's military is bombing Islamic State targets in Syria and Iraq and fighting extremists in Africa, and extremist groups have frequently threatened France in the past. French authorities are particularly concerned about the threat from hundreds of French Islamic radicals who have travelled to Syria and returned home with skills to stage violence.

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Published on November 13, 2015 15:10

“This is truly horrific”: GOP, Democratic presidential campaign tweet support, concern for Paris

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Published on November 13, 2015 15:05

Violence rocks Paris: At least 26 killed, hostage crisis currently unfolding

PARIS (AP) — Two police officials said at least 26 people have been killed in shootings and explosions around Paris Friday, in the deadliest violence in France in decades. A police official said 11 people were killed in a Paris restaurant in the 10th arrondissement, and about 15 killed in the Bataclan theater, where a hostage-taking is under way. Both officials spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to be publicly named according to police policy. Also late Friday, two explosions were heard outside the Stade de France stadium north of Paris during a France-Germany friendly football match. It is unclear if the explosions were linked to the other events. A police official confirmed one explosion in a bar near the stadium. It is unclear whether there are casualties. An Associated Press reporter in the stadium Friday night heard two explosions loud enough to penetrate the sounds of cheering fans. Sirens were immediately heard, and a helicopter was circling overhead. The officials spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to be publicly named. The attack comes as France has heightened security measures ahead of a major global climate conference that starts in two weeks, out of fear of violent protests and potential terrorist attacks. Emilioi Macchio, from Ravenna, Italy, was at the Carillon bar near the restaurant that was targeted, having a beer on the sidewalk when the shooting started. He said he didn't see any gunmen or victims, but hid behind a corner then ran away. "It sounded like fireworks," he said. France has been on edge since deadly attacks by Islamic extremists in January on satirical newspaper Charlie Hebdo and a kosher grocery that left 20 dead, including the three attackers. The restaurant targeted Friday, Le Carillon, is in the same general neighborhood as the Charlie Hebdo offices. The country has seen several smaller-scale attacks or attempts since, including an incident on a high-speed train in August in which American travelers thwarted a heavily armed Islamic radical trying to attack passengers.

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Published on November 13, 2015 14:26

Fox News rips into Jennifer Lawrence over Kim Davis and GOP criticism: “She has the right to sound like an idiot”

In response to Jennifer Lawrence's interview with Vogue -- wherein she calls Kim Davis "a lady who makes me embarrassed to be from Kentucky" -- Fox News host Andrea Tantaros voiced her objection. "I'm embarrassed for Jennifer Lawrence," Tantaros told her "Outnumbered" co-hosts. "I'm embarrassed to be a woman." To be fair, Tantaros's views on feminism are especially forward-thinking. For instance, she fully supports J-Law's "right to sound like an idiot." Watch Fox News's head explode below: (h/t Media Matters)