Table of Contents Letter from the Editor………………………………………….3 Letters to the Editor…………………………………………....5 Briefing…………………………………………………………..6 Politics Article: 21st Century Presidents………..……………8 World Article: “The China Decade”.......................................9 Society Article: “How to Make Schools Better for Kids”........11 Economy Article: “The Agency That’s Got Your Back”........13 Feature Article: “What’s it Like Being a Cop Now”..............15 Entertainment Article: “The Man Who Would Be Jobs”......19 Sports Article: “Danger Game”............................................20 9 Questions…………………………………………………….22 Bibliography…………………………………………………….23
Letters to the Editor Repeal Prohibition, Again By the Editorial Board It took 13 years for the United States to come to its senses and end Prohibition, 13 years in which people kept drinking, otherwise law-abiding citizens became criminals and crime syndicates arose and flourished. It has been more than 40 years since Congress passed the current ban on marijuana, inflicting great harm on society just to prohibit a substance far less dangerous than alcohol. The federal government should repeal the ban on marijuana. There are no perfect answers to people’s legitimate concerns about marijuana use. But neither are there such answers about tobacco or alcohol, and we believe that on every level - health effects, the impact on society and law-and-order issues - the balance falls squarely on the side of national legalization. That will put decisions on whether to allow recreational or medicinal production and use where it belongs - at the state level. There is honest debate among scientists about the health effects of marijuana, but we believe that the evidence is overwhelming that addiction and dependence are relatively minor problems, especially compared with alcohol and tobacco. Moderate use of marijuana does not appear to pose a risk for otherwise healthy adults. Claims that marijuana is a gateway to more dangerous drugs are as fanciful as the “Reefer Madness” images of murder, rape and suicide. We recognize that this congress is as unlikely to take action on marijuana as it has been on other big issues. But it is long past time to repeal this version of Prohibition. -----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------The Junk “Science” Behind the Marijuana Legalization Movement By Joseph Perrone Already, 23 states allow marijuana to be prescribed for medicinal use, making it easy for proponents for broader legalization, such as the Marijuana Policy Project, to brand the drug as “harmless,” Some go further, calling it “safe” and even “healthy,” The result is that voters in Oregon and Alaska 0 in addition to D. C.-may soon join Colorado and Washington as the first states to fully legalize recreational pot for adults. The problem is that marijuana is no, in fact, “harmless,.” Proponents are spinning the science-casting pot as a threat only if used improperly, much like a car- for the sake of advancing their political agenda. It’s fine for people to believe the government has no business conducting a “war on drugs,” but it’s something else entirely to trivialize or simply deny marijuana’s harmful effects. These dangers are real, according to a recently released comprehensive review of 20 years of scientific literature from Wayne Hall, who advises the World Health Organization on addiction and runs the University of Queensland’s Center for Youth Substance Abuse Research. And the dangers need to be dealt with. As more states move to legalize marijuana, polls indicate that Americans are growing much more accepting of marijuana use. But the growing acceptance and availability of pot, along with the misleading advertisements spread by legalization proponents, are spreading the dangerous myth that marijuana is risk-free. There are compelling reasons to change our policy toward marijuana- notably, cutting down on incarceration rates for possession. But simply ignoring science on the negative effects of chronic (no pun intended) marijuana use does a disservice to the dialogue around marijuana.
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21st Century Presidents
Barack Obama Democrat 44th President 2009-
George W. Bush Republican 43rd President 2001-2009 George W. Bush was born in Connecticut and grew up in Texas. He has degrees from Yale and Harvard and returned to Texas where he was in the oil business and started his family. He then became governor of Texas before he ran for president. As president, he had several noteworthy aspects of his time in office. The September 11, 2001 attacks turned him into a wartime president. He created a new cabinet-level department of Homeland Security. He also sent US troops into Afghanistan to break up the Taliban. Under his presidency, he was able to deliver tax cuts. One of the more controversial decisions of his time at the White House was the invasion of Iraq.
Barack Obama was born in Hawaii with his father from Kenya and his mother from Kansas. His story is that of the “American Story�; he had a middle class upbringing with values in strong families, hard work, and education. He worked his way through college with student loans and scholarships and also attended law school. He spent a lot of his time in public service. He became a US senator for Illinois in 2004 , and was elected as the first African-American President of the United States in 2009. During his first term, President Obama was able to work with Congress to improve the U.S. economy, pass health-care reform, and withdraw U.S. troops from Iraq. However, he spent significant time and political effort negotiating, often unsuccessfully, with Congressional Republicans about taxes, budgets, and the deficit. After winning reelection in 2012, Obama began his second term focused on immigration reform and gun control. Other highlights of his time in office include the following notes. He traveled abroad more in his first year as president than any other previous US president. On May 1, 2011, he announced that Osama bin Laden had been killed.
The China Decade By Ian Bremmer
It's been a rough summer for Beijing. But China is still poised to dominate—at least in the short term The Aug. 12 explosion at a chemical warehouse in the eastern Chinese city of Tianjin could have happened almost anywhere, but it symbolized the way many outsiders see China: as a country where dark forces might one day ignite a sudden conflagration inflicting massive damage—for reasons that are murky. News from China has provoked jitters all summer. The country's benchmark Shanghai Composite shook global markets in June and July with a fall of more than 30% in less than a month, stemmed only by direct and indirect government intervention. A stream of weak economic data and the recent shock devaluation of the Chinese renminbi stoked concerns that China's naturally slowing economy—both GDP growth and exports have fallen— may be weakening much faster than expected. These are worrying signs in a country where lost jobs translate into street protests, creating uncertainty in an economy that is now crucial for global growth and stability. (A total of 38% of global growth last year came from China, up from 23% in 2010.) The country's leaders know that the drive to shift China's economy from a heavy reliance on exports toward greater domestic consumption will inevitably slow growth from double digits to a more sustainable level, but this complex, high-stakes economic reform process isn't progressing as smoothly as they hoped. This summer's turmoil underlines challenges that leave China's long-term strength very much in question. Yet China isn't headed for serious trouble anytime soon. Its leaders have the cash and the policy tools—tools not available to most developed countries—needed to stabilize China's markets and stimulate its economy. Beijing will use them if it has to. Though China has major demographic problems on the horizon and environmental threats that are worsening by the day, its global economic and political clout is still on the rise. In fact, we are already well into what might be called the "China decade," the period when the country's fast-expanding global influence pushes it across an important threshold and becomes impossible to ignore—before those long-term problems finally take their toll. The U.S. has been the world's leading economic power since 1872. But it's a question of when, not if, China will overtake the U.S. to become the world's largest economy. When adjusted to account for differing exchange rates, in a measure called purchasing power parity, China's GDP became No. 1 last year. With the U.S. still sluggish, Europe stuck in the mud and many emerging markets struggling, the global economy will depend on China to propel it forward for at least the next few years. Even as its growth slows to a more sustainable pace of around 7% this year, China, a voracious consumer of oil, gas, metals and minerals, will benefit significantly from lower commodity prices. Global crude prices are half what they were a year ago, and slower demand in China, tepid growth in Europe, resilient supply from North America and increased production in Iraq and Iran (as sanctions are lifted) will likely keep oil cheap for the next few years. Another parachute: China holds about $4 trillion in foreign currency reserves, more than twice as much as the No. 2 holder, Japan. That's a sizable rainy-day fund to tap should the economy need emergency stimulus.
How to Make Schools Better for Kids By Alexandra Sifferlin It's a tough time to be a kid in America: playtimes are getting shorter, piles of homework are getting taller, obesity rates are sky-high and there's not enough time to sleep well (at least for middle and high schoolers). In the past, policymakers, medical professionals and federal officials have tried to fix these issues by educating parents on the importance of healthy eating and encouraging them to set limits on screen time. But experts are increasingly looking to effect policy changes in the places kids spend the bulk of their waking hours: schools. In recent years, U.S. schools have started to experiment with a variety of reforms designed to make students happier, healthier and better prepared to live and eventually work with people of all backgrounds. Of course, realizing these goals is by no means easy, especially amid widespread budget cuts. (Most public schools are getting less state funding than they were before the recession.) And even though debates over issues like teachers' unions and Common Core are sure to get more attention as the 2016 election nears, some innovators are making headway with fresh ideas that are starting to stick—and may even scale—in American classrooms. Design cafeterias that encourage healthy eating Many U.S. schools now offer healthy food options, but getting kids to bite is tough; students who buy school lunches opt for fruits or veggies only about half the time, and even fewer actually eat them, according to findings from the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. In an effort to curb that trend, Buckingham County K-5 public school in Dillwyn, Va., redesigned its kitchen (left) so kids can see fresh foods as they are being prepared. The school also encourages kids to grow produce in the school garden. "We wanted to reimagine the school as a platform for delivering wellness," says Dr. Matthew Trowbridge, who helped develop the project. Early data shows students are actively using the new features, even without prompting. Ditch traditional homework Homework is crucial to the kind of learning done at the middle-and high school level, but new research suggests that elementary students do not tangibly benefit from doing after-school work with their parents. With that in mind, several schools, like Gaithersburg Elementary in Maryland, have ditched it for a simpler task: read whatever you want for 30 minutes a night. Although it's too early to judge the results, principal Stephanie Brant says students seem to be much more engaged in class since Gaithersburg started the program in 2011, adding that many are performing "at higher levels" than students in years past who did traditional homework. Make recess mandatory At a time when adolescent obesity rates are quadruple what they were 30 years ago, experts say it's time to start thinking about recess not as a break but instead as a rare opportunity for kids to move around, which is good for body and mind. During seven-hour school days, physical activity helps kids "recharge their brains," says Avery Faigenbaum, who teaches pediatric exercise science at The College of New Jersey. And yet, in the past few years, some 40% of U.S. school districts have reduced or eliminated recess to make time for more academics and test preparation. One workaround: incorporating fitness into everyday classroom lessons, as some Bronx schools are doing. Screen kids for mental illness Most elementary-school students are routinely screened for vision and hearing, but there's no protocol for detecting psychological issues. That means kids with conditions like anxiety and depression can go undiagnosed for years, delaying treatment and exacerbating symptoms. Boston's public-school system is trying to prevent that. Twice a year, students are evaluated on social, emotional and behavioral functioning; those in need get in-school resources like psychologists as well as referrals for outside care. "We really want to make a difference," says Andria Amador, who helped launch the program in the 2012—13 school year.
Prioritize diversity For minorities and white students alike, studies show that attending a diverse school can lead to higher academic achievement and better preparation for real-world work environments. And yet a series of Supreme Court decisions has allowed most integration plans to dissolve, leaving schools across the U.S. more segregated than they were in 1968. Several states are trying to reverse that trend. Connecticut is beginning to make progress through a network of magnet schools that attractkids of different backgrounds. For the 2012—13 school year, its classes were 30.2% white, 31.4% black, 30.5% Latino and 4.4% Asian—well above the national average for diversity. Turn discipline into dialogue Punishments like detention or getting sent to the principal's office remove problematic kids instead of addressing what made them misbehave in the first place. Not so at Durham Community School in Maine, where teachers emphasize dialogue as discipline. If a kid jumps around during class, for example, the instructor will ask him to offer up his own idea on how to correct his disruption (standing for 10 minutes during a lesson, perhaps). This approach, developed by psychologist Ross Greene, was implemented in 2011. During the 2012—13 school year, there were just eight recorded instances of classroom disruption, down from 103 during theschool year when the program started. Let students customize their curriculums Kids have always learned best when they get personal attention. Now more than ever, that attention is coming in part from computers—and often to great effect. One leading tool (with more than 10 million users) is Knewton, a virtual platform that adapts to a student's needs in real time. If he is struggling with a math concept, for example, Knewton will recommend a set of problems to help him understand it, based specifically on his learning strengths. The goal for K-12 schools is to replicate the success Knewton has had in higher education, where its products have led to better pass rates. Start classes after 8:30 a.m. In order to stay healthy, adolescents need at least eight hours of sleep each night; deprivation can lead to weight gain, focus issues, lower academic performance and other problems. But biologically, adolescents are hardwired to stay up late, often until 11 p.m. or midnight. That's why federal officials and medical experts are calling for middle and high schools to start later—at or after 8:30 a.m. (Right now, fewer than 1 in 5 do.) On that schedule, 60% of students will get at least eight hours of sleep, according to findings from the University of Minnesota. That's a significant improvement over most of their peers.
The Agency That’s Got Your Back By Massimo Calabresi
A little-known government watchdog is striking fear into the lending industry The first time Deborah Jacobs heard about the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, it struck her as a terrible idea. It was 2010, and Jacobs, a 65-year-old retired teacher, was one year into the mortgage on her new house in Brooklyn, Mich. Watching the news one evening, she saw a Harvard academic named Elizabeth Warren talking about the need for a new federal agency to protect consumers from deceptive and predatory lending. Jacobs, who describes herself as "definitely a Republican," remembers thinking, Well, that's a waste of taxpayer dollars. Four years later, Jacobs was in a bind. Her daughter and grandkids had moved into her home, and the costs of supporting the expanded household caused her to fall behind on the mortgage payments. With interest rates low, Jacobs calculated that she could modify her mortgage and keep her home. Her Michigan-based bank, Flagstar, approved the modification, but when the documents for the deal arrived in the mail, they included a surprise: a "closing fee" of $11,599.32. The more Jacobs tried to find out what the fee was for, the less clarity she got from Flagstar. At her wit's end, Jacobs sent out a barrage of complaints—to the Michigan attorney general, to Flagstar's federal regulators at the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency in Washington and, finally, to the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB). "I'm at a loss and do not know what else to do," Jacobs wrote them. "If I had $11,599.32 in the bank, I wouldn't be behind on my mortgage." As it happened, Jacobs had stumbled on the most powerful new tool in government: the CFPB's consumer-complaint service. Imagine a site like Yelp, if Yelp could respond to negative reviews with federal investigations and hundreds of millions of dollars in fines and could fund itself from the bottomless coffers of the Federal Reserve. The day after Jacobs filed her complaint on the CFPB's website, the agency emailed her to say it was looking into her case. Four days after that, she received an overnight FedEx package from Flagstar with a new set of papers for her modification—minus the $11,599.32 fee. The consumer-complaint service is an ideal place to start understanding how in four short years the CFPB has become one of the most effective and feared regulators in Washington. Since opening its doors in July 2011, the bureau has received more than 650,000 complaints about lenders. And the pace is accelerating: it now receives as many as 27,000 complaints a month. What's more, the CFPB publishes the details of the complaints on its website, complete with banks' names and whether they responded promptly; the bureau is literally shaming banks into compliance. Just as important, the CFPB has used the data it has collected to launch investigations, guide its oversight of banks and publicly chart lending trends that it deems unfriendly to consumers. Lawyers and consultants for the banks now advise their clients that the once quaint phenomenon of customer indignation suddenly poses a threat to their business. "The financial institutions understand there's somebody looking over their shoulder now. There's a cop on the beat," says Sheila Bair, former chair of the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation. And banks are just the beginning for the CFPB. Less than a decade after Warren first proposed the agency, it is clear why opponents tried so hard to prevent it from becoming reality. Just as lending has expanded into every corner of the economy, with credit available for anything from fishing boats to orthodonture, the CFPB has pushed the limits of the broad powers Congress gave it under the 2010 DoddFrank financial-reform package, finding targets anywhere anyone is charging interest. In the past year alone, CFPB has taken on furniture retailers, cellular-network companies and auto-loan providers. To date, it has issued hundreds of millions of dollars in penalties and generated more than $11 billion in relief for 25 million consumers. That's the sort of record that attracts allies—and enemies. The rise of a credible cop in the marketplace—something Washington has never been very good at creating in the name of consumer protection—has neither surprised nor pleased the banks it now oversees. Financial institutions big and small use rhetoric to describe the agency that is drawn from the bad old days of secret files and illegal wiretaps. "CFPB is the most powerful agency we have seen in Washington since J. Edgar Hoover ran the FBI," says Richard Hunt of the Consumer Bankers Association, an industry lobbying group.
What’s it Like Being a Cop Now By Karl Vick 'Every time a police officer fires his weapon, the reputation of the police department is on the line.' —Captain Joe Bologna, Philadelphia Police District 19 Trevor Peszko wears the uniform of a Philadelphia cop with the same earnestness that made him a success in his first career, as a corporate trainer for Chuck E. Cheese's. "They flew me to Vegas to dress up as the mascot for their GM convention," he says. "That was my first time in Vegas. I was 19." And at 31, he's back in the city where he grew up, walking slowly toward the driver's-side window of a car that has just run a red light in a high-crime patch of town. Peszko is white. The driver is black. And as if the neighborhood does not look sufficiently desolate already, flies buzz around a rat dead on the pavement between them. Peszko walks past it and, when he reaches the rear of the car, pauses briefly to press his fingertips on the trunk. It's a routine move intended to address hazards that predate all recent controversies attending police work. The touch assures that, first, the trunk is indeed latched and will not, in some dramatic motion perhaps not seen outside of Hollywood, spring open to allow a hidden gunman to spray the officer with bullets. It also assures that in the somewhat less remote chance that the driver opens fire and takes off, he flees with his victim's fingerprints on the car. But when Peszko reaches the driver's window and peers down, the only thing pointing at him is a cell phone. It's propped on the speedometer ledge with its lens turned outward, recording everything he does and says, which turns out to be: "Just be straight with me: I know you're late for work." And "Next time it might be a ticket." Wherever a cop shows up today, so do people with cell-phone cameras. They hold them out from their bodies, like shields, and up in the faces of the officers, like taunts. "They got a cell-phone 'gun,'" says Anthony Jones, who like Peszko patrols some of the city's roughest neighborhoods. The phones have become so common in the crowds that are increasingly thronging arrests that the department circulated a flyer showing a "gun" with the barrel opened to hold an iPhone. It went out at roll call, along with the usual "Be careful out there," in the hope that Philadelphia might avoid joining a list that much of the country can now recite from memory: Ferguson, North Charleston and, sadly, onward. "Nowadays we're in a culture where everything's against the police, at least in the areas I patrol," says officer Ernie Williams. "Social media, news outlets, they're really coming down on police. And we still gotta come to work. I pray nobody's going to get shot or hurt, but the reality is, somebody probably is. We still have a job to do. And at times it can be a very difficult job." Now would be one of those times. There are some 680,000 sworn police officers in the U.S., and in the past 12 months, every one of them has had to answer, in one way or another, for the actions of colleagues they will never meet except on the screens running the latest viral police incident. "There's times," says Sergeant Francis Kelly, "when you get resistance because of what happens in some other part of the country." For most cops, the scrutiny is not debilitating. It is not even new. In many ways it is merely an intensification of what police have always encountered: the public's wary attention. Whether wrestling a suspect to the ground or buying a coffee at 7-Eleven, they are instantly the center of attention. The watchmen are used to being watched. What's changed is something else: the assumption of who is good and who is bad. In a Gallup survey in June, just 52% of Americans expressed confidence in the police, down 4 points from a year earlier and tying the lowest level since 1993. The atmosphere then was defined by the beating of Rodney King, recorded by a man on the balcony of his Los Angeles apartment with a Sony Handycam. Cops have always been tribal, keeping to their own in the weary belief that what they do is work only another cop could understand. Now everyone is an expert, and the zeal of bystanders "with their cameras out, 'waiting for something to happen,'" as one Philadelphia officer puts it, has altered the fraught dynamic between the arrested and the arresting.
What's it like to be a cop in America today? To find out, TIME spent weeks with the police force that calls itself the nation's oldest— Philadelphia's was founded in 1797. It's a relatively diverse force—57% white compared with a national average of 80%—charged with keeping the peace in a particularly violent city. The city's 248 homicides in 2014 were three-quarters of the 328 in New York City, which is five times larger. Police commissioner Charles Ramsey, who like the mayor is African American, readily acknowledges that America's cops are facing a crisis. But what does that mean day to day, more than a year after the killing in Ferguson altered the way many Americans think about police? The answer emerged in ride-alongs, station-house chats and sit-down interviews summed up in the words of one officer: "Everything is just harder." Confrontations are more numerous, and when the blood is up, so is the risk of the very thing everyone is trying to avoid—in the tattered, volatile neighborhoods to which the rest of the world until recently paid as little attention as possible. Captain Joe Bologna calls West Philadelphia's Police District 19 "a microcosm of the city," and he presides over it like a mayor. It contains only 90,000 of Philadelphia's 1.6 million residents and 6.4 of its 142 sq. mi., but the 19th extends from some of the most expensive homes in the city—the mayor, district attorney and a Congressman reside in the lush greenery of the north—to hardcore urban neighborhoods in the south, where the precinct house stands next door to Mr. C's Love Lounge. "Million-dollar homes and million-dollar bails," as Peszko says. "We got it all." It's a busy place. On a typical day, an eight-hour shift will answer 80 calls from 911 and stop 15 or 20 cars. Each encounter carries the potential to make national news, although most are more likely to produce insult than injury. That was the case inside a squad car on a Friday afternoon in mid-July, racing with siren and lights on toward a middle-class neighborhood where a knife fight has been reported in the road. The officers arrive to find nothing wrong, only a child and a bearded middle-aged man, who frowns. "We don't pay attention to that," he says. "Happens all the time. O.K.? So long." The officers do a U-turn and bolt north to a driving range where two golfers, one black and one white, are fighting over, yes, a patch of shade. "White privilege stops here, mister," says the black golfer, who has dialed 911. The white golfer has a bloody nick on his knuckle and a wreath of dried spittle around his mouth. Neither man wants to press charges, and the officers steer back to the 19th's southern section, where patrols spend most of their time, a dreary grid of broken roads, streetcar tracks and the corner takeouts known as Chinese stores. It is a rough neighborhood made just a bit rougher by a rich local tradition of cussing the police. "F-ck the law," a woman says, glaring into the open window of a cruiser easing past a corner. "That's the public, right there!" chirps officer Damon Linder, smiling behind the wheel. The cops are so accustomed to the guff that when some 19th District veterans visit neighborhoods like South Philly, where people wave at cops, they feel disoriented. A truly exceptional event like the deadly May 12 Amtrak derailment on the city's northeast side, which brought residents and first responders together in an almost transcendent sense of community, has as the weeks passed assumed the quality of a dream: Did that really happen? "I grew up in North Philly. Even up there they wouldn't yell at you when you drive by," says Ron Burgess, Linder's partner for the night. "It's been going on a long time, but it's definitely getting worse." A moment later, an "officer needs assistance" call crackles on the radio, and Linder floors the cruiser, a Chevy Tahoe, and hits the siren. At each intersection he eases off until Burgess says, "Good, right," indicating clear passage from his side. Year after year, roughly as many U.S. cops die in traffic accidents—49 last year—as in shootings (50), a toll that would likely be reduced by the use of seat belts, which police famously do not use. Officers say that's because a seat belt can snag on their thick police belts, and though it might require only a second to take off, what quickly becomes clear as the cruiser pulls up to the scene is how much a second can matter. We arrive to see a pair of stockinged feet being pushed into the backseat of another Tahoe, the socks dangling from toes an officer is quickly feeling between. A few moments earlier, the suspect had been behind the wheel of a silver Pontiac now askew in the road. Tucked between the driver's seat and center console is a .45-caliber pistol, grip and trigger fully accessible for a quick draw. The car was registered to a different man wanted in a shooting, and when the trailing squad car hit his lights, the driver chose to leave the gun behind. The officer tackled him as he climbed out of the car. It is difficult to exaggerate the prevalence of guns in the Philadelphia streets and the level of hazard that embeds in a cop's workday. Bullets fly so often in the district that at the scene of a shooting on North Allison Street—a young man shot in the hip and cursing the police who had rushed to help save him—I noticed a glint of something on the street outside the house where it had happened. It turned out to be a slug, the lead crumpled from impact. "I think that's an old one," said Jones, who had already spotted the bullet. "Looks like it's been there a while." There's so much lead in the air, Burgess a few months earlier witnessed a murder without realizing it: three muzzle flashes, one of which killed a man on Master Street. His own brush with death also caught him by surprise. In March 2013, while wrestling a suspected robber to the ground, Burgess learned the man was carrying a pistol only when it was fired four times beside his face, blowing out his eardrum. He rolled away, drew his own weapon and fatally shot the man who had been shouting, "I'm gonna die! We're gonna die!" Burgess says the man turned out to be "wet," meaning he was on the animal tranquilizer PCP, still common in these parts.
"Once you do something like that, you feel like you've done something wrong, even though you didn't," Burgess says. "I had to reflect on that for a time. It's not routine at all." Not at the human level, perhaps, but Philadelphia cops shot and killed 15 people in 2012—a particularly striking number since violent crime was in sharp decline citywide, as the news site Philly.com pointed out. Ramsey asked the Justice Department to investigate. That decision helped put Philadelphia ahead of the curve on the national debate over police abuse, a new experience for a department still defined in much of the public memory by the 1985 police firebombing of the militant group Move, which killed 11 people and destroyed 65 homes. Ramsey has embraced many of the Justice Department's recommendations, and last year the number of people killed by Philadelphia police dropped to four. He is banking on education to reduce it further. Beginning this fall, new cops will be trained to identify their own biases and spend a week at the city's National Constitution Center learning about the history of policing in America. It has plenty of dark chapters. "If you were in the South, you might have been tracking down slaves," Ramsey says. "Who enforced Jim Crow laws? Police. So just as our democracy has evolved, so have we. But what about those people who were on the other side of that? That baggage is still there. It ain't gone away. So why is there more tension in one community vs. another community? A lot of it has to do with the history of policing. Now I'm not saying you spend your life looking in the rearview mirror, but I am saying you can't move forward until you understand where you've been." Police see the viral videos just like everyone else but sometimes watch them differently. Some, like the shootings in North Charleston and Cincinnati, are not open to interpretation. But others show behavior that may look bad to the layperson but that police recognize as ambiguous. Watching the dash-cam footage of the Sandra Bland arrest, Sergeant Mariana Caprara wanted more information before condemning the Texas state trooper who appears to be escalating the situation out of spite. "We can't see inside the car," she said. "She could be reaching into her purse." But for cops, the main beef with the videos that make the rounds on social media, collecting outrage, is that they begin long after the police have arrived at the scene. Viewers see the tussle around the arrest but almost never what the cops see: the behavior that summoned them to the scene in the first place and whattranspired in the minutes before the crowds gathered and the cell phones came out. A few years ago—until Ramsey ordered them to stop, on First Amendment grounds—that feeling of injustice had Philly cops confiscating phones. Now it sharpens the appetite among police for cameras of their own, the "body cams" that departments around the country are using or considering. "When we get a body cam, everything will be changed up," says Jones. "When we do a traffic stop, we have to inform the driver immediately that the camera is on. That's why I'm all for it." So is Ramsey, though he warns against rushing. Serving as co-chair of President Obama's task force on policing gave him a clear view of the trap doors of privacy, expense, technology and, not least, storage that come along with cameras, all of which are better sorted through by departments now rather than in court challenges later. It also left him almost strikingly optimistic about where all this is headed. "Oh, it's gonna be good," Ramsey says. "Listen, it's a crisis. But as they say, never waste a good crisis. Because it's in crisis that you can implement the kind of change that you need. You wish you didn't have to go through it, but we'll come out better tuned to the community as a result." It's all part of the imperative—transparency, show your work—that the Internet has enforced in so many other realms and which comes now to law enforcement. "A lot of times the cameras on us are not a bad thing," says Brian Dillard, who grew up in the 19th and remembers that cops used to follow up a warning with a beating. "A lot of cops had to know it is not the old days," says his partner, Robert Saccone. "Time was, if you ran, you paid the running fee," meaning the punches dispensed to a fleeing suspect once caught.
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The Man Who Would be Jobs By Lev Grossman
One of the challenges that Michael Fassbender faced in playing Steve Jobs is that he doesn't particularly look like Steve Jobs. Unlike, say, Tom Cruise, whose name came up early in the casting process, Fassbender lacks the silicon-black hair, the intense eyebrows, that long power nose. "We decided that I didn't look anything like him, and that we weren't going to try to make me look anything like him," Fassbender says. "We just wanted to try to encapsulate the spirit and make our own thing of it." His performance is very much not an impression. High-definition fidelity was not the goal. "It's a portrait. That's what we always said right from the get-go," says Danny Boyle, who directed Steve Jobs. "Whatever it is that a portraitist does, it's that we're after, rather than a photograph." They did keep the clothing accurate, though Fassbender doesn't don Jobs' iconic black turtleneck until the third act. For the Macintosh launch in 1984, Jobs wore a profoundly unflattering, slightly hilarious candy-striped bow tie and a double-breasted blue blazer. "It is quite funny," says Fassbender, who does actually sound like Jobs when he drops his natural Irish accent for the role. "It's almost like he's trying to do something, or be something, that he's not." Steve Jobs, scheduled to arrive in theaters Oct. 9, was written by Aaron Sorkin and based in part on Walter Isaacson's best-selling authorized biography of the same name. (Full disclosure: Isaacson was the managing editor of TIME from 1996 to 2000.) There have been movies about Jobs before, but Steve Jobs is by far the most authoritatively credentialed depiction of the man who drove the transformation of at least four entire industries—personal computers, movies, music and phones—before he died in 2011 at 56. But Sorkin wants to be very clear that just as Fassbender isn't doing an impersonation, he did not set out to write a biopic. "It's not an origin story, it's not an invention story, it's not how the Mac was invented," he says. "I thought the audience would be coming in expecting to see a little boy and his father, and he's staring in the window of an electronics shop. Then we would view the greatest hits of Steve Jobs' life. And I didn't think I'd be good at that." Instead Sorkin structured the movie as three massive set pieces, each depicting one of Jobs' major product launches: the Macintosh, the disastrous NeXT in 1988 and finally the triumphant debut of the iMac in 1998. We don't see the launch events themselves: the matter of Steve Jobs is in the backstage chaos right before them. The camera shadows Jobs as he paces restlessly through greenrooms and back hallways, hectoring, agonizing, reminiscing, settling scores and at one point—oddly but entirely plausibly for Jobs—washing his feet in a toilet. There's a manic, claustrophobic Noises Off feel to it. "As a writer, I'm really a playwright who's pretending to be a screenwriter," Sorkin says. "I'm most comfortable in enclosed spaces." As Jobs preps to go onstage, the principal players in his drama buzz around him. All of them want something. Steve Wozniak (played by Seth Rogen), the brilliant bearded beta to Jobs' eternal alpha, wants credit for himself and his co-workers. Former Apple CEO and Jobs father figure John Sculley (Jeff Daniels) wants to be exonerated for firing him. Jobs' coldly furious ex-girlfriend Chrisann Brennan (Katherine Waterston), who's on welfare even as Jobs' net worth spikes into the hundreds of millions, wants Jobs to acknowledge their sweet, bright daughter Lisa. Long-suffering marketing chief Joanna Hoffman (Kate Winslet) and programmer—whipping boy Andy Hertzfeld (Michael Stuhlbarg) just want Jobs to act like a human being for five minutes. But if he did that he wouldn't be Jobs, and Sorkin wouldn't have a movie. In The Social Network, for which he won an Oscar, Sorkin had to work hard to gin up drama in the life of Mark Zuckerberg, whose personal affairs are nowhere near that complicated in reality. But Jobs gave him plenty of the real stuff to work with. "It's Shakespearean extremes, isn't it?" says Boyle. "You have tremendous, unbelievable ambition, thwarted and failed, and then you have this comeback. And that is the stuff of drama." In researching the movie, Sorkin went beyond just reading the biography. He tracked down and talked to people who knew Jobs, including all the movie's major characters. "I was very lucky to be able to talk to John Sculley, who after he left Apple kind of went into hiding a bit in Florida," he says. "There were parts of the record that he wanted to set straight." Sorkin also met with Lisa Brennan-Jobs, which was important because she had declined to participate in Isaacson's biography: "I don't want to put words or thoughts in her mouth, but my sense was that she was reluctant to do anything that might alienate her father or mother or stepmother. But once I started writing the movie, Steve had already passed away." Brennan-Jobs wound up becoming a major figure in the movie—an essential humanizing influence on her father.
Dangerous Game By Sean Gregory The tragic risks of an American obsession It was halloween night, and the Tipton Cardinals needed a tackle. With the team trailing Sacred Heart 27-18 in the opening round of the Missouri high school playoffs, a stop here—on first down and 10 with less than seven minutes to play—would help keep its fading season alive. As the running back took the handoff and sprinted right, Tipton's Chad Stover, a 16-year-old defensive back, dived at the player's legs with his arms outstretched. Chad's head collided with the runner's right thigh as the ball carrier dodged the tackle to gain another few yards. Chad went down, and his helmet smacked into the ground. "Was it a crazy-hard hit?" asks Ben Smeltzer, a Sacred Heart wide receiver who was blocking Stover on the play. "No." Chad wobbled to his feet, and after a time-out, he jogged to the sideline. Twice, a Tipton assistant coach asked if he felt well enough to return to the game. Twice, Chad said he was good. He went back in, and Tipton huddled up. "Something's wrong," Chad told a teammate before lining up for the play. Suddenly his legs turned soft; teammate David Richardson, one of Chad's best friends since grade school, caught him as he collapsed. "We've watched football games for years and years and years," says Chad's mom Amy. "I usually don't get shook. But you just knew, the way his legs went out from underneath him." Chad's father Ken raced out of the stands and motioned for Amy to follow. As she darted onto the field, a referee warned her to slow down on the slick and muddy turf. "I can't! I have to get there!" Amy replied. Chad was limp when she reached him. "He was lying on the ground, eyes closed," Amy says. "He had a tear going down each side of his face. I leaned down and I kissed his head, and I was pushing his hair back and talking to him. I remember somebody telling me, 'He can't hear you.' And I remember telling them, 'I don't care.'" Players and coaches from both teams circled together, hands linked and heads bowed in silent prayer. "When he walked out the door to play football that day, it didn't cross my mind that I wouldn't see him come off that field," Amy says, sitting on her living-room couch nearly eight months later. "It just didn't." The Brutal Reality Football's grip on the time, passions and wallets of the American public has never been stronger. But as another season gets under way, the game is under a shadow. One of the worst weeks in professional football's half-century march to cultural dominance began on Sept. 8, when grainy surveillance video posted on TMZ.com showed Baltimore Ravens star Ray Rice knocking his fiancée unconscious inside a casino elevator. The appalling footage forced the National Football League to punish Rice with something more than a wrist slap, which in turn cast a harsh glare on the NFL's lax handling of other players who had recently been arrested—and in one case convicted—for domestic violence. The next shoe dropped four days later, when Adrian Peterson, another star running back, was indicted on charges of abusing his 4-year-old son. These stories seized the headlines and all but eclipsed a disturbing indictment of the game itself. In a court filing made public on Sept. 12, the day Peterson was charged, the NFL estimated that nearly one-third of former players will develop dementia, Alzheimer's disease or other debilitating neurological disorders like Parkinson's and ALS. For years, the NFL had denied a link between blows to a player's head on the field and subsequent brain damage. This admission—based on data crunched by actuaries as part of a settlement between the NFL and some 5,000 former players who sued the league for allegedly covering up the risks of concussions—is a blunt confirmation that pro football players are far more likely than the general population to become severely brain damaged. "Hopefully, that sort of prediction will lead to a larger discussion around football safety," says Chris Nowinski, a former Harvard football player who co-founded the Sports Legacy Institute, a nonprofit dedicated to reducing brain injuries. "What does this mean for high school players? What does this mean for youth players? How much brain injury can we accept?"
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