Moose News!

Hello everybody!

After that cryptic post the other day, I’m happy to announce the re-vamping of moose dribble as The Moose Report–a weekly newsletter filled with mini-meditations on the world, and links to cool stuff to read/watch/look at.

I’m still a big believer in the moose dribble mission, to help people find great stories from around the web; but I also have come to realize that the blog isn’t quite the right format for that. At the same time, I often have something on my mind that I’d really like to write down and put out there, but because moose dribble is just for sharing nonfiction stories, it doesn’t seem like the right venue for my ideas. Newsletters, however, allow greater possibility to combine the two, with the added intimacy of me sending you a personal message right to your email. Because of that, I’m really excited for this change!

Right now, I’m planning to publish text versions of those emails on moose dribble as they go out. But that said, I really hope you’ll subscribe at the link above, so we can see where this thing goes. Thanks for reading!

Teach and Frisk

“I didn’t sign up to be a prison guard. I signed up–I thought–to be an educator.” This is the story of Vitaly, a high school teacher in Culver City, CA, who’s on the brink of losing his job because he refuses to pat down his students each morning. As Leighton Woodhouse points out in this story for The Awl, there is mounting evidence that metal detectors and security searches in schools tend to selectively target specific segments of the population, and their efficacy is questionable. That’s leading to new conversations about race and school safety, with some people believing the current prison-like policies could be gotten rid of. But for Vitaly, it might be too late.

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Photo by Christopher Webb

At the front of the one-classroom schoolhouse in the Mar Vista Gardens housing project in Culver City, California, a handful of high school students and their teacher sit in a circle and participate in small group discussion. Behind them, a dozen or so students who have opted to engage in independent study work silently at their desks. The volume of the class rarely rises above the level of a friendly dinner table conversation.

Yet the man running this class, a forty-two-year-old former public interest lawyer named Vitaly, may be on the brink of being fired. For the last four years, he has refused to conduct mandatory in-class weapons searches of his students—which the district argues keeps classrooms safe—because he believes that the policy is unethical and would destroy everything that makes his classroom successful.

Read on at The Awl.

The World Mourning Lincoln

150 years ago, America lost its President, but the whole world grieved the death of Abraham Lincoln. Matt Ford chronicles the range of responses in this stellar article for The Atlantic, including correspondence and newspaper reactions to the assassination from around the globe. It’s a fascinating way of thinking about his life and legacy, and a wonderful remembrance of one of the country’s greatest presidents.

 

On the night of April 14, 1865, John Wilkes Booth shot Abraham Lincoln in the back of the head. Lincoln—president of the United States, preserver of the Union, and liberator of four million slaves—died the next morning. He would be the last casualty of a war that cost some 750,000 American lives—more than all other American wars combined, and among the deadliest wars of its century.

Read on at The Atlantic. 

Is Hillary any good at running for President?

It’s official: Hillary Clinton has entered the running to become the next President of the United States. But does she even have a shot? Jason Zengerle examines her past political campaigns in this piece for New York Magazine that came out this week in the lead-up to Clinton’s announcement. He provides numerous examples of how she’s campaigned in the past, how her style has changed, and what that all might mean for this upcoming race. And in a rather fascinating twist, rather than focus solely on Clinton the entire time, he also gets into some interesting territory in the middle, looking at how much predictive analysis has become part of the drama of elections over the past several decades. That all leads to a surprising conclusion: whether Hillary’s any good at campaigning or not, it might not really matter at all.

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In 2011, when checking her email became a viral meme. Photo: Kevin Lamarque//Pool via The New York Times/Redux

A lot can happen between now and then, but barring something truly unprecedented and totally unforeseen — a meteorite, a Benghazi revelation, a health scare, or a Martin O’Malley groundswell — on July 28, 2016, Hillary Clinton will step onto a stage in Philadelphia. There, surrounded by red-white-and-blue bunting and balloons — as well as Bill, Chelsea, baby granddaughter Charlotte, and tens of thousands of screaming Democrats — she will officially become her party’s presidential nominee.

Read the full story at New York Magazine.