A Day Without a Woman: It’s International Women’s Day. Christina Cauterucci recaps how activists, journalists (including Slate’s), teachers, dating apps, PETA, and spunky little girls are approaching the day.
Aggression and abuse: A group of reporters with The Teacher Project at Columbia University School of Journalism, with support from ProPublica, dove into the allegations of staff-on-student violence at Camelot Education, a for-profit company that runs programs for students the public schools have given up on. The program, they concluded, “starts to resemble the nation’s incarceration system: racially biased, isolated, punitive, unnecessarily violent, and designed, above all else, to maintain obedience and control.”
An important promise: In his Tuesday confirmation hearing, Deputy Attorney General nominee Rod Rosenstein was grilled on Russian interference in the election. Leon Neyfakh writes that the Democrats were asking the wrong questions: the question isn’t whether he will appoint a special prosecutor, but whether he will give the prosecutor real independence.
The problem with A.I.: Uber’s rule-breaking self-driving cars and Google’s “alternative facts” both point to a problem with technologies based on machine learning: they have to be widely used before they become good. Will Oremus argues that calls for stronger regulation.
For fun: The incredible, shrinking Waldo.
Busting out my magnifying glass,
Molly
