Rolling Stone put a selfie of Jahar Tsarnaev on the cover of their August 1st issue, and all hell broke loose. The headline for Janet Reitman’s cover story reads: “The Bomber: How a popular, promising student was failed by his family, fell into radical Islam, and became a monster.” CVS is refusing to sell it, Mayor Thomas Menino of Boston called the cover a disgrace, and people I’m 99% sure have never read Rolling Stone are loudly threatening to cancel their subscriptions.

Their complaint is that Rolling Stone has glamorized terrorism.

Rolling Stone’s art directors didn’t make this image, Tsarnaev did. It was culled from one of his social media accounts and published in the Washington Post and the New York Times. It’s a self-portrait of Tsarnaev doing his best impersonation of a sensitive, moody rock star, presumably taken around the time he was planning to blow up the Boston Marathon. You can tell it’s a selfshot because Tsarnaev’s right arm is outstretched inside his baggy Armani Exchange t-shirt in the universal symbol for “selfie.” It’s like a million teenage selfshots in which the photographer strains to project an idealized image. 

Everyone assumed Jahar was an assimilated American, and what’s more American than wanting to be a rock star? Jahar captured the look better than most. Keep in mind that while Jahar was playing pop idol on the internet, his older brother and future accomplice Tamerlan had sworn off not just rock but all music because he thought music was anti-Islamic.

The shaggy, sensitive-looking photo was one of the many carefully curated images Jahar presented to the world. Janet Reitman’s cover story is a profile of a guy who was everybody’s favorite all-American stoner jock kid brother until he became a terrorist. The central mystery of his story is the discrepancy between appearance and reality. Putting a self-portrait on the cover captures that mystery perfectly. The question isn’t just “how did an innocent little boy grow up to be a big bad terrorist” (which you could ask any terrorist); the question is “how did Jahar fool everyone into thinking he was an innocent little boy until it was too late?” 

“Listen,” says Payack, “there are kids we don’t catch who just fall through the cracks, but this guy was seamless, like a billiard ball. No cracks at all.” And yet a deeply fractured boy lay under that facade; a witness to all of his family’s attempts at a better life as well as to their deep bitterness when those efforts failed and their dreams proved unattainable. As each small disappointment wore on his family, ultimately ripping them apart, it also furthered Jahar’s own disintegration – a series of quiet yet powerful body punches. No one saw a thing. “I knew this kid, and he was a good kid,” Payack says, sadly. “And, apparently, he’s also a monster.” [Rolling Stone]

It’s absurd to think that a cover that plainly identifies Tsarnaev as “the bomber,” a follower of “radical Islam” and “a monster,” glamorizes him. Who is that supposed to impress? The two most likely candidates are aspiring terrorists and Jahar fangirls. 

Aspiring Islamic terrorists probably regard Rolling Stone as a decadent Western abomination, given its hardline editorial stance on the inherent goodness of music and boobs. They are unlikely to find Jahar’s selfie treatment particularly inspiring. 

Of course the Jahar fangirls, the small but creepy subculture of teens in love with Jahar, are swooning over this picture. But they got ahold of it long before Rolling Stone did. Sadly, high profile killers attract groupies. But a magazine can’t program to the lowest common denominator. If you let the reactions of the Jahar fangirls influence your behavior in any way, the terrorists win. 

Late Saturday night, a jury in Sanford, Florida acquitted George Zimmerman of all charges in the shooting of 17-year-old Trayvon Martin. Charlie Pierce of Esquire reflects on what this all means:

[S]ome night very soon, if he so chooses, George Zimmerman can load his piece, tuck it into the back of his pants, climb into his SUV, and drive around Sanford, Florida looking for assholes and fucking punks who are walking through neighborhoods where he, George Zimmerman, defender of law and order, doesn’t think they belong. He can drive around Sanford, Florida and check out anyone who is dressed in such a manner as might frighten the average citizen who has been fed a daily diet of “Scary Black Kids” by their local news and by their favorite radio personalities, and who is dressed in such a manner as might seem inappropriate to their surroundings as determined by George Zimmerman, crimebuster. He can drive around Sanford, Florida until he spots an asshole or a fucking punk and then he can get out of his SUV, his piece tucked into the back of his pants, and he can stalk the asshole or the fucking punk, the one who is in the wrong neighborhood, or who is dressed inappropriately, at least according to George Zimmerman, protector of peace. If the asshole, or the fucking punk, turns around and objects to being stalked – or, worse, if the asshole, or the fucking punk, decides physically to confront the person stalking him – then George Zimmerman can whip out the piece from the back of his pants and shoot the asshole, or the fucking punk, dead right there on the spot. This can happen tonight. That is now possible. Hunting licenses are now available and it’s open season on assholes, fucking punks, and kids who wear hoodies at night in neighborhoods where they do not belong, at least according to George Zimmerman, defender of law and order, crimebuster, and protector of the peace, because that is what American society has told George Zimmerman, and all the rest of us, is the just outcome of what happened on one dark and rainy night in February of 2012.

More reactions to the verdict from Ta-Nehisi Coates (Hillman ‘12), Jelani Cobb, Scott Lemieux, and Emily Bazelon.

[Photo credit: Greg Lily, Creative Commons, 2012.]

In the Atlantic, Matt Bruening and Elizabeth Stoker look ahead to two Supreme Court cases that could devastate organized labor:

The first case concerns the president’s ability to appoint members to the National Labor Relations Board. Vacancies on the NLRB must be filled promptly because the board shuts down without a 3-member quorum. When Senate Republicans blocked Obama’s NLRB appointees, the president started filling the board with recess appointments. So, the Senate Republicans used procedural tricks to keep the Senate in perpetual “session” and thereby prevent recess appointments. The White House argues that the president should be allowed to make recess appointments anyway because the senate isn’t really in session if no business is being conducted. If the White House loses this case, the Senate Republicans will be able to paralyze the body that enforces the nation’s labor laws indefinitely. 

The second case could doom one of the most effective new organizing strategies to come along in years:

[M]ulhall v. UNITE HERE Local 355, calls into question what is probably the most successful union organizing strategy of last decade. Because our labor laws are so unfriendly to workers, major unions – including SEIU, UNITE HERE, and CWA, among others – often seek to enter into so-called “organizing agreements” with employers. These deals establish the rules that the unions and employers must follow in subsequent organizing battles. The most common provisions require employers to remain neutral about the union and to recognize it as soon as the majority of their employees sign cards authorizing it to represent them.

In Mulhall, these agreements are being challenged under anti-corruption laws that prevent employers from providing “things of value” to unions. If the Supreme Court decides that organizing agreements are unlawful, the only promising unionization strategy in recent years will die. 

It’s unclear to me how an organizing agreement counts as a “thing of value” for the purposes of an anti-corruption statute that is intended to prevent the improper exchange of tangible things of actual value–like suitcases stuffed with $100 bills. But to further muddy the waters, the Mulhall case involves an employer that agreed to a neutrality agreement in exchange for $100,000 worth of political support from the union for a casino gambling vote and a promise not to strike. A federal judge found that the agreement was legal, but the 11th Circuit disagreed. Unite Here said in a statement that it was pleased the Supreme Court decided to review the case. 

[Photo credit: Sad Panda, Jason Scott Jones, Creative Commons.]

Doctors under contract with the California prison system sterilized 148 female inmates without required state authorization between 2006 and 2010, according to a bombshell story by the Sacramento Bee and the Center for Investigative Reporting. As many as 100 others were sterilized in procedures that date back to the late 1990s. Forced sterilizations of prisoners and the mentally ill used to be common in California, until state lawmakers banned the practice in 1979. Today, in order to ensure that all sterilizations are truly voluntary, doctors must get regulatory approval before performing the surgery. Records obtained by the CIR show that the rule was ignored for years. 

The prisoners were sterilized when they came to prison infirmaries in Corona or Chowchilla to give birth. Prison officials insist that the women consented to tubal ligations, but some inmates say they felt pressured to have the surgery. 

Yet Kimberly Jeffrey says she was pressured by a doctor while sedated and strapped to a surgical table for a C-section in 2010, during a stint at Valley State. She had failed a drug test while out on parole for a previous series of thefts.

Jeffrey, 43, was horrified, she said, and resisted.

“He said, ‘So we’re going to be doing this tubal ligation, right?’ ” Jeffrey said. “I’m like, ‘Tubal ligation? What are you talking about? I don’t want any procedure. I just want to have my baby.’ I went into a straight panic.” [SacBee]

An inmate who worked in the prison infirmary said she often heard staff urging women who had served multiple prison terms to get sterilized. “I was like, ‘Oh my God, that’s not right,’ ” she told a reporter. “Do they think they’re animals, and they don’t want them to breed anymore?”

[Photo credit: Derekskey, Creative Commons.]