In defense of the Mommy Track →

The result of rejecting the Mommy Track for the past quarter-century has been an exodus of highly qualified mothers from the workplace for some period of time, a transition by many women into less-demanding career paths, and a dramatic decline in the trajectory of their earnings.
Here is what we know in 2015:
There is abundant research that shows having more women in the top leadership and governance positions of business and other professions correlates with higher performance for both the business and the economy. At the same time, there is widespread consternation on how to achieve this goal. Progress toward this end has been far slower than almost anyone imagined. In 1989, with women pouring out of the top business and law schools and already earning the majority of the nation's bachelor's degrees, it would have been almost impossible to imagine that a mere 5 percent of Fortune 500 companies would be headed by a women more than 25 years later.

Government Spy Powers Face Major Test in Congress →

The government’s expiring ability to sweep up the phone and email records of millions of Americans faces a test Thursday, as a key House panel will vote on a bipartisan plan to rework the practice.
The House Judiciary Committee will debate a new measure allowing the bulk collection of personal records by the National Security Agency to “sunset” at the end of May. The bulk collection would be replaced by a new system that allows the government to seek data on specific individuals—or potentially specific businesses—but only after they argue the need before a secret court.
To obtain telephone, email, or related data, the government must designate a “specific selection term,” such as an email address or telephone number, that the government can prove is linked to a threat. It would no longer be able to sweep up millions of records and then cull through the ones it has for specific matches.
The bill would also require—for the first time—that certain legal opinions from the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court become declassified. This measure is meant in part to prevent the government from winning controversial and secret legal opinions that expand intelligence programs. It also would make it easier for companies to challenge gag orders the government often obtains when it demands information through subpoena-like “National Security Letters,” known as NSLs.

Freddie Gray death ruled homicide; officers charged →

Baltimore's prosecutor brought charges Friday against six police officers in the death of Freddie Gray, saying he suffered "a severe and critical neck injury" as a result of being placed "handcuffed, shackled by his feet and unrestrained" inside a police van.
 
The most serious charge: second-degree depraved-heart murder for the driver of the van, Officer Caesar R. Goodson Jr.
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In addition to the charges against Goodson, another officer was charged Friday with several counts, including manslaughter and involuntary manslaughter. Two other officers face charges including including involuntary manslaughter. An additional two officers are charged with several counts, including second-degree assault.
Warrants have been issued for the officers' arrests. The officers are expected to be arraigned Friday, according to a source with knowledge of the proceedings.

No Sharp Rise Seen in Police Killings, Though Increased Focus May Suggest Otherwise →

What official data exists suggests that the number of killings by police officers has crept upward only slowly, if at all, in recent years. Since 2009, one regular if incomplete measure, the F.B.I.’s account of justifiable homicides by police officers, ranged between 397 and 426 deaths annually before jumping to 461 in 2013, the latest reporting year.
Federal experts have long acknowledged that that estimate is too low, and a handful of more recent, unofficial reports — online databases compiled and fact-checked by volunteers — place the toll much higher, at about 1,100 deaths a year, or three a day. Yet they do not suggest that the pace of police killings or the racial composition of victims as a group has changed significantly in the last two years or so.
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“People are shocked by all these shootings,” said Peter Moskos, a former Baltimore police officer who is an assistant professor at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice at City University of New York. “But they’ve always been there.”
But it also means that lethal force by the police is a steady problem that is causing police departments across the country to debate whether they need to change procedures and training.

The Clock Didn't Start With the Riots: Black people in Baltimore are subjected to violence all the time. →

Transcript of a great talk by Coates, which gets to the complexity behind the recent violence in Baltimore: the selective use of the word "violence"; the systematic plunder of African-Americans throughout all of U.S. history (only possible by federal and state violence); and that while none of us chose to be born here or at any particular time, this is the mess we inherited, and to ignore the history that defined the present is to become party to the sins of the past.

U.S. allies in Middle East ramping up support for rebel forces in Syria →

Beyond the growing number of militant recruits in Europe, extremist groups in Libya, Afghanistan, Nigeria and the Sinai have declared their allegiance to the Islamic State, which has also reportedly put down roots in Southeast Asia.
But what many view as a leadership vacuum is most acutely felt in the case of Syria. In response, Saudi Arabia and Turkey, with an assist from Qatar, recently ended a long estrangement to address their shared concern over the lagging fight against Assad.
The new approach could undermine three years of U.S. Syria policy focused on securing a negotiated settlement to the war by putting enough pressure on Assad that he feels compelled to make compromises, but not enough to score an outright opposition victory that might result in chaos and cause Syria to collapse even further.
Most of the moderate groups chosen to receive support have been eliminated or eclipsed by extremists, however, and the negotiation process begun years ago in Geneva has languished.

The Deep, Troubling Roots of Baltimore’s Decline →

I've seen a couple op-eds claim that because Baltimore has a more racially diverse political system and police force, "it's not about race," unlike Ferguson. Supposedly, "it's about class." But in many places in the U.S., the two are historically intertwined. The entire article, and its quick dive into Baltimore's segregationist past, which spans the entire 20th century, is worth reading.

There is much, much more to this story. The key part, however, is the remarkable stability of Baltimore’s segregation over time. By and large, the “Negro slums” of the 1910s are the depressed projects and vacant blocks of the 2010s. And the same pressures of crime and social dislocation continue to press on the modern-day residents of the inner city. If the goal of early segregationist policies was to concentrate black Baltimoreans in a single location, separated from opportunity, then it worked. More importantly, it’s never been unraveled; there’s never been a full effort to undo and compensate for the policies of the past. Indeed, the two decades of drugs and crime that marred Baltimore in the 1980s and 1990s helped entrench the harm and worsen the scars of the city’s history.
Baltimore is stuck, captured by the injustices of the past as well as the countless individual choices of the present. The city’s ills—its poverty, its fatherlessness, its police violence—are rooted in these same patterns of segregation and discrimination. This isn’t an excuse—Baltimore has had a generation of politicians, white and black, who can renovate tourist areas and implement new police techniques, but who can’t provide relief and opportunity to its most impoverished residents—but it is important context. Even at their absolute best, the city’s leaders have to contend with the cumulative impact of past disadvantage. White flight means a smaller tax base and fewer resources for improvement; industrial collapse means fewer jobs; crack and violence means a generation of “missing” black men, in jail or in the ground; a culture of police violence means constant tension with the policed.
The simple fact is that major progress in Baltimore—and other, similar cities—requires major investment and major reform from state and federal government. It requires patience, investment, and a national commitment to ending scourges of generational poverty—not just ameliorating them. But that’s incredibly difficult, and it’s not clear there’s any political will to pursue potential solutions. Or, as President Obama said in his remarks on the Baltimore riots, “If our society really wanted to solve the problem, we could. It’s just it would require everybody saying this is important, this is significant.”