Posts Tagged ‘chicago’
FOX News Compares Raping Child to Losing Olympic Bid
Dan Gainor of FOX News has had it up to here with the mainstream media! No, not FOX News: The other mainstream media. “Excuses, excuses from the mainstream media for everything from child-rape to the Letterman using the office as a dating service to explaining why the president failed to win the Olympics!” Gainor opines in today’s column.
I’m totally with you on the child rapist excuses, Gainor. I’m a little bit less with you on the Late Night womanizer excuses. Remember: just because a man’s legal relationships with consenting adults happen to be aired the same week that a notorious child rapist was arrested does not mean that the two incidents are related. And I’m really not with you on the mainstream media’s Olympics “excuses,” which amount to Katie Couric announcing, “Despite a high-powered, star-studded U.S. appeal from Oprah to the Obamas, the Olympics are awarded to Rio.”
Which is worse: Hollywood filmmakers excusing child rape, or Katie Couric alliterating on “Oprah,” “Obama,” and “Olympics”? To Gainor, it’s pretty much a draw!
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Library Conference Secret Twitter Proves Librarians Sexy, Stern
When the American Library Association’s annual conference kicked off in Chicago last Thursday, some attendees wanted the world to know that librarian get-togethers aren’t all about shushing and stacking: There’s a lot of fucking, too.
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The True Price of Prostitution
In last month’s “Capital Ideas,” a publication of the Chicago Booth school of Business, Steven Levitt gives the Freakonomics treatment to Chicago-area prostitution. The conceit of “Trading Tricks,” as with Levitt’s examination of the inner-city drug trade [PDF], is that prostitution is a market like any other.
Levitt, along with Columbia University professor Sudhir Alladi Venkatesh, reveal that prostitutes “want to be where their customers can easily find them”—just like “stores do in shopping malls.” That the price of a trick “increases with the risk associated with a particular sex act”—just like in construction work. And that pimps increase the wages of loyal prostitutes in order to “effectively raise the penalty associated with being fired, which will hopefully induce better behavior on the part of the prostitutes”—just like with any employer.
But prostitution is not a job like any other:
