Wild Style

Listening to: Rye Rye, "Hardcore Girls." Working my way through the music of the artists profiled in "The Novelty of Up-and-Coming Female Rappers Isn't That They're Female."

It's not every day you get mugged while listening to Bieber. Last weekend I was walking home at four in the morning, just minding my own teen pop business, when a skinny dude jumped in front of me, threatened that he had a gun, and demanded my phone. I thought he was asking for change or something. Two guys grabbed my arms from behind, otherwise I never would never have surrended my precious new iPhone 5. What a wonderful nine days we had together. I'll miss you forever little guy. To get a new one, it'll be like six hundred dollars. I could run right out and replace it I guess, but that's a little crazy. Sigh.

The lesson? Don't walk home with white earbuds dangling around, your hood all up against the cold, and have a tougher soundtrack playing when getting jacked. The police were overwhelmingly helpful. I rode around in a squad car, trying to spot the perps -- they really do call them "perpetrators -- and as they pressed me for details and urged me to recall their faces, the one thing that was flashing through my head was "man, I so do not want to be racial profiling." Eventually we found my purse ditched a block away from the subway, and there was no catching them after that. Aside from the iPhone, they had taken my Kindle, my camera, my backup floss, and my friend's precious Les Mis paperwork that I had been keeping safe for her after she attended a pre-screening.

Strangely, the thieves left my checkbook behind. How thoughtful. The police were almost overbearingly helpful too. Aside from the car ride, I received no less than four phone calls, as well as a visit from a detective. I was like, "It's fine, it's just a phone, I'm good." One of the officers had gone to the trouble of checking the security cams for like three hours, to no avail. I felt apologetic for their having spent so much time on this. They must have really felt my pain. The incident put a small damper on my weekend but it wasn't too bad. Nothing replaceable was taken, my wallet and keys were intact, and I had to pivot straight into another deadline anyway. Now I just won't listen to music on my walks home at night. All in all, a minor event. The past few months, everyone has been getting their stuff stolen -- including everything from one friend's apartment and fifteen grand worth of recording equipment from another friend's trunk  -- so it's hard to complain.

Last night we watched a new Ken Burns' documentary, The Central Park Five, about five black teens arrested and incarcerated (falsely) for the 1989 assault and rape of a white jogger in the park. It was a highly publicized case because of many factors, not the least being the obvious race dynamic. New York in the Eighties was the crime capital of America and this case ushered in the death penalty and a few years later, Rudy Giuliani's reign.

The film was very powerful, but Burns wasn't that interested in presenting a nuanced look at the events, which was something that I can both understand and criticize. The goal of the film is to get the story out there, to get supporters galvanized, to give the five men a voice, and not necessarily to present a balanced perspective. Overall, worth a watch, or at least a spin through Wikipedia to learn about the case.

Take a look at this amazing n+1 piece about The Atlantic's penchant for blasting out all those link bait articles "intended to terrorize unmarried women, otherwise known as educated straight women in their twenties and thirties." I've read every single one of them, as you probably have. Here's The Atlantic's latest, "When Do Men Become Grown Ups?"

We all know the answer to that one.