• Alexis Okeowo on “Nigeria’s Stolen Girls”
Sanya is eighteen years old and was taking her final exams before graduation. Many of the schools in towns around Chibok, in the state of Borno, had been shuttered. Boko Haram attacks at other schools — like a recent massacre of 59 schoolboys in neighboring Yobe state—had prompted the mass closure. But local education officials decided to briefly reopen the Chibok school for exams. On the night of the abduction, militants showed up at the boarding school dressed in Nigerian military uniforms. They told the girls that they were there to take them to safety. “They said, ‘Don’t worry. Nothing will happen to you,’ ” Sanya told me. The men took food and other supplies from the school and then set the building on fire. They herded the girls into trucks and onto motorcycles. At first, the girls, while alarmed and nervous, believed that they were in safe hands. When the men started shooting their guns into the air and shouting “Allahu Akbar,” Sanya told me, she realized that the men were not who they said they were. …
For a while after the abduction, girls trickled back into town — some rolled off trucks, some snuck away while fetching water. That trickle has stopped. “Nobody rescued them,” a government official in Chibok said of the girls who made it back. “I want you to stress this point. Nobody rescued them. They escaped on their accord. This is painful.”
Read the whole thing. As much as I hope that searchers will find that missing Malaysian plane in order to provide some measure of knowing for the families of the 239 people who were on board, it also seems to me that this story of 234 abducted girls is also deserving of the kind of wall-to-wall media attention that story has received.
• Listen to your mother. And while you’re at it, also listen to Rebecca Schoenkopf’s mother.
• Instead of maybe talking to a therapist to work out his issues privately, South Dakota state Rep. Steve Hickey opted to write a 600-word letter to the editor about anal sex. He’s against it … like, really, really against it. OK, then.
• Meet the kryptodrakon — “The Earliest Pterodactyloid and the Origin of the Group.” It was found — fossil remains, alas, not a living specimen — in the Chinese desert where part of the movie Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon was filmed, and was thus named (in Latin), “hidden dragon.” Cool.
• Most Web articles about job-hunting offer variations of the same dubious victim-blaming “advice.” This one has the ring of truth.
• “There is more support for official Roman Catholic Church positions among white evangelical Protestants than among Catholics.”
• Atrios highlights another astonishing aspect of the rant that got Clippers owner Donald Sterling banned for life from NBA games. This is the not-as-racist part, in which Sterling explains that his players are nothing without him:
I support them and give them food, and clothes, and cars, and houses. Who gives it to them? Does someone else give it to them? … Who makes the game? Do I make the game, or do they make the game? Is there 30 owners, that created the league?
He means that as a rhetorical question to which the correct answer is that he makes the game. Because the players are dependent on him. They don’t earn their pay, it’s something he “gives” them. This is the Romney/Ryan philosophy of “makers and takers” laid bare. The makers allow us to work, and they choose to “give” us wages. And all they want in return is our undying gratitude.
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