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Crunching the numbers
- From this series on how the ultrawealthy dodge taxes: A ProPublica investigation found that professional sports team owners often obtain deductions by reporting their teams received millions less than their actual earnings. The tactic frequently allows billionaire owners to pay lower tax rates than their players or stadium workers.
- California will become the third state to provide reparations to people who the state forced to be sterilized during the eugenics movement. Victims, including women sterilized while in prison, could receive up to $25,000 in compensation. California’s forced sterilization program, which lasted from 1909 to 1979, was the largest in the United States. The state also sterilized 144 female inmates from 2005 to 2013, according to an audit.
In local news
- From The Frontier: Last year, the Oklahoma Department of Human Services permanently closed or consolidated 45 offices to avoid layoffs during state budget cuts. Out of the counties with shuttered offices, half have poverty rates that tower above the state average, and the closures have reduced the public’s access to social services.
- AL.com reported that police in Huntsville, Alabama continue to pay an officer who was convicted of murder. Officer William Ben Darby lost his law enforcement certification but is still employed by the police department as he awaits sentencing for shooting and killing a man who had told police he was suicidal.
- New York Focus and The Intercept reported that 27 former law enforcement officers lost state certification before being hired by another police department or public safety agency.
- An analysis from the Salt Lake Tribune and Frontline revealed that 38 police officers in Utah were involved in more than one shooting during the past 17 years. Five officers fired their weapons in three to four shootings.
I strongly recommend
- This oral history of “Legally Blonde,” a feminist classic starring Reese Witherspoon as law student Elle Woods, as the movie reaches its 20th anniversary. Screenwriter Kirsten Smith said of the film: “It wears its desires on its sleeve: the contradiction [that] you can be a woman who’s fighting to be heard with a very clear point of view, who’s very strong and smart and also funny, fun and interested in different things, fashion and the law.”
- This essay on Elle Woods, the bimbo archetype in film and how 2021 became the unlikely “Year of the Bimbo.” Marlowe Granados writes: “Just like Hollywood, men want women who fit into their lives neatly, without too much adjustment on their part. The bimbo, in all her glory, is a walking reminder that femininity is a process of making oneself. High maintenance and high effort. The more time a bimbo puts into her looks, the less time she spends on anyone but herself.”
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Thank you for reading Hard Reset. You can find me here at bryant@bigiftrue.org and 405-990-0988.
– Mollie Bryant
Founder and editor, BigIfTrue.org