From the Newsroom
Perform Criminal Background Checks At Your Peril — James Bovard, The Wall Street Journal
Americans can treat ex-offenders humanely without giving them legal advantages over similar individuals without criminal records. The EEOC's new regulatory regime is likely to chill hiring across the board and decrease opportunities for minority applicants.
-Jonathan Pedde, Opinion Editor
Love Online — Andrew Gelfand and Lynn Miao, The Harvard Crimson
Whether dating across campuses or meeting young professionals, students find that these tools have proved invaluable in enlarging their social networks. Love online is still far from perfect, but there seems to be a trend towards a social lifestyle that involves both online and offline dating.
-Jenny Che, Editor-in-Chief
You Belong With Me — Lizzie Widdicombe, The New Yorker
Swift’s aura of innocence is not an act, exactly, but it can occasionally belie the scale of her success. She is often described using royal terminology—as a pop princess or, as the WashingtonPostput it recently, the “poet laureate of puberty.” In the past five years, she has sold more than twenty million albums—more than any other musician. And, in an era of illegal downloading, fans buy her music online, too.
-Claire Groden, Evening Managing Editor
Namibia's Most Fascinating, Horrifying Wildlife — Mark Vanhoenacker, Slate
We pulled onto the open road and this drumbeat of crunching death accelerated to a blood-curdling, Jiffy-Pop pace. Utterly revolted, we pulled over almost immediately and turned off the ignition. Wandering into the silence of the windswept highway, we came face-to-spiny-face with our victims: fat, bristling with eponymous armor, and about two inches long, plus antennas.
How a Sweetheart is Made — Derek Thompson, The Atlantic
The misprints can lead to some pretty funny stories. Our Ps sometimes look like Fs, so we can't say anything like "Pucker Up" for reasons you understand. Last year, we received a letter from a parent with a picture of a heart that was supposed to say "Smile." But because of the way the print came out -- no S, a messy E -- it ended up looking more like "MILF." Her son had no clue what that was about, so he asked his mom. She said, "I don't know what you people are doing." Anyway, we do our best to avoid things that have the Ps in them. This is the human element.
INFOGRAPHIC: All the Deaths in Quentin Tarantino's Movies, Charted — Alexandra Beggs, Vanity Fair
Frank Ocean Can Fly — Jeff Himmelman, The New York Times
But as those 131,000 copies of “Channel Orange” (mine among them) made their way onto iPods and car stereos, as Ocean’s music got a chance to speak for itself, the questions about his sexuality turned sideshow. Some records, rare records, become a part of your life. They arrive at just the right moment and take over for a while, mapping familiar terrain in unexpected ways.
SLIDESHOW: Manhattan of the Mind — Zachary Sniderman, The New York Times
-Leslie Ye, Dartbeat Editor
SLIDESHOW: Architecture Photography — Ezra Stoller, The New York Times
"Ezra Stoller was a prominent modernist architecture photographer who had a way of photographing modernist buildings that really brought out the angular lines and forms that were so symbolic of modernist architecture. NYT published a retrospective of his work in conjunction with an ongoing exhibit of Stoller's work at the Yossi Milo Gallery in Chelsea until March 2nd."
-Gavin Huang, Photo Editor