Beef Intro Letter

Munk Dialogues - Malcolm Gladwell

The moderator is terrible but this talk from April this year is fascinating in hindsight. Gladwell discusses the differences between how soccer and basketball differ in their path to a winning team. Soccer is only as good as its weakest member. An opposing team can target that weakness and exploit it. While basketball relies on the one exceptional player to elevate the whole team.

And that Covid has exposed that society is more like soccer than basketball. We have concentrated efforts for too long on the big hero problems like cancer and not enough on the weakest spots like PPE and a stockpile of paper masks.

And that Covid has disproportionally hit marginalised communities and he hopes that society will start to focus on shoring up its weakest, underserved members.

Grace is a 15-year-old Black kid with ADHD who was on parole for briefly stealing a fellow student’s phone when lockdown started. She failed to turn in her distance-education homework, so she was jailed for violating her parole. She’s still in jail.

https://pluralistic.net/2020/07/15/3-frauds-in-a-trenchcoat/#judge-mary-ellen-brennan

Grace’s story became a center of national outrage after a Propublica story about it last week. The elected judge who put Grace in jail - after an inexplicably in-person hearing that her lawyer wouldn’t attend due to safety concerns - has granted review of Grace’s case.

That judge - Mary Ellen Brennan - refused to allow Grace to return home  pending review, saying that doing so would “interrupt…mental health treatment.”

(It’s obvious that being imprisoned places a significant burden on a child’s mental health).

https://www.propublica.org/article/the-michigan-supreme-court-is-reviewing-the-case-of-a-teenager-incarcerated-after-not-doing-online-schoolwork-during-the-pandemic#979914

Brennan has been spinning her role in locking up a Black child for failing to complete homework, saying that she had access to non-public information about Grace that led her to calling the child a “threat to the community.”

But Jonathan Biernat, one of Grace’s attorneys, points out that “the record is entirely devoid of facts to support the actual threat of harm…If there is additional information that has not been disclosed, I look forward to reviewing that documentation.”

Meanwhile, Brennan’s statements are full of self-praise for her judicial wisdom and kindness and dedication to justice - and awfully shy on empathy for either the child she’s locked away or that child’s frantic mother.

The local Board of Education unanimously passed a resolution asking for review of Grace’s case: “No harm should come to (Birmingham Public Schools) students as a result of the sudden shift to online learning caused by the COVID-19 global pandemic.”

Meanwhile, the Michigan Supreme Court is “reviewing the circumstances” of Grace’s case.

Judge Brennan was ran unopposed in 2014. She is up for re-election this year, with her term expiring on Dec 31.