Eyes Wide Open

Charleena Lyles called 911 for help, police shot her dead

A black, pregnant mother of three in Seattle called police to report an attempted burglary at her apartment on Sunday. But when two white Seattle Police Department officers arrived, they reportedly shot and killed the knife-wielding woman in front of her children.

She has been identified by relatives as 30-year-old Charleena Lyles. Her family is distraught, the Seattle Times has reported.

Police confirmed the shooting happened Sunday morning, after officers responded to Lyles’ Seattle apartment. They’d had previous contact with Lyles, who was alerted to the responding two officers as a “hazard,” the Times reported.

A sharp memory doesn’t make you smart. Our brains are actively trying to forget things.

It might be good to forget some things.

A recent study from Canada shows that our brains are typically trying to forget. It suggests that the “goal” of our memory is to dump extraneous details and hold onto the important ones — meaning that we don’t want to remember everything.

“If you’re trying to navigate the world and your brain is constantly bringing up multiple conflicting memories, that makes it harder for you to make an informed decision,” Blake Richards, an associate fellow with the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research’s Learning in Machines and Brains Program, said in a release. Read more (6/21/17)

Colorado mosque vandalized as suspect throws rocks, Bible through glass doors

Police in Fort Collins, Colorado, are looking for a person caught on surveillance video throwing rocks and a Bible through the glass doors of a local mosque, the Denver Post reported.

The incident took place at roughly 4 a.m. Mountain on Sunday at the Islamic Center of Fort Collins, roughly a one-hour drive north of Denver.

“[We] would urge state and federal law enforcement authorities to investigate the possibility of a bias motive for this attack on a house of worship,” Ibrahim Hooper, national communications director for the Council on American-Islamic Relations, said in a statement. Read more (3/27/17 12 PM)

Legal adviser Stella Tsantekidou spoke out for immigrant rights and compassion at a protest in London’s Parliament Square on Monday.

Arizona man breaks into mosque to rip up 130 copies of Quran

On Tuesday, the Islamic Center of Tucson shared on its Facebook page that an unknown man broke into and vandalized the center, ripping up over 130 the mosque’s copies of the Quran, the Islamic holy book. 

The Tuscon, Arizona, mosque shared pictures of pages ripped out of the Quran and strewn all over the center’s prayer room rug. 

I’d suggest two different ways, very different from each other.

You could tell yourself it doesn’t matter, and start finding out how to write for fun again. Give yourself an hour a day to write in: no phone, no internet, no reading books or talking to people, no Tumblr, just time to write in. And in that time, write whatever you want, or don’t. A poem. A description of someone. A memory. A sea-shanty for seven morose pirates and a raccoon. Anything. Just give yourself time to write and find that writing can be fun again.

Or else…

In 2015, Cosmopolitan surveyed 2,235 women between the ages of 18 and 34 and found one in three had suffered sexual harassment on the job. 

That same year, the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission dismissed 52% of sexual harassment claims. 

That might help explain why, in a 2013 YouGov/Huffington Post poll, 70% of participants who said they had been sexually harassed at work also said they never reported the behavior.  

It’s not just the U.S. that has the problem.

A study from August found that 52% of U.K. women had been sexually harassed at work. 

The European Union estimates that between 40% and 50% of women “experience unwanted sexual advancements, physical contact or other forms of sexual harassment at their workplace.”

A 2014 Pew Research study on online harassment indicated that women were more likely to be sexually harassed and stalked online.

Twenty-five percent of women between the ages of 18 and 24 reported having been sexually harassed, against 13% of men in the same age bracket; 26% reported having been stalked, to just 7% of men.

In Australia, the digital security firm Norton surveyed 1,000 people in March. 

Almost half the female participants reported having been harassed online — which is to say, they’d received unwanted contact, rape and/or death threats or had simply been trolled.

Women under the age of 30 seemed to shoulder more abuse, with 76% of participants in that age bracket reportedly having been the victims of cyber harassment.

An October 2016 report by the National Partnership for Women and Families showed that, on average, women nationwide make 80 cents to men’s dollar.

Adding another layer of badness to the equation, that higher education women are more likely to have doesn’t seem to be getting them anywhere.

In 2015, there were more CEOs named John than there were female CEOs of all names, according to Payscale. 

That makes sense given that, according to Forbes, just 4% of Fortune 500 companies have women at the helm.

A recent study found men are granted promotions to first-tier managerial positions 30% more often than women.

That confirms the results of a separate study that found women do actually ask for raises as often as men do — it’s just that they’re more likely to be told “no.”

In 2013, the World Health Organization declared violence against women “a global health problem of epidemic proportions.”

 The report that spurred the statement found that 35% of the world’s women were victims of “physical or sexual violence." 

Additionally, 38% of women who were murdered worldwide were murdered by their intimate partners, while 42% of women who’d been physically or sexually abused by their partners sustained injuries.

A study by New York City Department of Consumer Affairs found that products "for women” cost an average 7% more than their male counterparts,