To protect and serve (coffee).

Back a hundred and fifty years ago, when I was in the midst of a totally different career as a touring performance poet, I had a show in Portland, Oregon at a collectively-run coffee shop called the Red And Black Cafe. It was probably the best night I had on the west coast on that tour, and so I’ve remembered the place (and the vegan carrot cake they served) fondly. So I was surprised, a few days ago, to see a Facebook group pop up called “Boycott the Red And Black Cafe”. Who’s got a problem with a bunch of Portland coffee anarchists?

It turns out that the place had actually been making national news for an incident in which they exercised their right to refuse service to a uniformed police officer who’d stopped by for a cup. The Internet, of course, got all huffy about it. That’s what the Internet is for, after all. And I’ll admit that it looks kind of petty – the cop is probably a pretty nice guy, all things considered (most people are, in my experience), and he probably just thought the place looked interesting and was in the mood for a cup of coffee. It is a neat-looking coffee shop. N0 one’s account of the incident had the officer bothering customers or behaving in any capacity other than as a guy who wanted a cup of coffee. So on the surface, yeah, it’s pretty easy to side with the cop and the Internet. The anarchist coffee shop was rude!

iPeople: The Common Use of Surrogates in Juvenile Crime

This evening the 5th grade class of Bryker Woods Elementary School presented their annual installment of a self-written and self-produced opera. The theme involved time travel, and the most clever part of the performance was a collection of kids in refrigerator boxes posing as iPeople who happily ate broccoli, took out the garbage, and finished unpleasant math assignments.

The right to talk to affirm that you’re not waiving the right to remain silent.

There’ve been a lot of good blog posts this week about the Berghuis v. Thompkins Supreme Court decision that (as Justice Sotomayor succinctly put it in her dissenting opinion) presumes that a person facing police interrogation has waived his or her fifth and sixth amendment rights unless that person explicitly informs the police (in language […]