There’s been some good and thoughtful reporting over the Rentboy arrests over the last few days. From Graeme Reid at Human Rights Watch:

Rentboy.com connects male escorts to clients in the same way that Uber does for transport, or Airbnb does for accommodation. There are no middlemen, thus affording users control and autonomy over the services brokered through the website. The website connects consenting adults. None of the government statements about the raid have alleged any coercion or involvement of underage persons.

It is hard to see the harm done by Rentboy.com, but it’s easy to see the harm done by the raid on society at large. The criminalization of voluntary, consensual sexual relations among adults is incompatible with the rights to personal autonomy and privacy – internationally recognized human rights that everyone, including individuals engaged in sex work, is entitled to. Criminalization creates barriers for those engaged in sex work to exercise basic rights and to seek access to justice, health care, and other available services.

No, she’s a monster, obviously; Frank Norris’ The Octopus might as well have her on the cover. Forbes ran one of the neatest, soundest, trimmest little hit pieces I’ve ever sen on Elisa Stephens & co. and their dreadful, exploitative Academy of Art University racket this week. It’s a wretched Rube-Goldberg machine designed to match up human beings with vast quantities of debt and everyone in San Francisco has at least one friend who’s lost something to it. (A friend of mine once dated a guy who’d gone to a prestigious, genuine art school, then taken a job at AAU pushing massive student loans at under-qualified and unprepared applicants; I felt mildly uncomfortable at their dinner parties until they broke up, which was hardly making a stand for The People on my part.)

At any rate, if one is going to be featured in an article profiling one’s family with lines like “the illusion is starting to unravel,” “serious code violations,” “abysmal graduation rates,” and “a business model based on underperformers,” one has two options: make a lot of explanations and cavils and excuses, or thrust one’s chin up toward God, wrap oneself in a fur coat, and deny nothing. Elisa Stephens chose the latter, and it’s rather wonderful to watch

This weekend marked the one-year anniversary of Mike Brown’s death in Ferguson at the hands of Darren Wilson.

Today is the final day for thousands of people with Haitian ancestry living in the Dominican Republic to prove they have a right to continue living there. From Here and Now:

“The Dominican government says that after 7 p.m. tomorrow, anyone who can’t show papers proving they’re in the country legally will be subject to expulsion. Hundreds of thousands of Haitians and people of Haitian descent in the Dominican Republic have been scrambling to abide…deportees will include people born in the country, who had once believed they were Dominican citizens.”