What we're reading (besides the stats ahead of the Cubs game tonight):
Black Catholics: Though African Americans make up only about 3 percent of the Catholic church in the U.S., blacks should lament the shrinking parochial school system here says Jennifer Wilson, writing for Al Jazeera America.
Wilson, an African-American and a Catholic grade school alum, said the number of Catholic schools in the country's 12 largest cities declined by nearly by 30 percent since 2004. "For many African-Americans from working- and middle-class families, Catholic school is an integral part of our biographies and identity," she writes. "At a small fraction of the cost of most private schools, parochial education provided African-Americans with their only realistic alternative to failing public schools before the charter school era."
In the long run, though, the schools didn't necessarily bring the students to the faith. "I went on to public high school and haven't attended Mass since," Wilson admits (though she did see the pope in New York twice.)
New Yorkers: Not As Apathetic As We Thought: The 1964 killing of Kitty Genovese sparked a national conversation about apathy and the "bystander effect." At the time of Genovese's murder, the New York Times reported that dozens of her neighbors heard her screams for help and ignored them. But, the New Yorker writes, Genovese's neighbors did try to help: They called police, tried to shout at her attacker to scare him off and a woman cradled Genovese in her arms and tried to help her.
Genovese's brother, Bill, is behind a new documentary that is re-examining Kitty's murder and how the world reacted to it. “If the story had been reported more accurately, it still would have been a two- or three-day, maybe even a four-day story, but it would not have been a fifty-year story," one man tells Bill in the documentary, according to the New Yorker. "We would not still be sitting here talking about it today.”
Your Words Hypnotize Me: The story of three teens who died after being hypnotized by their high school principal rocketed around the Internet after being reported by the Sarasota Herald-Tribune. Each family will get $200,000 under the settlement approved by the Sarasota County School District. Two of the teens committed suicide and the third died in a car wreck after he tried to hypnotize himself. An attorney representing the families of the teenagers who died said the principal — now drawing a pension while running a bed-and-breakfast in North Carolina — "altered the underdeveloped brains of teenagers, and they all ended up dead because of it.”
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