This week, at least 30 people died when a packed sailboat ran aground and capsized off the coast of the Bahamas, about 250 miles southeast of Miami. The rest of the migrants onboard clung onto that splintered boat for hours until the U.S. Coast Guard found them. The survivors are being cared for at the Coral Harbor Royal Bahamian military base until they are sent back to the place they risked their lives to leave. They were Haitians fleeing their island for America. By the time they were found, they'd been at sea for eight or nine days, and had run out of food and water. Many were severely dehydrated. Professional smugglers stuff people onto boats like so many sacks, with only the food and water they might be able to carry and no life jackets. That's according to U.S. Coast Guard Lt. Comm. Gabe Somma. " are ruthless," the commander says. "They don't care about safety, they only care about making money." The number of Haitians caught by the Coast Guard crossing the Mona Passage, between the Dominican Republic and Puerto Rico, has soared this year. More than 2,000 have died so far this year. Coast Guard Chief Petty Officer Ryan Doss told the Miami Herald, "every year we see hundreds of migrants needlessly lose their lives at sea ... And those are just the ones officials are aware of." And, Comm. Somma adds, "we don't know how many people die out there on the open water." Marleine Bastien, the director of Haitian Women of Miami, told the SunSentinel newspaper that increasingly harsh conditions in Haiti are causing more people to risk their lives to try to leave. Thousands of Haitians are still living in tents, nearly four years after a crushing earthquake. "The cholera outbreak continues to create havoc there," she says. "It's still active, it's still killing people." But how many earthquakes and typhoons, not to mention typhoid and cholera outbreaks, have struck the world over the last four years? Haiti is no longer at the center of world attention, and thousands of Haitians choose to put their lives in the hands of criminals and dangerous waters to try to get in to the United States. The hope of America is still a beacon that pulls people to our shores. Of course it's illegal to enter the United States this way and try to work and stay. But in this week in which we give thanks for freedom and plenty, we might want to remind ourselves that some of the first Americans became American by risking their lives to sail across rough seas. [Copyright 2013 NPR]Fresh Air Weekend highlights some of the best interviews and reviews from past weeks, and new program elements specially paced for weekends. Our weekend show emphasizes interviews with writers, filmmakers, actors, and musicians, and often includes excerpts from live in-studio concerts. This week: Anjelica Huston Tells Her 'Story' Of Growing Up With A Director Dad: The actor's new memoir, A Story Lately Told, ends just as her Hollywood career is taking off. It covers her early life growing up in Ireland, the daughter of Maltese Falcon director John Huston. The two first collaborated on 1969's Walk With Love And Death, a project that proved disastrous for their relationship. Across 'Nebraska,' On A Journey That Goes Beyond The Trip: Critic David Edelstein calls the film, in which an elderly man sets out to claim a million-dollar sweepstakes prize, a "superb balancing act" from director Alexander Payne. Don't Stuff The Turkey And Other Tips From 'America's Test Kitchen': Jack Bishop and Bridget Lancaster of the public TV series share tips for buying, seasoning and cooking a turkey (hint: bigger isn't necessarily better, keep lots of salt around, and give the bird a break before carving). They also give advice on how to make some of their favorite side dishes. You can listen to the original interviews here: Anjelica Huston Tells Her 'Story' Of Growing Up With A Director Dad Across 'Nebraska,' On A Journey That Goes Beyond The Trip Don't Stuff The Turkey And Other Tips From 'America's Test Kitchen' [Copyright 2013 NPR]Researchers recently took data from the Facebook app Are You Interested and found that not only is race a factor in our online dating interests, but particular races get disproportionately high and low amounts of interest. Of the 2.4 million heterosexual interactions researchers reviewed, the findings show: Women get three times the interactions men do. All men seemed to be more interested in people outside their race. Black men and women get the lowest response rates to their messages. All women except black women are most drawn to white men, and men of all races (with one notable exception) prefer Asian women. The business site Quartz graphed these preferences using data on the percentage of "yes" responses to the "Are you interested?" question on the app. The data suggest some uncomfortable stories about racial preferences in online dating. Back in 2009, the folks over at OKCupid culled through the site's data and similarly found that race played a big role in who would respond to messages, with some similar (and a few different) findings. Some quick facts from the OKCupid data: Black women respond the most. White men get more replies from almost every group. White women prefer white men; Asian and Latina women prefer them "even more exclusively." We have a conversation about the data, below, and invite you to join in too. (And if you're, um, interested in this topic, don't miss this recent conversation about it hosted by Michel Martin of NPR's Tell Me More.) Kat Chow: What's remarkable to me is that, according to that study, most men respond to Asian women except Asian men. For a while now, we've heard of the (popularized? stereotyped?) plight of Asian men lamenting about how Asian women mostly date white guys, with videos like Wong Fu's "Yellow Fever." That stuff's not new. But why haven't we heard more about the dating preferences of Asian men? Here's the bit from Quartz that's been fodder for some discussion: "Unfortunately the data reveal winners and losers. All men except Asians preferred Asian women, while all except black women preferred white men." And in case any of y'all missed it, Fusion had this hilarious interview with "Are You Interested" creator Josh Fischer and comedian Kristina Wong on Alicia Menendez Tonight. Elise Hu: So one of my reactions to the disproportionate popularity of Asian women is, I don't see troves of men flocking to Asian women in the offline world. I wonder to what extent there's something about finding Asian women attractive online but not in "real life." Is this a preference revealed by online dating, or changed in some way by it? How would, say, the "mask" of screens affect our preferences? Kat: Maybe. Maybe the "mask" of screens empowers/emboldens users to pursue the type of people they might not encounter in real life. But to your point about not seeing troves of men flocking to Asian women: I dunno, I feel like I see a strong "preference" for Asian women in real life. (I put "preference" in quotes, because I think there's a very fine line that teeters between preferences and fetishization, but that could be a whole other conversation.) Elise: I actually do think there must be some of the Asian fetishization, er, "yellow fever" at play here. This just really gets in my craw, because it becomes a problem for the Asian women Am I just loved because I'm part of an ethnic group that's assumed to be subservient, or do I have actual value as an individual, or is it both? and it's a problem for men who love them Is my husband only with me 'cause he's a creepster who makes certain assumptions about me and my race, or can he legitimately be attracted to me as an individual? The results of this study only perpetuate social problems for both sexes involved. On the flip side, it's glaring how much everybody prefers white guys and doesn't respond to black men and women. And white men never have to question whether they're attractive to others because of a fetish, that's for sure. Kat: Dating as an Asian woman is sort of like this: So another study about online dating and how people self-segregate on the interwebs started floating around this month. Kevin Lewis, a researcher at the University of California, San Diego, looked at more than 125,000 new OKCupid users in a 2-1/2-month period. He saw that most people didn't reach out to potential suitors who were outside their race or ethnicity, and if they did, they were less likely to get a response. But the researcher noticed that people who were contacted by someone of a different race on OKCupid were more likely to initiate contact or interact with someone of that race later on. Elise: So where does that leave us, now? The connective tissue appears to be that race definitely matters when it comes to online dating. And that general idea is not necessarily something to get our backs up about, since even studies on babies indicate we might be wired to prefer our "in groups" to whatever we perceive as "out groups." (A Yale study of babies showed the infants that prefer Cheerios over graham crackers favored their fellow Cheerios-lovers and were not as nice to graham cracker fans.) But the question that I'd like to see people get at is the difference between the online and offline worlds when it comes to these preferences. Or: differences between the preferences this app's users and other online dating communities. Maybe this is an app just for weirdos who love Asian chicks and don't love black women? I am annoyed for the black women who seem to be clearly getting discriminated against by these online picture-scanners. And speaking from an Asian woman point of view, I found my time in the analog dating world to be one in which men clearly favored white women or Latinas. I am really skeptical about the odds being ever in my favor, to borrow a Hunger Games line. Kat: I think with all these new apps rolling in, we're going to learn more about relationships and preferences. I'm just looking to get my hands on a study that delves deeply into racial preferences so if anybody knows of one, holler at me! Elise: Yep, if this little exploration leads me to any conclusion, it's a skepticism of data from one particular dating app, since these are going to vary community by community, and I'd like to see a lot more aggregate data before getting too uncomfortable about the results. It could be that the Are You Interested dating community is just a weirdly skewed world, and now we're extrapolating all this meaning into it. To be continued ... [Copyright 2013 NPR] |