Monday evening roundup

David Remnick's excellent piece on Israeli politics reminds me of a short comic film I saw years ago. The filmmaker, in response to accusations that he was oversimplifying and/or making light of a bad situation, said that the Israeli-Palestinian has been mired in despair from within and indifference from the rest of the world because people are just overwhelmed by the hopelessness and complexity, respectively. To revive the attention of the general public, which has reflexively zoned out, it doesn't hurt to humanize the issue in a light story that brings it back to the level of people. In that context, consider the falafel peace truck.

While we're on the New Yorker, there are lots of disturbing angles in Rachel Aviv's piece on child pornography and predictors of abuse, one of which is that the criminal justice system is apparently rife with singlism. Did you know that it's a bad sign to never have been in a live-in relationship for over two years?

When relying only on clinical interviews, mental-health professionals predict dangerous behavior at a rate not much better than chance. To determine John’s risk of committing a new sex crime, Ferraro used an actuarial instrument, the Static-99, and concluded that John was in the “high range of risk.” The tool... places individuals in classes of risk based on ten factors correlated with recidivism, including age, whether the defendant has ever had a live-in relationship that lasted at least two years, and whether his victims were strangers.

Wow.

Speaking of wow: Metro, someone's been having a good, drunk time on your trains.