So sometime not long before they went underground and started working in earnest to overthrow the United States government, Weatherman—the radical revolutionary fringe faction of Students for a Democratic Society—put together a songbook. Yes, a songbook.

And it wasn’t a collection of old activist songs, either. There were no union hymns or indigenous folk songs. It was a book of song parodies.

As best as I can figure out the Weatherman Songbook was written for the group’s December 1969 “War Council,” the six-day meeting at which the group formally endorsed a strategy of armed struggle against the government. It consisted of a dozen parodies of pop songs and show tunes, each given revolutionary lyrics.

“White Christmas” became “White Riot.” “Stop in the Name of Love” became “Stop Your Imperialist Plunder.” And in honor of North Korea’s dictator, “Maria” from West Side Story turned into this:

Kim Il Sung

I just met a Marxist-Leninist named Kim Il Sung

And suddenly his line

Seems so correct and fine

To me.

The Weatherman Songbook has always been a weird touchstone to me—an indelible artifact of an astonishing moment in American activist history when violent domestic rebellion and dorky rewrites of old Supremes songs could somehow go hand in hand. So wrong, so dumb, and yet somehow adorable.

Anyway, I recently read a memoir by Weather veteran Cathy Wilkerson. Sharp, insightful, passionate, critical. Great book. And she mentioned in passing something I’d never known: Who wrote the songbook.

And it turns out it was Ted Gold.

Ted Gold was a New York City kid. Born and raised on the Upper West Side, child of a doctor and a schoolteacher. In the early sixties his dad visited Mississippi to volunteer medical services for the civil rights movement, and Ted started a Friends of SNCC group at Stuyvesant, the city’s best public high school for really smart kids.

Gold went to Columbia after Stuyvesant, and joined SDS there. He did tutoring with Harlem kids in his spare time, and wound up becoming a teacher. He stayed involved in SDS after graduation, helping to organize a short-lived spinoff, Teachers for a Democratic Society.

And on March 6, 1970, he died in the Weather townhouse explosion in Greenwich Village, when one of his comrades touched two wires together while assembling a bomb.

The sixties were so weird.

Fifty years ago today a front-page article in the New York Times turned the Kitty Genovese murder into one of the central myths of contemporary urban society. In The New Inquiry this morning, I take a look at the ways in which new research has rendered the Times account unsupportable.

An excerpt:

Karl Ross heard the first attack — at least he heard screaming. Then the screams died down and for a few minutes he heard nothing. But soon he heard other sounds, sounds coming from the lobby of his own building. Genovese had staggered there after Moseley had been scared off, but he had tracked her down. In the foyer, away from the eyes of the community, he was attacking her again. Now Ross was the only one who could hear. He hesitated, then opened the door to his apartment. He saw Genovese being attacked, just a flight of stairs away. He looked into her eyes, and those of her attacker. And then he closed the door.

Unlike Fink, Ross didn’t go to bed after witnessing the attack. He called a friend, asking for advice. When that friend told him to stay out of it, he called another. That friend told him to come over to her house, and he did — climbing out his window to avoid the scene in the lobby. When he got there that friend called a third, who called the police. The cops arrived a few minutes later.

When the Times reported on the murder, it was Ross’s feeble explanation to the police — “I didn’t want to get involved” — that summed up the story. His reaction was portrayed as nonchalant, brazen. But what the Times didn’t say was that Ross was involved. He knew Kitty Genovese. They were friends. He had recognized her when he saw her being stabbed in his lobby. By one account, she had called him by name.

So why didn’t he act more quickly?

We don’t know for sure. Ross never gave a detailed public account of his actions, and was never called to testify at the trial. He moved away not long after the murder, and soon disappeared entirely. But we do know a few things about Ross. We know that he was a drunk, and that he was drunk that night. We also know that he was gay, that he was closeted, and that he was afraid of the police. For Ross, cops weren’t just a potential source of assistance. They were also a potential threat.

Read the whole thing here.

Twitter is a public space, says Gawker, and conversations you have in public spaces are public. You want private? Take it to email, or text, or phone.

Seems legit. But apply this rule to the offline world, and it falls apart pretty quickly. Don’t want me butting into the conversation you’re having in a coffee shop? Take it to a hotel. Don’t want me snarking on that phone call about your cancer diagnosis? Talk quieter. Don’t want me putting your reaction to the car accident that killed your kid on YouTube? Grieve when you get home.

The reality is that the boundary between private acts and public acts is blurry, and always has been. People do private stuff in public all the time, and while we often have a legal right to violate the privacy of those moments, mostly we don’t, because it’s understood that we shouldn’t. It’s understood that it’s a jerky thing to do.

Is Twitter different? Maybe. In some ways it is. Certainly it’s generally simpler to snoop on people’s private conversations on Twitter than it is in meatspace — simpler not just because it’s easy to do, but also because it’s easy to do without getting caught. And while tweets aren’t more public than a loud conversation on a movie theater line, they are more massively public — they’re potentially visible to a lot more people.

Only potentially, though. To make them actually visible beyond their intended audience requires action — someone other than the speaker has to do something. Someone has to search or stalk or retweet. Unless they do, the actual audience is the intended audience, or some subset of it.

As someone who sometimes butts in on strangers’ Twitter conversations, and who sometimes writes about the stuff he reads on Twitter, the question I ask before hitting send isn’t whether I have a legal right to jump in (I assume I do, though I’ve never given the issue much thought) but whether the people I’m barging in on have an expectation of privacy, or might.

To see what I mean, let’s take it back to the offline world for a minute.

I speak on campuses and at student conferences pretty often. (I’m on my way to one as I write this, as it happens.) When I get up behind a podium at an event like that, what I say is presumptively public. If there’s a reporter there, what I say is fair game for quoting without permission or notice. Folks can and do take photos, even video, and put them up online without asking.

But what if I go out for dinner with some of my hosts afterwards? What if a student newspaper reporter happens to be along? Can they record our conversation without my knowledge? Can they quote what I say without asking, without even identifying themselves? My gut tells me no. Not, again, as a matter of law. Just as a matter of basic decency. A casual dinner isn’t a public event in the way a speech is, even if there was an open invitation to attend. Both are public, but one is more public than the other, and I’d consider it really inappropriate for someone to report on a meal the way they’d report on a speech.

And here’s something interesting: I absolutely wouldn’t have a problem with someone who was at the dinner tweeting something I said. I think that’s because the audience for such a tweet strikes me as semi-private in the same way as the dinner itself — you can talk to your friends about what happens at dinner, so why shouldn’t you use low-volume social media to do the same thing?

I could go on like this indefinitely, laying out hypotheticals and trying to tease out the underlying principles. But that wouldn’t be particularly helpful, because ultimately I’m not trying to establish rules. There isn’t consensus on this stuff, and there isn’t going to be. Twitter is a public space where people sometimes have private or semi-private conversations, and sometimes inserting yourself into those conversations is sometimes going to be okay and sometimes it’s going to be a real jerk move.

So how can you avoid being a jerk in such situations? I can think of a few issues to bear in mind:

1. Audience.

Is the public you’re bringing the material to much larger than the one it was intended for? Is it culturally distant from the original? Is it likely to be hostile? If the answer to any of these questions is yes, take a moment to mull before signal-boosting.

2. Author.

Is the person you’re boosting a public figure? A longtime tweeter? An adult? How many followers do they have? How much information do they share about themselves in their Twitter profile? What do you know about their expectations of privacy?

3. Content.

Is the material you’re thinking about broadcasting a goofy joke or something more personal? Most people will be a lot happier to see their Divergent macro on Buzzfeed than their ugly opinions about their grandmother’s birthday party.

4. Consequences.

What are the chances that the person you’re shoving up on the soapbox will suffer because of what you’ve done? Are they likely to be stalked or flamed? Could they lose a job or get kicked out of their house or flunk a class? Might you be sharing information with the world that they haven’t shared with their parents?

5. Motive.

Why are you sharing this stuff? Is it for their benefit? Is it to embarrass them? Is it for page-clicks and page-clicks alone? What’s the goal? What are you trying to achieve?

6. Consent.

Do you have permission to share the material? Would you likely get it if you asked? If you do, or would, have consent, is that consent grounded in the same understanding of the potential consequences of publication that you have?

These are the kind of questions I ask myself when I’m deciding whether to retweet something, or to write about something I’ve stumbled across on social media. None of them are decisive in isolation, and most of them don’t lend themselves to simple rule-making. But taken together they give me a sense of whether what I’ve got in mind is justifiable.

And yeah, I use a similar calculation when I’m evaluating the decisions that other authors make. And while I can respect people who weigh the answers differently than I do, if you’re not engaging with issues like these at all? Yeah, I kind of think you’re a jerk.

The New Republic has a story out mocking and condemning what it describes as a trend toward the use of mandatory “trigger warnings” in college classes.

I don’t have time for a full post on this subject right now, but as I said on Twitter a few moments ago, while I’ve never given a trigger warning by that name, I do make a point of mentioning to  my students at the start of the semester the fact that my courses sometimes address horrific and difficult subjects. Beyond that, I spend a lot of time thinking about how I prepare my students for traumatic material in class, and about how I present that material. Classrooms can be traumatizing environments, and it’s appropriate for professors to consider how to ameliorate that possibility.

After I logged off of Twitter, I got to thinking about whether it would be appropriate for me to address the subject of potentially traumatic subjects in the syllabus, and what an attempt to do so might look like. Here’s what I came up with:

“At times during this semester we may be discussing historical events that may be disturbing, even traumatizing. If you ever feel the need to step outside before or during one of these discussions, either for a short time or for the rest of the class session, you may always do so without academic penalty. If you ever wish to discuss your personal reactions to this material, either with the class or with me afterwards, I welcome such discussion as an appropriate part of our coursework.”

That’s just a very early first draft. I don’t know for sure that I’m going to incorporate this into syllabi going forward, but it’s a whack at the problem at least.

I’m interested to know what y’all think, and to see other examples, if you know of any.

Update | Having mulled it a bit, I believe I will include language along these general lines in future syllabi. This is no longer a hypothetical, in other words—it’s something I’m going to do. Again, I’d very much welcome reactions and suggestions.

Second Update | On Twitter, @AgentStarrk asks whether students who stepped out of a class under such circumstances would be responsible for the material they missed. It’s a good question, and the answer is yes, the same as if they were absent for any other reason. The “without academic penalty” phrasing is ambiguous, though—I’ll have to tweak it a bit.

Campus activists who bantered about raping the president of the University of Ottawa student union are threatening to sue her after their comments were distributed to others in the campus community.

Early last month, Student Federation of the University of Ottawa president Anne-Marie Roy received screenshots of a chat that took place among several of her political opponents. In the chat, which took place during the most recent campus elections, five male students joke about orally and anally raping Roy in the student union offices, call her a “shit-eater,” and exchange other scatological and sexual taunts at her expense.

Roy went on to win the election.

As a blogger at The Belle Jar put it,

“This is the type of thing that’s said about women in positions of power – not a critique of their policies, but a threat of sexual violence. Not a comment on how they do their job, but graphic fantasies about how they should be sexually degraded. Nothing about their intelligence or capability, just a string of jokes about how riddled with venereal disease they are. This is misogyny, pure and simple. This is slut-shaming. This is rape culture.”

The students, two of whom sit on the Student Federation board with Roy, have not denied the veracity of the screenshots. Although the five initially sent Roy a letter of apology, three — Bart Tremblay, Alexandre Giroux and Michel Fournier-Simard — have said that they are contemplating legal action in response to the distribution of the images. A motion to condemn the students that was brought forward at last week’s meeting of the Federation board was tabled after Roy was served with what one student newspaper called “a cease and desist letter…telling her to not distribute the content of the emails.”

The screenshots were made public after the meeting, and a Facebook page demanding the five students’ resignation from their campus positions currently has nearly two hundred members.

Update | I wrote last year about the need for student organizations  to develop robust policies on sexual harassment. While it’s not clear that this incident, which involved a private conversation, would be covered under such a policy, the importance of creating them is always worth reiterating.

March 2 Update | The four men who were elected representatives in the student federation or its clubs have resigned their positions. In a statement released today Anne-Marie Roy said that as far as she is aware, the three who had threatened to sue are still contemplating legal action. You can read Roy’s lengthy and compelling statement here.

March 4 Update | The students have apparently dropped their threat of legal action against Roy. Meanwhile, the university’s entire hockey team has been suspended in the wake of reports that team members participated in a group sexual assault of a woman last month.