Vox Sentences: Ahmed Mohamed just learned the most important lesson for young brown men

A 14-year-old arrested for making an electronic clock; a last-minute execution stay; and another GOP debate.

Vox Sentences is written by Dylan Matthews and Dara Lind.

TOP NEWS

Ahmed Mohamed built a clock. You’ll never believe what happened next.

Prajwol/Ru

• Yesterday, 14-year-old Ahmed Mohamed brought a homemade clock to school to show off to his engineering teacher. His English teacher thought it was a bomb. Ahmed ended up getting handcuffed and arrested.

  [Dallas News / Avi Selk]

• The photo says it all: a 14-year-old geek in a NASA shirt, a pair of handcuffs, and an expression of dawning horror as he realizes that much of America fears people like him.

  [Anil Dash via Twitter]

• The school district, police department and mayor all reacted by basically saying "better to be safe than sorry," which is pathetic but also what happens when your schools become obsessed with security (as Libby Nelson explains).

  [Vox / Libby Nelson]

• But everyone else on the planet is siding with Ahmed. #IStandWithAhmed was trending even before President Obama invited him to the White House — but the invitation certainly opened the floodgates.

  [Barack Obama via Twitter]

• Tech #brands also jumped to send Ahmed encouragement — something that, by the time Twitter literally offered the 14-year-old would-be robotics engineer an internship at their social-media company, stopped looking like a goodwill cheering-up gesture and more like a plea for some easy good publicity.

  [Twitter via Twitter via Twitter]

• For those of you who are not Ahmed but still interested in technology, Wired will teach you "How To Make Your Own Homemade Clock That Isn't A Bomb."

  [Wired / Marcus Wohlsen]

• Ahmed himself, meanwhile, has learned the single most important lesson a young brown man can learn in America: never talk to the cops without a lawyer present.

  [YouTube]

Richard Glossip has two more weeks to live

Mike Simons/Getty Images

• Three hours before Oklahoma was scheduled to execute Richard Glossip, the state's Court of Criminal Appeals issued an emergency stay postponing the execution until September 30.

  [DocumentCloud via The Frontier]

• The court is giving itself two weeks to look over the new evidence Glossip's lawyers submitted earlier this week — including affidavits testifying that the key witness against Glossip admitted he lied.

  [The Intercept / Liliana Segura]

• Glossip's attorney told the press that upon hearing the news, Glossip started jumping up and down, pounding on the glass and yelling "Yes!"

  [Huffington Post / Kim Bellware and Cristian Farias]

• Lawyers are also trying to challenge Oklahoma's decision to execute Glossip with midazolam, the controversial drug whose use the Supreme Court just upheld. Glossip's lawyers claim they've found pharmacies that will compound phenobarbital — the relatively painless alternative that Oklahoma and other states used before European export restrictions cut off the supply.

  [The Frontier / Ziva Branstetter]

• Two weeks isn't much time. And it's unlikely that any evidence will emerge that would definitively prove Glossip's innocence. As Dara explains, that problem is at the heart of this case: exoneration can stop an execution, but can simple uncertainty?

  [Vox / Dara Lind]

• That said, Glossip's case is also a demonstration of another important death-penalty principle: sometimes, important evidence comes to light only after several years of scrutiny after a conviction is granted. That's bad news for death-row prisoners. It might be even worse news for people serving life sentences — who don't get the same level of post-conviction scrutiny.

  [Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences / Samuel R. Gross et al.]

Somehow, the second GOP debate has even more candidates than the first one did

Justin Sullivan/Getty Images

• Here are the five biggest differences between tonight's Republican presidential primary debate, hosted by CNN, and the first one, hosted by Fox News:

• 1) Even the cord-cutters can watch it! CNN.com is streaming the debate from 8p-11p ET.

  [CNN.com]

• 2) Carly Fiorina is in it! Under CNN's original qualifying rules, the lineup would have been identical to the first Republican debate. Thanks to a late rule tweak, however, they're adding Fiorina — who's experienced a slight poll boost after being the undisputed winner of the "consolation debate" last time — to the debate stage.

  [Vox / Andrew Prokop]

• 3) Ben Carson is now a strong second in the polls! After his performance in the last debate, he's won the support of a solid 20 percent or more of voters.

  [RealClearPolitics]

• 4) Jeb Bush's campaign is totally flailing! Donald Trump calls him low-energy. The media pretty much agrees. And this ad from his Super PAC is pretty terrible.

  [Politico / Eliza Collins and Daniel Strauss]

• 5) Conservative groups are running attack ads against Donald Trump now! The Club for Growth — a pretty significant conservative pressure group — is going to war with Trump in Iowa over Trump's support for entitlements and raising taxes on the rich.

  [Vox / Andrew Prokop]

• 6) Even the candidates think it's going to be too long!

  [Vox / Sarah Kliff]

MISCELLANEOUS

At Fan Expo Canada, a meeting with Gillian Anderson will cost you $91. Malcolm McDowell's $74. Karen Gillen's $80. There's a big price list and everything, and it's super-depressing. [The Walrus / Jonathan Kay]

• Today in great frequent flyer mile hacks: in June, Avis offered 5,000 miles per car rental, regardless of rental length. So one hero rented 37 cars in two days and wracked up 185,000 miles.

  [FlyerTalk]

• A beach in Chicago was overtaken by corgis this past weekend. There are photos.

  [Curbed / AJ LaTrace]

• The amount of time 15-24 year olds spend attending or hosting social events on weekends and holidays fell 40 percent from 2003 to 2014.

  [NYT / Teddy Wayne]

• Venmo scams are shockingly easy to pull off.

  [Slate / Alison Griswold]

VERBATIM

"When I asked Irfan how he made sense of the experience of being accused and released, he said, 'Did you ever see the ‘Seinfeld’ finale?'" [New Yorker / Evan Osnos]

• "The history of gin in England reads something like the history of high-fructose corn syrup in the United States: bad policy designed to enrich agricultural interests wreaks havoc on the health of the urban poor, who can then be castigated for the error of their ways."

  [The Toast / Siobhan Phillips]

• "Feminist criticism isn’t about ripping something to shreds or making others feel guilty for liking it. It’s simply about pointing out a specific creative weakness and then taking that a step further to explain the real-world social ramifications of that weakness, all in the hopes of dissuading future filmmakers from making the same mistake."

  [AV Club / Caroline Siede]

• "You're probably right that it was published in 1955, but that would make it difficult to explain how I read it at Sciences Po in 1949."

  [Stanley Hoffman via Vox / Yascha Mounk]

• "His whole personality seemed designed to be filmed by an awful college student."

  [Anonymous to NY Mag / Anna Breslaw]

WATCH THIS

Vox / Estelle Caswell

• 9 facts about medical errors you should know before entering a hospital

  [YouTube / Sarah Kliff and Estelle Caswell]

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