{"id":181591,"date":"2016-05-10T19:17:00","date_gmt":"2016-05-11T00:17:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/2016\/05\/10\/al-gebra-terrorist-operative-uncovered-on-american-airlines-flight\/"},"modified":"2016-05-10T19:17:00","modified_gmt":"2016-05-11T00:17:00","slug":"al-gebra-terrorist-operative-uncovered-on-american-airlines-flight","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/2016\/05\/10\/al-gebra-terrorist-operative-uncovered-on-american-airlines-flight\/","title":{"rendered":"Al-Gebra Terrorist Operative Uncovered on American Airlines Flight"},"content":{"rendered":"

My bad, not Al-Gebra, Algebra<\/span><\/b>.<\/p>\n

It turns that an award winning economist of Italian descent was ethnically profiled for doing mathematics for a talk that he was going to give<\/a>:<\/p>\n

On Thursday evening, a 40-year-old man \u2014 with dark, curly hair, olive skin and an exotic foreign accent \u2014 boarded a plane. It was a regional jet making a short, uneventful hop from Philadelphia to nearby Syracuse.<\/span>

<\/span>Or so dozens of unsuspecting passengers thought.<\/span>

<\/span>The curly-haired man tried to keep to himself, intently if inscrutably scribbling on a notepad he\u2019d brought aboard. His seatmate, a blond-haired, 30-something woman sporting flip-flops and a red tote bag, looked him over. He was wearing navy Diesel jeans and a red Lacoste sweater \u2013 a look he would later describe as \u201csimple elegance\u201d \u2013 but something about him didn\u2019t seem right to her.<\/span>

<\/span>\u2026\u2026\u2026<\/span>

<\/span>Then, for unknown reasons, the plane turned around and headed back to the gate. The woman was soon escorted off the plane. On the intercom a crew member announced that there was paperwork to fill out, or fuel to refill, or some other flimsy excuse; the curly-haired passenger could not later recall exactly what it was.<\/span>

<\/span>The wait continued.<\/span>

<\/span>Finally the pilot came by, and approached the real culprit behind the delay: that darkly-complected foreign man. He was now escorted off the plane, too, and taken to meet some sort of agent, though he wasn\u2019t entirely sure of the agent\u2019s affiliation, he would later say.<\/span>

<\/span>And then the big reveal: The woman wasn\u2019t really sick at all! Instead this quick-thinking traveler had Seen Something, and so she had Said Something. <\/span>

<\/span>That Something she\u2019d seen had been her seatmate\u2019s cryptic notes, scrawled in a script she didn\u2019t recognize. Maybe it was code, or some foreign lettering, possibly the details of a plot to destroy the dozens of innocent lives aboard American Airlines Flight 3950. She may have felt it her duty to alert the authorities just to be safe. The curly-haired man was, the agent informed him politely, suspected of terrorism. <\/span>

<\/span>The curly-haired man laughed. <\/span>

<\/span>He laughed because those scribbles weren\u2019t Arabic, or another foreign language, or even some special secret terrorist code. They were math. <\/span>

<\/span>Yes, math. A differential equation, to be exact. <\/span>

<\/span>Had the crew or security members perhaps quickly googled this good-natured, bespectacled passenger before waylaying everyone for several hours, they might have learned that he \u2014 Guido Menzio<\/a> \u2014 is a young but decorated Ivy League economist. And that he\u2019s best known for his relatively technical work on search theory, which helped earn him a tenured associate professorship at the University of Pennsylvania as well as stints at Princeton and Stanford\u2019s Hoover Institution.<\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

We are a nation of panicked cowards, soiling ourselves at the smallest provocation.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

My bad, not Al-Gebra, Algebra. It turns that an award winning economist of Italian descent was ethnically profiled for doing mathematics for a talk that he was going to give: On Thursday evening, a 40-year-old man \u2014 with dark, curly hair, olive skin and an exotic foreign accent \u2014 boarded a plane. It was a …<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[967,982,1076,1035,979],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-181591","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-bigotry","category-stupid","category-terrorism","category-transportation","category-wanker"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/181591"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=181591"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/181591\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=181591"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=181591"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=181591"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}