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I had to stage a protest. And the best way I knew how was through my appearance. My fellow classmates would see me, I thought, and back off. They would know I came from a different world, Fresh-Prince-style.

I should note, I wasn't a particularly intimidating 14-year-old. For middle school dances, I wore jumpers and turtlenecks.

But for the first day of high school, I decided I was going to rep the flatlands.

I kept the outfit simple, Fonzian even: a white tee, blue jeans, spotless Nikes and a jean jacket. But the pice de rsistance would be on top: with the help of my best friend Maria and her younger sister Chrystal, I did my hair up in cornrows.

I just needed to convey a single message on the first day of high school: Look, rich kids, I'm not here to make friends. I'm just here to get an education and get out.

My plan backfired.

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The legislative process on Capitol Hill is often slow and grinding. There are committee hearings, filibuster threats and hours of floor debate. But sometimes, when Congress really wants to get something done, it can move blindingly fast.

That's what happened when Congress moved to undo large parts of a popular law known as the STOCK Act last week.

A year ago, President Obama signed the Stop Trading on Congressional Knowledge Act into law at a celebratory ceremony attended by a bipartisan cast of lawmakers.

"I want to thank all the members of Congress who came together and worked to get this done," he said.

The law wouldn't just outlaw trading on non-public information by members of Congress, the executive branch and their staffs. It would greatly expand financial disclosures and make all of the data searchable so insider trading and conflicts of interest would be easier to detect.

It's All Politics

Insider-Trading Ban Passes Congress, But Some See Missed Opportunity

A computer glitch in the reservations system at American Airlines caused all of the carrier's flights to be grounded for at least two hours on Tuesday.

"American's reservation and booking tool, Sabre is offline," American Airlines spokeswoman Mary Frances Fagan told Reuters in an email. "We're working to resolve the issue as quickly as we can. We apologize to our customers for any inconvenience."

NPR's Wade Goodwyn reports that the outage was announced about 2:30 p.m. Eastern time.

On Twitter, American wrote: "We're currently unable to modify today's reservations. However, when able, we'll offer refunds or update travel at no charge." It said flights would be held at airports until at least 5 p.m. ET.

In the next few hours, thousands of passengers were stuck on planes and in terminals as American worked frantically to get their network system back online. By 4:30 p.m., Goodwyn reports, passengers were again boarding flights.

According to The New York Times, the outage with the reservation system meant that gate agents could not print boarding passes.

"Sabre, meanwhile, said the issue did not come from its own computer systems. Other airlines, including Southwest Airlines and JetBlue, use Sabre and have not experienced any outages, said Nancy St. Pierre, a spokeswoman for Sabre.

"At Dallas-Forth Worth International Airport, thousands of passengers were stranded waiting for flights, some of which were being canceled. Some passengers described being stuck for long stretches on planes on the runway unable to take off or, having landed, initially unable to get to a gate."

She's in Finland now, getting her Ph.D. at the University of Jyvaskyla, but before that, when she was in Adelaide, Australia, she studied elevator behavior. Rebekah Rousi hung around two tall office towers in town, riding elevators up and down day after day, looking for patterns. When a bunch of people get into an elevator, she wondered, do they segregate in any predictable way? Do tall ones stand in the back? Do men stand in different places than women? Who looks where? She says she wasn't expecting or even predicting a particular configuration, but she found one.

Over and over, she noticed that older "more senior men in particular seem to direct themselves towards the back of the elevator cabins."

Younger men took up the middle ground.

And in the front, facing the doors, backs to the guys, stood "women of all ages."

She's not sure why. It wasn't segregation by height. It wasn't age, since older and younger women co-mingled. Clearly, the people in the back had the advantage of seeing everybody in the cabin, while people in the front had no idea who was behind them. Could there be a curiosity difference? A predatory difference?

There was a second pattern, one that broke along gender lines. "Men," she wrote, "looked in the side mirrors and the door mirrors" to openly check out the other passengers, and/or themselves.

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