Fixed Opinions, or The Hinge of History by Joan Didion - A startlingly insightful account of the ideological aftermath of 9/11
The Falling Man by Tom Junod - In the picture, he departs from this earth like an arrow… (now behind a paywall, all the proceeds go to charity!)
Tuesday, and After - John Updike, Jonathan Franzen, Denis Johnson, Roger Angell, Aharon Appelfeld, Rebecca Mead, Susan Sontag, Amitav Ghosh, and Donald Antrim react to the 9/11 atacks
Remains of the Day, an interview Mary Lee Hannell - A New York City mother and Port Authority executive recalls the worst day of her life and the aftermath for herself, her colleagues, and her family
The Worst Day Of My Life Is Now New York’s Hottest Tourist Attraction by Steve Kandell - Nearly 13 years after my sister’s death, a reluctant Sunday visit to the 9/11 Memorial Museum, where public spectacle and private grief have a permanent home together
If You Want To Humble An Empire by Nancy Gibbs - If you want to humble an empire it makes sense to maim its cathedrals…
Life Atop Ground Zero by Rex Sorgatz - Given the option, I would not have chosen to live above The Hole
Monsters by Zadie Smith - Everything changed. Or did it?
9/11: The View From the Midwest by David Foster Wallace - Suddenly everbody has flags out – big flags, small flags, regular flag-size flags
For those who are sitting at home feeling angry and useless and so, so, SO sad (like I am) here are some things you can do. I would add that you can also call your senators and congressmen, or contact Missouri Senators Claire McCaskill (D) and Roy Blunt (R) or even the President and demand they do something to stop the violence. Tell them to protect Ferguson’s citizens’ right to peaceful assembly.
Voices from Tiananmen: Eyewitnesses look back to the spring of 1989
Wednesday marks the 25th anniversary of a brutal military crackdown on pro-democracy protests led by students and residents in Beijing. Hundreds of people were killed and many more were wounded when People’s Liberation Army units rolled into Tiananmen Square, ending more than a month of peaceful protests seeking political reforms.
In the following pages, former government officials, student leaders and other eyewitnesses revisit the momentous events of spring, 1989. These personal accounts, gathered from recent video interviews, as well as memoirs, shed new light on the hope and despair left by those days, which continue to haunt China a quarter century later.
One U.S. Supreme Court justice referred to Netflix as “Netflick.” Another seemed not to know that HBO is a cable channel. A third appeared to think most software coding could be tossed off in a mere weekend.
The people ultimately responsible for making legal rulings in the modern world are often dangerously out-of-touch with it. [via Lawrence Hurley @ Business Insider] (via huffpostpolitics)
"A digital archive recently launched by the Bancroft Library sheds new light on the mass internment of Japanese Americans during World War II and their resettlement immediately following the war.
The Japanese American Evacuation and Resettlement Study Digital Archive is based on interdisciplinary academic research conducted by trained observers reporting from “war relocation centers.” The collection includes nearly 100,000 original manuscript items — among them personal narratives never before made public…”
For more, see Cathy Cockrell, “An Online Archive Sheds Light on WWII Japanese-American Internment,” UC Berkeley News Center (19 May 2014).
“That is part of the beauty of all literature. You discover that your longings are universal longings, that you’re not lonely and isolated from anyone. You belong.”
This is the challenge for us Asians in America. How do you say no to what seems like a compliment? From the very start we don't wish to be rude or inconsiderate. So we stay silent in our guises. We misapply what our parents taught us. I'm as guilty as anyone.
I guess I assumed that a graduate program full of artists dedicated to seeing beyond the world’s masks would be better on the race front—that despite all my previous experience with white-majority institutions the workshop would be an exception. What can I tell you? In those days I must have needed that little fantasy, that little hope that somewhere shit might be better.
Like I said: I was young.
Let me begin by telling you that I was in love. An ordinary statement, to be sure, but not an ordinary fact, for so few of us learn that love is tenderness, and tenderness is not, as a fair proportion suspect, pity; and still fewer know that hapiness in love is not the absolute focusing of all emotion in another: one has always to love a good many things which the beloved must come only to symbolize; the true beloveds of this world are in their lovers’s eyes lilac opening, ship lights, school bells, a landscape, remembered conversations, friends, a child’s Sunday, lost voices, one’s favourite suit, autumn and all seasons, memory, yes, it being the earth and water of existence, memory.
Truman Capote, Other Voices, Other Rooms (via bookmania)
Tomorrow is May 2nd, the day the battle of Hogwarts 15 years ago. The day that Harry, Ron and Hermione snuck back into Hogwarts and destroyed the Horcruxes. The day that Harry finally defeated Voldemort. We remember everyone who fought in the war and all those who died. Fred Weasley, Nymphadora Tonks, Remus Lupin, Colin Creevey, Severus Snape and more. May we raise our wands to those who fought and died. Remember, remember May 2nd 1998.
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