Michael Simms: And Jesus Wept
Our friend Christian, an African-American and one of the best men I know, told my wife that when he saw the video of the murder of George Floyd, he wept for hours.
Michelle Bitting: Walls
Worst I had to deal with, well, I suppose that time my son was shut in a padded room and shit himself at the special needs school. He was 13 and having one helluva wiring crisis. I got called to come get him after he graffitied his feces across white walls.
Barrett Swanson: The Soldier and the Soil
Their prose often stood head and shoulders above the standard freshman drivel, exhibiting a certain rigor of thought and depth of feeling that perhaps comes from having witnessed whole anthologies of trauma—entire villages razed by fire, wide-eyed children draped in gore, wives screaming beside mutilated husbands.
W. D. Ehrhart: Paul Fussell — A Remembrance
While Fussell wrote on a wide variety of subjects over his long life—ranging from Augustan humanism, Samuel Johnson, and Kingsley Amis to the 2nd Amendment, the Indianapolis 500, and travel in between-the-wars Europe—war, the irony of war, the suffering and lunacy and permanent damage of war, the unfairness of war, lay at the heart of his writing and of his being.
Doug Anderson: Burning Man
Burning man comes from an instinct and need for carnival, a masking of the respectable self in order to release the animal/imaginative self, but with ritualized decorum and boundaries.
Stephon Alexander: The Physics of Jazz
Physicist Stephon Alexander narrates how he came to understand the parallels between quantum particle theory and jazz composition.
Michael Simms: Ten things I should have figured out before now
Love is complicated. Courtesy is simple. Start with courtesy.
Video: Liberal Redneck | Progress in Rural America
There’s votes to be had, ya’ll.
Lise Ragbir: How Coronavirus Will Shape a Generation
This generation now collectively understands that one’s daily existence can change overnight.
Pilar Lopez-Cantero: Your love story is a narrative that gets written in tandem
By coming to recognise the degree to which overlapping and different narratives shape our expectations in love, we can avoid some of the worst outcomes.
George Yancy: Ahmaud Arbery and the Ghosts of Lynchings Past
As a black man living in Georgia, I am all too aware of the state’s history of lynching.
Joan E. Bauer: W. Eugene Smith in Minamata, Japan 1971
Smith frames: Tomoko Uemura in Her Bath
The mother cradles Tomoko, her misshapen daughter.
Light through a dark window.
A post-modern pietà.
Belle Chesler: This Empire Has No Clothes | In the Classroom That Zoom Built
The gravest and most immediate threat to our most vulnerable students was, and continues to be, hunger. If schools are closed, so is the critical infrastructure that helps keep our nation’s children fed.
Michael Simms: On my recent experience with Covid (maybe)
Yesterday afternoon when I got home from the hospital and booted my computer, I was overwhelmed by the thousands of people who sent me messages of love and encouragement after my recent health scare.
