Srebrenica, Harper Lee, Swimming, Motherhood, Ta-Nehisi Coates, The Awl
Dutch Grapple With Shame Of Srebrenica
Duncan Robinson | Financial Times | 10th July 2015 | | Read with 1Pass
Twenty years after the Srebrenica massacre, the shame and anger endures. When the Dutch government invites a party of Bosnian victims' relatives to Amsterdam, a tour of Anne Frank House triggers "strong emotions" among the visitors: "Now we see what happened with Srebrenica. You delivered us into the hands of the killers, the way you delivered the Jews to the Germans in WWII! You did not learn shit in the second world war!" (860 words)
Harper Lee’s New Novel: The First Chapter
Harper Lee | Guardian | 10th July 2015
"Home was Maycomb County, a gerrymander some seventy miles long and spreading thirty miles at its widest point, a wilderness dotted with tiny settlements the largest of which was Maycomb, the county seat. Until comparatively recently in its history, Maycomb County was so cut off from the rest of the nation that some of its citizens, unaware of the South’s political predilections over the past ninety years, still voted Republican" (3,800 words)
The Fish Kick
Regan Penaluna | Nautilus | 25th June 2015
If it wasn't for rules forcing swimmers to surface, by now all freestyle records would be set underwater. Swimmers discovered in the 1980s they could go much faster underwater because they didn't make bow waves. The fastest underwater stroke, the "fish kick", mimics the tuna, which swims at 50mph. “Nobody is going to come up with a new way of running that is faster than anything else. Yet we just did that in swimming” (2,150 words)
Gravity
Elizabeth Bachner | Longreads / Hip Mama | 9th July 2015
Diary of a pregnancy. "My daughter doesn’t have a father, or, she has two fathers, since I don’t know which man her father is. One of her fathers says it’s like Schrödinger’s cat in there — right now, both men are fathers of hers at the same time. But when I’m cut open, or when I’m emptied, when she comes out of the box, only one man will be her father, and the other won’t be anything. The other father says, It’s like a Dutch auction" (2,200 words)
Between The World And Me
Thomas Chatterton Williams | Washington Post | 9th July 2015
The first reviews of Ta-Nehisi Coates's book on race in America are out, and this, while not perfect, is the most perceptive among them. "Coates is still a young writer, not even 40 years old. Whether, ultimately, he will deserve Baldwin’s enormous reputation, is a question that will clarify itself only with a much larger body of work. What is clear now is that he has indisputably inherited the mantle of 'America’s conscience'" (1,530 words)
Website, Profiled: The Awl
Josh Dzieza | Verge | 9th July 2015
In praise of The Awl, an "offbeat" website which has emerged as a major source of critical writing about the "ongoing collision of media and technology". According to The Awl's John Herrman: "The transition from media hosted on websites to media built around social platforms is more profound than people realize. As more content is published directly onto Facebook, users will gradually lose a sense of who’s producing what" (4,790 words)
Video of the day: Cure Violence
What to expect: Cartoon urging young people to break the cycle of violence in which cities entrap them (2'16")
Thought for the day
The terrible state of public education has paid huge dividends in ignorance
Fran Lebowitz