Some people use emojis sparingly, some with abandon; some are practical while others are creative; even emoji meanings are highly personal—smiley poop comforts my friend, grosses out my mom, makes my sister think of changing diapers. Emojis today are in a similar fluid state as the English language in the 16th century: Anything goes and […]
Quotes
Posted inNonfiction, Quotes
The Technology of ‘Nonlethal’ Weapons and Crowd Control
What the “protesters” had come up against was the Active Denial System, a weapon, we were told, that “could change the rules of war and save huge numbers of lives in Iraq.” Active denial works like a giant, open-air microwave oven, using a beam of electromagnetic radiation to heat the skin of its targets to […]
Posted inBooks, Nonfiction, Quotes
‘The Rise of the Warrior Cop’
Sal Culosi is dead because he bet on a football game — but it wasn’t a bookie or a loan shark who killed him. His local government killed him, ostensibly to protect him from his gambling habit. Several months earlier at a local bar, Fairfax County, Virginia, detective David Baucum overheard the thirty-eight-year-old optometrist and […]
Posted inNonfiction, Quotes
Cop Movies, Race, and Ferguson
Nonetheless, whenever I see masked and helmeted police in photographs and movies or on the street going after protesters, I wonder, as I did during a battle royal between peasants and cops in the summer’s class-war sleeper Snowpiercer: “Who are these hidden people?” It crosses my mind anytime I see a helmet swing a nightstick […]
Posted inNonfiction, Quotes
Journalist Austin Tice Is Still Missing Two Years After Being Kidnapped
Syria is the most dangerous place in the world for journalists. In the last three years at least 60 of them have been killed while covering the conflict there, according to the Committee to Protect Journalists. Missing from the statistics is anything about the kind of journalist who goes to Syria and why. After the […]
Posted inNonfiction, Quotes
Homecoming and Pain: On the Etymology of Nostalgia
Why do some people look back and others refuse to? What are the pleasures of “nostalgia”? The word itself has its etymology in the Greek nostos(homecoming) + algia (pain), but the condition is more multifaceted, combined of equal parts of homesickness, self-indulgence, sentimentality, and an alertness to the genuine, confected, or nonexistent pleasures of other times, other ages, […]
Posted inNonfiction, Quotes
The Movement to ‘Unschool’ Children
There’s a name for the kind of education Fin and Rye are getting. It’s called unschooling, though Penny and I have never been fond of the term. But “self-directed, adult-facilitated life learning in the context of their own unique interests” doesn’t exactly roll off the tongue, so unschooling it is. It is already obvious that […]
Posted inNonfiction, Quotes
Lauren Bacall: The Last ‘Eyewitness to the Golden Age’
“My son tells me, ‘Do you realize you are the last one? The last person who was an eyewitness to the golden age?’ Young people, even in Hollywood, ask me, ‘Were you really married to Humphrey Bogart?’ ‘Well, yes, I think I was,’ I reply. You realize yourself when you start reflecting—because I don’t live […]
Posted inNonfiction, Quotes
‘I Will Try to Hold on to the Intense Feeling’
It’s been a meta-adolescence. Tavi has enacted a camera-ready high-school life, one in which her fashion experimentations looked fantastic rather than just ill-fitting and strange, and the whole thing was seen as a lark, hilarity worth preserving. She’s been adopted by the pop intelligentsia, who perhaps see in her a younger version of themselves, either […]
Posted inNonfiction, Quotes
The Daytime Dance Party As Harbinger Of Gentrification
The hundreds of people who show up each week to party at Mister Sunday are out for a good time. What the carefree fun-seekers likely do not realize is that they are also a part of a powerful real-estate developer’s plan to remake Industry City—and the Sunset Park community in which it sits—into the Next […]